India's daughters and lost subtexts

Somewhere on the margins of the debate around ‘India’s daughter’, there is another lingering image – the image of a silver-haired woman, with tears streaming down her withered cheeks, gently being consoled by Leslee Udwin, who is seen with her arms around the old woman. It is at her behest that her son Mukesh Singh spoke on camera to the director Leslee Udwin.

 In the wake of the ban, a hurt Leslee Udwin said she had left her two children and her home for the movie and that India instead of ‘embracing it’, has reacted with a ban. One cannot help but wonder about the other mother, that shrivelled silver-haired mother of Mukesh, who urged her son to speak on camera (perhaps with faint hope that speaking might give him a chance) – one that will come back to haunt the due process, with pending appeal.

In the din of this ‘for and anti-ban’ debate, critical feminists’ concerns stand overwhelmed. That includes the essential idea of justice and fairness for all, including that of the accused.

 But before that, a look at the four sides to the two lobbies around the debate. On the one side is a hurt ‘Indian pride’ that agitates against branding of India as unsafe and its men as rapists and an equally facile outrage that the ‘rapist was given a platform to justify’. And on the other, is the outrage over the ‘lack of regret’ and the ‘rapist mindset’ and that unravelling this mindset will fix the problem.

But is there an archetypal ‘rapist’s mindset’? If so, let us look back at similar mindsets in the wake of December 16, 2012. We’ve had an Asaram, who in the exact words of Mukesh Singh asked, “Can you clap with one hand?; a BJP minister from Madhya Pradesh who spoke of ‘lakshman rekha’ for women or be abducted by demons; a West Bengal minister, who asked “what the fee for rape’ mocking rape compensation; an Andhra Pradesh Minister, who asked if it was right for women to ‘roam around just because India got independence’; and the son of President of India who spoke of ‘dented and painted’ women shuttling between protests and pubs. And, a Madras High Court judge, who said the victim was out at the ‘wrong time’.

These were direct comments made on the victim by men in power. Each of these statements, deny the central idea of woman’s autonomy and of woman as a rights-bearing person. The semantics just the same, only here the speaker is a convict. If this were to be the archetypal “rapist’s mindset”, then how do we pitch the struggle to locate women’s bodily autonomy central to the demand for recognition of marital rape – a demand pooh-poohed by the government that considers the institution of marriage as a holy cow.

The understanding of class-caste-gender linkages is essential to the understanding of Politics of Power behind sexual violence. Here, one walks away with a subtle sense of rape as a ‘culture of poverty’, that lower class men do. Unwittingly, it also shows that it is easy to goad the underclass to make a self-incriminating submission. Elsewhere, Kavita Krishnan of All India Progressive Women’s Association, (one of the critical voices in the December 2012 movement) has wondered if it would’ve been possible for the director to extract an incriminating statement out of a Tarun Tejpal, Rajendra Pachauri or Strauss-Kahn.

Equally disconcerting is the orphaning of the December 2012 movement as one without roots. According to Leslee Udwin, this was the first time she’s seen a “protest like this in her lifetime in any part of the world”, signalling a certain ignorance of the struggles that went before. Women’s movement often battle against this branding of a struggle as one without history, as something that is sporadic. 1987 witnessed the powerful anti-Sati movement after a young woman Roop Kanwar was made Sati on her husband’s funeral pyre. Young women marched down the streets of Delhi during the anti-Sati agitation. Ofcourse, that was before the advent of 24-hour news channels.

To be fair, one does not expect a movie to capture a phenomenon within its span. But, the presumptuousness around the promotional campaign that pitches it as a final nail to ‘inspire change’ and to deploy a language around the campaign that obscures a history to the women’s movement in India is irksome. By its own doing, the campaign had come across as ‘seeing the mindset’ through the Orientalist’s lens, immune to subtexts.

Our outrage over the culprit’s inability to repent is equally misplaced – and borne by the assumption that jails are site of reformation. The criminal justice systems world over is moored on retributive and restorative jurisprudence and never reformative.

Concerned feminists had made an appeal to NDTV to stay the screening on its own volition, citing just and fair process for all individuals, including the accused, who spoke at the behest of his mother.

To locate something in binaries deprives us of nuances. When the December 2012 movement was fuelled by anger, it was these feminist voices that drew from its own struggles, and from the history of Indian women’s movement to make tangible interventions. Without this, the movement might have fizzled out with mere demands for ‘castration’ and ‘capital punishment’. Restraint and not a ban was what feminists wanted. Lest we forget, the right wing ideology that backs the government of the day lends doctrinaire credence to precisely this idea of an ‘ideal woman’ and spins off to discipline and punish the ‘deviant’ woman.

As “India’s daughters” and daddy’s ‘lil’ girls, we will continue to have the State, the Godmen, and the family tell us what we wear, where we go, who we love and who we spurn. The women’s movement has fought precisely against this ideation of women as ‘mothers, daughters and sisters’, in order to foreground woman’s personhood.