If, like me, you’ve been reading every single story about Women in India in the past few weeks, and have found them as terrifyingly familiar, please accept my commiserations. I’m a compulsive reader and I’ve read every single news story, blog post, Facebook status, Instagram poem and general scraps of paper in a act of abject self torture. Why is it torturous? Because every incident I read about, hit home. Something disturbingly similar had, at some point or the other, happened to me or a friend. The rampant perpetuity of it, the relentlessness, is what filled me with despair and made me physically sick, sometime last week.
So in this context, I retired hurt to my bed, head spinning and heart sinking. I messaged a friend to suggest a movie I could watch since I couldn’t have spent another night compulsively toggling from one article to the other.
Her suggestion was “Monsoon Wedding” , which for some reason I hadn’t seen yet.
“It’s really fun! And you’ll see so much of Delhi in the 90s, it’ll be like being back home! :) Also, coz you’re Punjabi, you won’t need the subtitles heheh”
My friends have a compulsive need to remind me of my Punjabi-ness at any relevant/ irrelevant point, so anyway. Monsoon Wedding it was. Now, I don’t know how many of you have seen the 2001 Mira Nair movie, but you should. It’s like a Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, without the happy-sanskaari-steroids. Also, no Tuffy, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.
So anyway, I was loving every part of the movie. How stunning Vasundhara Das was, the glimpses of CP before the never-ending Delhi Metro constructions swallowed it up, the dance rehearsals that reminded me of my own ladies sangeet fails and as much as I hate to admit it, the general Punjabi-ness of the movie was like a warm hug on a cold night. And then, just when I thought I could sink into a relatively peaceful sleep, along came the paedophile.
It was the most subtle yet skin-crawling portrayal of sexual abuse I’ve seen in a movie. What made it really terrifying was how “normal” the portrayal was. Because that is exactly how abuse happens. Demonisation gets home the point quickly, but it’s also extremely misleading, because it makes you feel you’ll be able to spot a demon in your midst and it isn’t as scary as narrative. A normal, fully functional offender in a surrounding so familiar, is terrifying. Every scene that had the abuser and the victim in the same frame made me angrier and angrier, which I guess, was the point. The tension was building up to a long pending confrontation between the now-adult victim and her now-elderly abuser. Except, the confrontation was completely pointless.
As the grown woman poured her heart out to her own flesh and blood relatives, everyone looked at her like we generally look at disfigured beggars at traffic signals. We’re morbidly fascinated by their disfigurement, but we can’t wait for them to leave. We certainly don’t want them anywhere near us, polluting the air we breathe in. The family then reacts like every respectable family in India would, and acts like “nothing happened”- even as the woman leaves the wedding venue, now stripped of her dignity even further and humiliated as a “unmarried girl with weird fantasies about her handsome uncle”
Since it’s a happy movie about a wedding, however, redemption is around the corner. Via, of course, a male saviour. When her uncle, who on seeing another man’s photo (the woman’s late father and his own brother) is reminded of the promise he made to his brother to “protect” his daughter; decided to “stand-up” for her. He asks the abuser (who by that time has been a part of every ritual even post the woman’s emotional disclosure) to leave the house and hugs his niece, who tearfully runs into his arms.
Now here’s the thing. I don’t really blame the filmmaker for the portrayal though, because art is, of course, a reflection of society. And this is literally, how things are. But there is this little thing, called legitimising a way of thinking and sending out a message.
If that’s how you’re going to portray handling of sexual abuse, just don’t do it. Don’t make it another way to highlight the magnanimity of your male characters; another paean offered at the alter of patriarchy.
The message you just sent out, is that if you, a woman alone, are going to call out your abuser, everyone will lap up the stories and literally no one will give a fuck. For that, get a clue, and get a man to outrage on your behalf. Until you have the legitimacy of a man castigating another, for outraging his wife/ daughter/ sister/ aunt; don’t bother talking about it. Nope.
Is that really the kind of message we want to put out there ? Legitimise even further the vague idea of winning male acceptance before a woman can venture out with anything bold or risky ? That if you have to wage a war, a man must either be the shield or the weapon you fight with ?
Let me answer that with a resounding no. You don’t.
Standing up for yourself needs the approval and acceptance of only one person and one person alone. That person is you.
