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| India’s abandoned daughter | | | Shiv Visvanathan
The message of the Indian state is clear from its response to the documentary India’s Daughter. Rape is permissible and normal, but a film which is an insult to the nation state is taboo. When culture is under threat, the vulnerability of women, the obscenity and the banality of rape are inconsequential
Controversies have a way of fragmenting the narrative of stories. They also have a touch of scandal which generates not merely outrage but also an epidemic of political correctness. The recent ban of the BBC documentary, titled India’s Daughter, on the Nirbhaya rape case, is an example. I sat and watched the documentary. It is powerful and compelling. What holds one’s attention are the fragments of conversation from the convict and the quiet responses of the family. What is irrelevant or possibly elliptical to the movie is the commentary of the NGOs that spread out like politically correct icing. The reactions of Krishnan, Kanth, Seth, all sensitive people, are reasonable in themselves but they do not touch the core of the narrative.
The narrative
The story, presented in its rawness the rapist’s narrative and its various thematic elements. Listening to the narrative, I was sickened by the sheer lack of humanity. I felt as if I did not want to be part of the human species. I was wondering where I had watched a similar display of responses and the sheer ordinariness of the comments reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s study of Eichmann in Jerusalem, a controversial but classically relevant book.
Arendt’s book talked of Eichmann, wondering how to make sense of the sheer ordinariness of the man and the enormity of his crimes. Eichmann claimed he was merely obeying orders; that he was an officer enacting his daily chores. He appeared “normal”, or as one psychologist admitted “more normal than I was after interviewing him”. The nature of the crime here is different. Adolf Eichmann committed genocide; our rapist killed and disembodied a woman, a paramedical student, removing her intestines as if it was a bit of garbage.
If Eichmann saw himself as a responsible bureaucrat following orders, our rapist saw himself as a pedagogue punishing deviants around the city. He sees himself as a moral policeman, as a surveillance mechanism tracking and punishing couples roaming “irresponsibly” around the city.
The rapist in this case becomes not a pathological case, but a symptom of the normalcy of our culture. In fact, it is the sickness of our culture that we witness through the words, the attitudes, and the body language of the perpetrator.
The rapist seems ordinary, dressed in a T-shirt and with the makings of a beard. He could be sending a rakhee message to his sisters, full of mild complaints rather than talking of the woman he raped. There is no remorse, no sense of loss; he sounds like a man who has had a meal and appears to be complaining about it. In fact it is the sheer normalcy, the patriarchal normalcy of the story that creates a link to Arendt’s analysis. What one witnesses is the sheer absence of guilt, the banality of culture.
The narrative opens simply. Our friends have had food, also a bit of alcohol. They are now tempted to move across their personal Maslovian hierarchy to fun and sex. They decide to ride towards GB road, where such activities are reputed to take place. The picture is clear, these are ordinary men in ordinary pursuits, following predictable urges.
However, they are also folk sociologists theorising on modernity and the city. They reflect on the human condition and talk about the vagaries of the city. They express their sense of urban anxiety, about women walking the city at night, and hint at the seduction and temptation of women floating freely around. For these men, a freely moving woman is an act of licence.
Such a woman becomes classified as dirt. Dirt, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas defined it, is matter out of place. As dirt, the women threaten order and classification and order has to be restored. They have to be put in place. The liminality, the ambiguity, the threat of a woman violating male order is clear. As patriarchs and pedagogues, the men must teach the women their rightful place.
The rapist confesses. He wanted to teach the young couple a lesson and also cure the standard masculine itch. If it is collective itch, they resort to gang rape. He complains that the victim was not pliable; that if she had submitted passively, she would have been subject to less violence.
Cultures and responses
The two lawyers who play the chorus to the perpetrator systematise his responses. They play the contemporary Manu explaining why men were not to blame. A woman is not victim but a temptation. She is in fact responsible for rape, because she is the agency that triggers it. One lawyer in fact says that a woman in the right place is worshipped as a gem but a woman in the wrong place has to be punished. As the two lawyers articulate their defence of rape, one witnesses the logic of the culture at work. The argument is that men are not to blame. Their feelings are normal. It is the woman who as temptation has agency. Men are mere facts of biology. Women create the culture of threat and anxiety which triggers biology.
The documentary juxtaposes the response to rape across two cultures. One embodied in the radical stereotype of JNU and by young students and reveals the horror and the anger which boils over. Protest against rape becomes their initiation rite into politics. They feel their responses are genuine and are surprised by a patriarchal state which greets them with violence and water cannons. For these young students, rights is about freedom, about inventing a culture. For the rapists and the defence lawyers, culture is about control and surveillance. It is a male panopticon subjecting women to perpetual scrutiny; even the idea of the woman at home as an icon to be worshipped is sheer hypocrisy. One realises that domestic violence meets urban violence in the rape story. In exposing the hypocrisy and portraying the protest, the documentary creates a politics of hope.
(Shiv Visvanathan is a professor
at Jindal School of Government
and Public Policy.) |
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