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.

Ajmal Kasab - A Hanging

“Power is when we have every justification to kill and we don’t,” says Oskar Schindler to the SS officer Amon Goeth in the movie Schindler’s List. “Do you think that’s Power?” asks the officer. “That’s what the Emperor said,” replies Schindler. “A man stole something, he was brought before the emperor, he throws himself on the ground and begs for mercy; he knows he’s going to die and the Emperor PARDONS him…this worthless man and he lets him go. That is POWER,” says Schindler.

Images of young boys celebrating outside the Yervada Prison in Pune, over the announcement of the hanging of Ajmal Kasab, the lone-survivor of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, speak of a greater moral turpitude. I see no difference between these young boys, schooled in the privileges of democracy, yet harbored such misplaced vengeance and Ajmal Kasab, the boy-turned-terrorist-turned-deadman, who, born into abject poverty and schooled into theocracy, only looked to a wrong way out of his life conditions. How do we bring to books the terrorism of the mind that celebrates over a dead man, who was a victim himself?

Now that the lynch mob has had its celebratory orgy over a dead man, who was not born a terrorist, may be we indulged in a bit of soul-search. A simple mercy for Kasab may have been a potential currency to convert a few other potential jihadis and possibly earned us a conscientious response and reciprocity from Pakistan. It is not altruism, but common sense that a Presidential pardon would have been a potent deterrent. Yet, the Indian State squandered that rich currency called mercy. A kill for a kill perhaps constitutes Justice. But retributive justice is invariably arbitrary.

Notes from Nagai

A sparkling clean tri-coloured Stupa, stood tall against a dusking sky, and a mound of salt marked the symbolism of the memory of a landmark event that struck at the heart of colonial arrogance and invincibility. On Friday evening, as the sky dusked, caparisoned horses, drummers and trumpeters, hordes of fluttering tricolours amid chants of Vande Mataram and a reenacted march ushered in the eightieth anniversary of the Vedaranyam Salt Satyagraha. But, somewhere on the fringes, a shriveled old woman in her sixties carried the flag staking claim to the struggle just as others – only that hers was closer to the struggle than most others gathered there. M.Indrani is the daughter of Marimuthu Thevar - one of the three persons, deputed by Sardar Vedarathinam Pillar to escort Rajaji to circumvent British surveillance on that eventful morning of April 30, 1930, when a fistful of salt was picked up and history was made. On the eightieth anniversary of the Salt Satyagraha, she stood there misty-eyed, wearing her impoverishment on her skin, holding the tricolour, and walking the distance of about 5 kilometers to the Salt Satyagraha stupa at Agasthyampalli. For this woman, a destitute descendent of a satyagrahi, her only means of income is the monthly Rs.400 pension and not a penny more.

Amid the dominant themes of the march last evening, her presence and her impoverishment seared through the heart of the nation's collective memory of a struggle long gone by, and the blandness of symbolisms.

When every drop of tear shed is accounted for, that is absolute justice.

2nd Women’s Film Festival, Chennai

It is an effort to forge identities. It is an attempt to place things in perspective. When movies attempt to speak sense to power positions, they need to be heard.

They speak of multiple identities, their multiple positions; some forced; some consciously embraced; some consciously rejected. Be it communal violence, identity politics, farmers suicides, bar dancers or moral policing; when every form of conflict and contest becomes engendered, lives of women get caught in mindless mayhem. And, when movies explore these themes, it becomes a shared experience for those of us, couched in our comfortable worlds.

An eight day women’s movie fest is reclamation of a woman’s space through the cinematic lens. When gender transcends every possible faultline, it makes a statement, charting out a pattern through a kaleidoscope of experiences.

For the willing, it offers a feminist world view, one that tries to map out women’s experiences across borders. For the uninitiated, it offers an understanding that there is a world outside of our own experiences. Feminist discourse believes that women’s struggles are not unique. Struggles of the past form the recurring themes for the struggles of the future. When the word ‘feminism’ makes a woman squirm and man recoil, the idea of a women’s film festival is another moment to pause and look back at the traversed path and its struggles.

Somewhere in the alleys, questions will be raised about the futility or the utility of a women’s film festival. Are they mere symbolisms? Is it an othering project or is it mainstreaming an idea of women’s films? Do we attribute meanings to movies unintended by their creators?

Every time cinema becomes a tool for discourse building, it also walks the tight rope. Not all women film makers see themselves as a single category. There are faultlines of ideology, schools of thought, positions and perspectives. Sometimes, meanings are generated and attributed.

But every unique experience and its ideology that has been visually captured needs a space for debate, at times like these, when women’s sexualities are sought to be contained. Symbolisms evoke meanings. A woman’s film festival evokes a certain meaning. They chronicle critical positions. Their vantage point makes them voices of dissent and assertion. When movies reflect upon the anxieties of womanhood in times of conflict and peace, it strikes a resonance with our privileged positions.

Sandwiched between capitalist commercial machinations that seek to hijack the significance of the woman’s day through candy floss symbols and those that critique it as yet another elite construct, the movie fest culminating on March 8, can function as a potential tool of inquiry. An array of 137 movies, spread over eight days, can help build bonds by universalising women’s experiences.

Every exercise need not consummate into making a ‘difference’. Where it can make a ‘statement’, it would mean we have arrived.

A week down, when the curtains fall and the carpets are rolled back, perhaps questions would have been raised, debates would have been spurred, experiences would be demolished or embraced; they can become a part of the collective understanding of the traversed path, the rugged terrain of the present and challenges of the future.

(Written for the 2nd Women’s Film Festival in Chennai, March 1 to March 8, 2009)

Contours of deprivation, Contours of journalistic sensibilities

“The greatest temptation that journalists face is to regard the stories they write as their own.” – Mark Tully

Multiple stories, multiple struggles, some won, some lost, some not waged at all. Bred in cities, where every amenity is a ‘right’, a deprivation tour blurs the lines between rights and charity. As it sets out the contours of deprivation, it also sets out the contours of journalistic sensibilities. To battle the temptation to activism and attempt to glean stories with objectivity, yet feel the outrage of your subject and squirm in the face of reality of certain outrages is what one is faced with on such a tour.

The development, Nagapattinam district has seen in the past four years would have taken 50 years under ordinary circumstances, say the district authorities. When Nagapattinam observed the fourth anniversary of Tsunami, a 20 kilometers further, Keezhvelmani observed the fortieth anniversary of dalit killings, where 44 dalits were burnt to death on Dec 25, 1968. Even before we set out for the tour, a family member looked at the itinery and informed that things are settled in Keezhvelmani and that we overzealous journalists should not ‘re-kindle the dirt’. In Keezhvelmani, that dirt of human bigotry stands memorialised not just as a constant reminder of a past, but also as a flame of hope to future. For the visitor, it revealed a gory reality of rural caste-based power structures.

Grassroots democracy functions effectively, but is not without its foibles. When the elected representative of Kaveripoompattinam panchayat with a population of 3,500 people, takes an amateur journalist on a tour to showcase the works being done, a sense of immense responsibility to the electorate that voted him to power, settles in to unsettle the luxuries of a weary mind. When an emaciated young girl, just about old enough to vote, with a child in her arm and another clinging to her waist, is a beneficiary of a group housing scheme, which has given her four walls but not provided for a roof above her head, one cannot help but partake in that desperation.

When a shriveled Ayyakanu, a dalit labourer narrates what it was to live as a landless dalit, prior to a sarvodaya struggle for land re-distribution in Valivalam in the 70s and what it feels like to 'breathe freely' today, all that fatuous banter against reservations in the elite circles stands demolished.

Schemes and policies look fool-proof on paper, but logistics pose insurmountable hurdles. One understands the problems of skewed State welfarism, when it is taken as charity. Somewhere within, a thatched roof is seen as a potent symbol of poverty and a reinforced concrete roof sends across sighs of disappointment, among those desperate to capture deprivation. And, there is this constant effort to battle the feeling of scavenging on someone else’s poverty and deprivation.

When every descent of a cropped-haired journo from the hired Bolero sends across an aura of bureaucratic visit to the elected representatives and the deprived alike, one wonders how to take that visit to its logical conclusion, one that offers at least a semblance of a solution.

Deprivation is not just about poverty. It’s about institutions, about their receptivity, responsiveness and failures. It’s about politics as authoritative allocation of resources. As one wanders in the wilderness of contestations and counter-contestations, legitimation and de-legitimation of claims, in an attempt to place things in perspective, a magic wand is all that I yearned for.

Power of Apology – Righting Wrongs

On a summery February morning this year, the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pledged an apology to the 'stolen generations' of his country's aboriginal population. And the world sat up and listened.

The Prime Minister addressed the blemished chapter of his nation's history that practised social engineering through the forcible separation of aboriginal children from their families and their assimilation into the white society. "We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians," he said. By reflecting on the past of a wronged people, Kevin Rudd renewed his nation's future and chalked out a new road to reconciliation. The visuals of a teary-eyed elderly aboriginal woman embracing the Prime Minister, after his poignant apology, struck a telling point to the world riveted in conflicts from the past and the present. It required a great deal of moral courage to apologise for a historical wrong on behalf of an entire nation, and Rudd did.

A few months later, in July 2008, Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian, after sustained reportage on the Bosnian concentration camps in the early 1990s, revisited Bosnia in the wake of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the man who orchestrated the Bosnian War crimes. Vulliamy recounted his meeting with Fikret Alic, the survivor from the Tronopolje concentration camp, in his Guardian article "I am waiting, No one has ever said sorry". It was the emaciated picture of Fikret Alic that became the iconic image of genocide and served as a wake up call to the world to end the pogrom in Bosnia. Vulliamy quotes Fikret Alic in the article: 'No one has ever said sorry for what they did. I don't know what it is about these people - I can show you five killers any time we go to Prijedor. Either they are proud of what they did, or pretend it did not happen. I am waiting for someone to admit what they did, or apologise, but they do not, they never will.'

When Kevin Rudd proclaimed "We say sorry" to Australia's aborigines, half way around the world, Fikret Alic, like other survivors and victims, yearned for an apology, to vindicate their suffering.

And somewhere in Turkey, a writer wanted his country to apologise for the massacre of Armenians and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire. Orhan Pamuk, the writer, was persecuted for "insulting Turkish identity." He was branded an enemy of the State.

Every grave, human-inflicted misery has carried with it an iconic image of suffering. Though these sufferings are spatially and temporally disconnected, the humiliation and pain they inflicted is essentially the same. Putrid memories of victim hood invariably carry with it burning memories of humiliation. Be they the terror-stricken image of Qutubuddin Ansari with folded palms, pleading for life during the Godhra riots in India, or the image of a naked Phan Thi Kim Phuc with a burnt back running hysterically after the Napalm attack in South Vietnam or the image of an emaciated Fikret Alic standing behind a barbed fence in a Tronopolje concentration camp in Bosnia ---- they are the images of terrible crimes against humanity that should not have happened.

It is the time of the year when we revisit the checkered history of human rights with its human wrongs. At the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a retrospection of the traversed path tempts us to reckon the number of unuttered apologies that may have healed scarred memories. Human rights are not just commemorative rights. They are not about covenants and conventions. They are also about acknowledging historical wrongs. That would be the first step towards reconciliation.

No apology is intense enough to undo the scars of the wrongs done. But every apology is powerful enough to secure the present and the future, by making it inclusive for the survivors. For them, it is an exercise in reclamation of a hijacked past and an obscure future.
"When there was everything to be done, we pretended to know nothing. Today, when there is so little left to do, we want to know everything" wrote Ed Vulliamy in his accounts on the Bosnian genocide.

The survivors are indeed waiting, in the submerged river valleys, behind the battlefronts, and in bunkers, for someone to say sorry.

Power of Apology – Righting Wrongs

On a summery February morning this year, the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pledged an apology to the 'stolen generations' of his country's aboriginal population. And the world sat up and listened.

The Prime Minister addressed the blemished chapter of his nation's history that practised social engineering through the forcible separation of aboriginal children from their families and their assimilation into the white society. "We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians," he said. By reflecting on the past of a wronged people, Kevin Rudd renewed his nation's future and chalked out a new road to reconciliation. The visuals of a teary-eyed elderly aboriginal woman embracing the Prime Minister, after his poignant apology, struck a telling point to the world riveted in conflicts from the past and the present. It required a great deal of moral courage to apologise for a historical wrong on behalf of an entire nation, and Rudd did.

A few months later, in July 2008, Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian, after sustained reportage on the Bosnian concentration camps in the early 1990s, revisited Bosnia in the wake of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the man who orchestrated the Bosnian War crimes. Vulliamy recounted his meeting with Fikret Alic, the survivor from the Tronopolje concentration camp, in his Guardian article "I am waiting, No one has ever said sorry". It was the emaciated picture of Fikret Alic that became the iconic image of genocide and served as a wake up call to the world to end the pogrom in Bosnia. Vulliamy quotes Fikret Alic in the article: 'No one has ever said sorry for what they did. I don't know what it is about these people - I can show you five killers any time we go to Prijedor. Either they are proud of what they did, or pretend it did not happen. I am waiting for someone to admit what they did, or apologise, but they do not, they never will.'

When Kevin Rudd proclaimed "We say sorry" to Australia's aborigines, half way around the world, Fikret Alic, like other survivors and victims, yearned for an apology, to vindicate their suffering.

And somewhere in Turkey, a writer wanted his country to apologise for the massacre of Armenians and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire. Orhan Pamuk, the writer, was persecuted for "insulting Turkish identity." He was branded an enemy of the State.

Every grave, human-inflicted misery has carried with it an iconic image of suffering. Though these sufferings are spatially and temporally disconnected, the humiliation and pain they inflicted is essentially the same. Putrid memories of victim hood invariably carry with it burning memories of humiliation. Be they the terror-stricken image of Qutubuddin Ansari with folded palms, pleading for life during the Godhra riots in India, or the image of a naked Phan Thi Kim Phuc with a burnt back running hysterically after the Napalm attack in South Vietnam or the image of an emaciated Fikret Alic standing behind a barbed fence in a Tronopolje concentration camp in Bosnia ---- they are the images of terrible crimes against humanity that should not have happened.

It is the time of the year when we revisit the checkered history of human rights with its human wrongs. At the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a retrospection of the traversed path tempts us to reckon the number of unuttered apologies that may have healed scarred memories. Human rights are not just commemorative rights. They are not about covenants and conventions. They are also about acknowledging historical wrongs. That would be the first step towards reconciliation.

No apology is intense enough to undo the scars of the wrongs done. But every apology is powerful enough to secure the present and the future, by making it inclusive for the survivors. For them, it is an exercise in reclamation of a hijacked past and an obscure future.
"When there was everything to be done, we pretended to know nothing. Today, when there is so little left to do, we want to know everything" wrote Ed Vulliamy in his accounts on the Bosnian genocide.

The survivors are indeed waiting, in the submerged river valleys, behind the battlefronts, and in bunkers, for someone to say sorry.