(The Hindi
translation of this article was published on bbc.com/hindi/ on July 25, 2015.
It was written as a follow-up to the right-wing reaction to “The Rape of Avanthika”, my column that appeared in The Hindu Businessline on July 18, 2015)
By Anna MM Vetticad
“It’s not rape,
it’s seduction, b**ch!”
“Ignore her Her
name says she’s from Vatican city and She might have got money from church to
write this column.” (sic)
This is a tiny –
relatively polite – sample of the venom being spewed on my social media
accounts since the appearance of my column, “The Rape of Avanthika”, in The Hindu Businessline last Saturday.
By the time the
column was published, the Telugu blockbuster Bahubali – simultaneously shot in Tamil and released in multiple
dubbed versions – was already a certified hit. Fans of the film, you would
imagine, had no reason to be insecure.
Still, I
expected a standard misogynistic backlash since I had written about the
trivialisation of sexual violence in Indian cinema. The immediate provocation
was an extended ‘seduction’ sequence in Bahubali,
in which the hero repeatedly violates the body of the female warrior Avanthika,
then – through music and dance – roughs her up, strips off part of her outfit,
alters the rest of her attire and her face despite her resistance. Within
seconds, she falls for him and falls asleep in his arms.
This
song-and-dance metaphor for rape insidiously perpetuates a prevalent notion
that the way to a woman’s heart is through force. I knew from experience that I
would receive sexist vitriol for my critique. What I did not realise was that hordes
of viewers have been counting Bahubali as
a “Hindu success” and a matter of “south Indian/Telugu pride”.
And so, vile
comments have been pouring in for a week now, from film fans and from the Hindu
Right who see Bahubali – steeped as
it is in Hindu mythology – as a “Hindu answer” to the “Muslim PK”. “Muslim” because of the lead actor
Aamir Khan’s religion and “answer” because they saw PK’s indictment of religion per se as a Hindu-bashing exercise.
Be that as it
may, Indian films have trivialised violence against women for decades. Readers
of this website would be familiar with the phenomenon in Bollywood in
particular. Just this year, in director Aanand L. Rai’s Tanu Weds Manu Returns, the character Pappi abducts a woman from
her wedding because, despite her denials, he believes she loves him. Pappi is
portrayed as loveable, his actions as a joke.
From stalking to
molestation and other forms of assault, our heroes are doing it all under the
guise of courtship. In Rai’s 2013 film Raanjhanaa,
the hero is a pest who slashes his wrists twice and even drives the heroine
into a river on a scooter in anger. In Holiday
(2014), Virat Bakshi (Akshay Kumar) stalks Saiba (Sonakshi Sinha) and
forcibly kisses her. In Kick (2014),
Salman Khan lifts Jacqueline Fernandez’s skirt with his teeth, surrounded by a
group of male dancers.
Violence, you
see, is cute and amusing in Bollywood’s book. Even a seemingly enlightened
director like Imtiaz Ali has featured rape jokes in both Jab We Met (2007) and Rockstar
(2011).
The cliched response to such
criticism is that films portray India’s reality. My
experience this week tells you that fans don’t like those who raise their
voices against a glorification or comedification of this terrible reality. The
thing about breaking the silence though is that whenever you do, you discover
multitudes who share your opinion but were feeling lonely with their views
since no one around them had spoken up. Far greater than the flood of Bahubali-loving trolls abusing me this
week is the deluge from men and women saying: “Thank goodness you wrote this. I
thought I’m the only one feeling this way.” You are not. I am not. And we both
ought to speak up.
(Anna MM Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)
BBC Hindi link: http://www.bbc.com/hindi/entertainment/2015/07/150723_mysogyny_india_films_bahubali_women_rns
Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/bahubali.the.movie
Note: This photograph was not sourced from BBC
Hindi
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