The story now has the status of dystopic legend. On a cold December Delhi night in 2012, a young woman returning home from watching a film with a male friend was gang-raped, beaten and thrown out of a bus to die. Given a series of pseudonyms, most frequently “Nirbhaya” or the Fearless One, her sickening fate caught the horrified imagination of middle-class urban India and the world beyond. Young people, men and women, poured out on to the streets to call for an end to rape and to demand that Indian cities be made safer for women.
For many, the rape of an educated young woman travelling on public transport in India’s capital city spoke to an unacceptable – and for some, embarrassing – discrepancy between the soaring growth figures which nourished an increasingly affluent Indian middle class proud of its modernity, and what was frequently described as a “backward” or “barbaric” mindset. Now India’s Daughter, a documentary by British filmmaker Leslee Udwin , has ignited a controversy ahead of its airing on the BBC. The film purports to expose this savage mindset by carrying an interview with Mukesh Singh, one of the jailed rapists whose appeal against his sentence is still pending. In it, an apparently unremorseful Singh blames rape squarely on women roaming in public places at night. His famously bullish lawyer, ML Sharma, has also suggested that the victim was responsible for her fate in a culture which has “no place” for women.
On the basis of complaints, including the charge that the convicted rapist’s remarks incite violence against women, the Indian government has taken steps to restrain the Indian media from showing the interview until further notice. Significantly, many Indian women’s rights activists have also suggested that it is judicially problematic to air Singh’s statement while the matter is still in the courts. In an impassioned statement which uses the word “civilised” in three consecutive sentences as an exhortation against critics of the broadcast, Udwin has appealed to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to personally intervene against what she deems attempts to “silence” her film through “kneejerk hysteria”.
Udwin’s elevation to the status of free speech martyr and the ensuing controversy is likely to boost the viewing figures in Britain for a film that she describes as having been made through enormous personal sacrifice. She has stressed her abdication of home comforts to travel with Conradian determination to explore “the blackest recesses of the human heart”. Indian feminists, on the other hand, have expressed unease – not only with the timing of the documentary’s broadcast which might, they fear, result in a further trial by media of the accused, already fast-tracked through the judicial system because of the public outcry, but also with some of the premises both of the film and the associated “Daughters of India” global campaign against sexual violence to be launched next week at a star-studded New York screening. As the leading feminist campaigner and Secretary of the All-India Progressive Women’s Association , Kavita Krishnan, notes, Indian anti-rape protestors themselves have unambiguously rejected the patriarchal language which denotes women as daughters, wives or sisters entitled to protection in that capacity rather than as human beings who will assert themselves and resist attacks on their bodies and rights.
Indian women’s rights campaigners – who, as it happens, have been active and vocal on the question of rape for decades before December 2012, even if that miserable event galvanised a wave of impressive fresh protests – frequently find themselves wedged between Indian patriarchs who deny that rape is a serious problem or blame it on westernisation, and the well-meaning but often ill-informed “maternalism” of some western feminist quarters that lay the blame on a particularly retrograde mindset in India. It is a false choice rightly rejected by Krishnan and others even as ruling right-wing Indian politicians have quickly taken recourse to the language of “hurt sentiments” and wounded national pride in objecting to the film.
In contrast, Indian feminists fully believe that rape culture must be widely exposed and discussed as precisely a national problem, though hardly a uniquely Indian one. They also believe, correctly, that violence against women cannot be discussed as a single issue reducible, in Meryl Streep’s rather jejune words, to a “ mindset that must be made to know it has no place in the civilised world ”. Systemic sexual violence is not a cocktail party faux-pas; it will not blush and quickly mend its ways for fear of bad publicity and not being allowed to sit at the table of the putatively “civilised”, although quite which rape-free country is hosting this dinner is as yet unknown.
One of the great strengths of India’s diverse and flourishing women’s rights movement is that many of its most powerful voices stress the systemic and universal nature of sexual violence which, however, takes different forms depending on context. Rape can be a perfectly modern weapon that is intimately connected to other systems of privilege, exploitation and inequality, including, in the Indian context, caste oppression, religious chauvinism, resource appropriation (including that of mineral-rich land from indigenous tribal communities by multinational corporations) and the vicious economic inequalities fostered by an unfettered capitalism prosperity that has yet to bring basic shelter and nourishment to millions.
To talk about rape in terms of a savage cultural psyche locked to the past is to miss the dense wood for the most exotic trees if that discussion does not examine how the same government appealed to now by Udwin is backed by Hindu right-wing political groups which allegedly wielded mass rape as a weapon against Muslim women in Gujarat in 2002 where Modi was chief minister . (One Hindu supremacist recently called for even dead Muslim women to be raped). To not note the ways in which rape has been systematically used to keep Dalit women and communities “in their place” by upper-castes threatened by change is to fail rape victims. To not think about how class rage can be lethally displaced on to the bodies of women in a context where economic disenfranchisement crackles like lightning through the body politic of India is to fail rape victims. To reduce rape to a matter of a generic Indian male mindset is to fail rape victims. It is, at best, embarrassingly facile. At worst, it is to collude in the silences about gender exploitation and sexual violence as very modern problems inseparable from every other form of global exploitation that blights our supposedly emancipated times.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd, London, 2015
— Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.
