MY REJOINDER TO TAMANNAAH BHATIA'S RECENT INTERVIEW REGARDING MY 2015 ARTICLE

 

In a recent interview to the media platform The Lallantop, the actor Tamannaah Bhatia was asked about the representation of female bodies on screen, and in particular about my article published in The Hindu Businessline in 2015 under the headline “The Rape of Avanthika”. 

 

ICYMI: “The Rape of Avanthika” was a critique of a scene in S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali: The Beginning in which Avanthika (played by Bhatia) attacks Prabhas’ character in reaction to his incursions on her body portrayed in the preceding scenes. 

 

This encounter is depicted as a dance, during which he strips her of her practical warrior’s attire and alters it into a flowy outfit, unties her hair against her will, and forcibly applies makeup on her face. At the end of this passage, she is no longer fighting him – instead, she is mesmerised by her own transformation, and in love with him. 

 

I had described the scene as a symbolic – and romanticised – representation of the violation of a woman’s consent in sexual relations. 

 

“The Rape of Avanthika” was about Baahubali the film, not about Bhatia the individual. In her recent interview, though, she characterised the article as an attack on her. 

 

“When people can’t control you, they use shame and guilt as a technique to make you feel that you must feel ashamed of whatever you do. Because when they make you feel shame, they can gain control over you,” was how she began her answer to the question about the article.

 

She then spoke at length about sexual repression in our society. 

 

Attributing my article to this sexual repression, Bhatia made the following personal remark about me: “If you show someone the purest thing, but if that person thinks sex is a bad thing or your body is a bad thing or your entire system is a bad thing, then that’s all they will see.”

 

When “The Rape of Avanthika” was published, I was flooded with responses from readers who said it resonated with them, including a large number who told me they had, until then, assumed they were alone in their discomfort with that scene in Baahubali. Simultaneously came a spate of communal and misogynistic online attacks, in addition to vulgar, sexually explicit abuse. 

 

Having faced those attacks, I still say that Bhatia’s latest interview is the most inexplicable and absurd response to the article I have received in these 10 years.

 

The article was concerned about the romanticisation of sexual violence in a film. Bhatia has somehow interpreted that concern as an aversion to sex. 

 

I wrote about what I saw as a symbolic, prettified representation of rape. Bhatia has somehow interpreted that as my attempt to control her. 

 

Why would I want to control a stranger to whom I have no personal ties? 

 

This is not about me though. 

 

The issue here is the deep-seated internalised misogyny that prompted Bhatia to defend a portrayal of stalking, harassment and violence as courtship, and the normalisation of sexual violence in a film.

 

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2022 report, India records 51 cases of crimes against women every hour. (Source: Times of India)

 

Women in India suffer acid attacks, rape and have even been killed by men who are socially conditioned to ignore or avenge rejection. 

 

That scene in Baahubali showed a woman initially enraged at the repeated violation of her bodily integrity by a man, but eventually making love to him. It is dangerous because it echoes what our society tells boys and men: that when a woman says no, she means maybe or yes; that true love or genuine attraction means persisting even after she rejects your advances; and that it is up to a man to “make her realise” (to quote an oft-used phrase) how beautiful she is. 

 

In such circumstances, I don’t care about Bhatia’s demeaning comments aimed at me, or her pretence that she does not know me or of me – we have met, and even spent time together. Besides, she has clearly devoted lots of time to thinking about my article for an entire decade. 

 

I genuinely don’t care about the act she put on though. 

 

I care that she, a celebrity with the power to positively influence minds if she wishes to do so, publicly made false allegations about “The Rape of Avanthika”, and intentionally conflated sexual violence with sex to confuse the audience at an interview. In doing so, she has supported the patriarchal status quo that causes great harm to women, and ultimately harms men too.

 

I feel compelled to write this rejoinder although I am short of time and bogged down by work, because sections of the media have unquestioningly quoted Bhatia’s interview in articles, without pointing to the regressive mindset she displayed and the falsehoods in her comments.

 

I am a middle-class individual without the massive PR machinery and management team that a millionaire movie star like Bhatia has working for her. This means I do not have the resources to amplify this rejoinder, and can only trust that individual members of the public and the media who share my values will amplify it for me. 

 

I repeat: this is not about me, it’s about Bhatia’s dangerous messaging. This is not about Bhatia either: she is a mere instrument, a mouthpiece, for an oppressive system that seeks to subjugate women and non-conformist men; a system that some women, sadly, play along with in the interests of career advancement.

 

The link to “The Rape of Avanthika” is here and here.

 

Please share this statement not just on the platform on which you are reading it, but in the e-groups, WhatsApp groups and other networks that you are a part of, so that it leads to a conversation that conservatives and misogynists like Bhatia do not want us to have. (Ends)

… OF ZAKHMI WOMEN AND PUTHIYA LAWS

Indian cinema’s fondness for post-rape revenge sprees continues with Sridevi’s Mom. But such films let “us” off lightly

By Anna MM Vetticad

(This article was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink on July 15, 2017.)

Most human beings have felt it at some point in their lives: an anger so overpowering that in that moment, you wanted to kill the person who had infuriated you. Few of us give in to that primal urge. Devki does.

In her new Hindi film Mom, Sridevi plays Devki, a high-school teacher who methodically executes the men involved in her daughter’s gangrape, after a court frees them. Mom’s first half is heartbreaking and credible as it establishes the mother-child relationship, portrays the rape with extreme sensitivity and shows us the family’s initial battle to retain sanity. The narrative changes track completely though when Devki sets off on her applause-inducing rampage. This is not self-defence or spur-of-the-moment violence, but carefully planned revenge. It is the Zakhmi Aurat Syndrome all over again, harking back to the 1988 Hindi film Zakhmi Aurat (Wounded Woman) in which a policewoman played by Dimple Kapadia joins forces with rape survivors like herself to bobbitise their attackers.

Like Bollywood, India’s other big film industries too have, over the years, delivered a small crop of populist films favouring vigilante justice for rape. Just last year, Nayanthara and Mammootty starred in the Malayalam film Puthiya Niyamam (New Law), which was about a woman killing her rapists with help from unexpected quarters. Another high-profile Mollywood film from the genre, 22 Female Kottayam in 2012 had Rima Kallingal’s character killing a rapist and castrating his accomplice.

Admittedly, real women rarely react in this fashion, but how can a spot of fantasy hurt, you ask? Besides, zakhmi women are still not a common occurrence whereas zakhmi men have been the bedrock of escapist Indian cinema for decades, taking the law into their hands in droves when the ‘system’ fails them.

Well, at an artistic level it is true that both are clichés, but at a sociological level, there is no equivalence between them. The unrealistically vengeful man of cinema does not carry with him the same baggage of off-screen social prejudice that the woman does. He, therefore, calls for a separate discussion.

Commercial cinema down the decades has swung wildly from the female rape victim with no agency — who weeps helplessly or commits suicide, while her male relatives or lover exact revenge for her lost ‘izzat’ (honour) — to another extreme, where she metamorphoses into a raging Goddess Durga. The latter is an extension of our national vocabulary, which perennially pedestalises the female as “mata” or “devi”, a deification that then becomes an excuse to deny women the right to be ordinary humans — flawed, fearful, normal, like men. When women deviate from these superhuman standards set by society, the penalty is harsh, whereas men — seen as hapless slaves of their hormones and feminine wiles — are casually absolved of grave crimes. While saying, “Ladke hai, galti ho jaati hai (after all they are boys, mistakes happen),” UP neta Mulayalam Singh Yadav echoed a widely held view of rapists emerging from this mindset.

The rape-victim-as-avenging-Durga cliché comes from film industries that almost never give space to stories of ordinary, believably tough women responding to sexual violence (Bollywood’s Pink in 2016 being an exception).

Vengeance is a quick route to applause. Watching a woman chop the genitals off a sexual predator can be deeply satisfying for those of us frustrated with the ‘system’, but such films do not compel us to introspect about our own part in that system and a culture that socially sanctions rape. These films point fingers at everyone but the citizenry. Why demand self-questioning, I guess, if letting viewers feel self-righteous pays off?

By cheering Devki in Mom, do we not prove that “we”, the good people watching her, are disgusted with rapists, that “we” are different from “them”? So what if at home we have conversations with our sons blaming women’s attire for rape? So what if our sons see evidence of women as lesser beings in the relationship of inequality between Mum and Dad? Stop this feminist bullshit, please! “Our” boys do not commit rape, only “they” do.

Films like Mom let “us” off lightly.

There is another point worth considering. In recent years, India has displayed a bizarre need to attribute qualities to anonymous rape victims that would give us the drive to fight for them — as if their being humans is not enough. The news media’s nicknames for these women reflect this attitude. In 2014’s Uber case she became Veera (the brave one), the toddler gangraped in a basement in 2013 became Gudiya (doll), and of course there was Nirbhaya (the fearless one) from 2012.

What if that woman was cowering in fright in that taxi? What if that child was not Barbie-like? What if that physiotherapy intern was begging for mercy? Would they then not be worthy of our empathy and support?

Rape victims and their families should not be objects of public fantasy. Like it or not, Vasuki of Puthiya Niyamam and Devki of Mom are the cinematic equivalents of our imagined Nirbhaya, The Fearless One. It is as if X, The Ordinary One — on or off screen — does not deserve us.

(This is the concluding piece of Film Fatale)

Link to the version of this column published in The Hindu Businessline:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/mom-indian-cinemas-fondness-for-postrape-revenge/article9765674.ece

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “…And The Games The Thackerays Play”

(a shorter version was published in The Hindu Businessline’s BLink)

http://annavetticadgoes2themovies.blogspot.in/2017/06/and-games-thackerays-play.html

Photographs courtesy:

Mom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mom_(film)

Puthiya Niyamam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puthiya_Niyamam

Zakhmi Aurat: IMDB

REVIEW 504: MOM

Release date:	July 7, 2017
Director:	Ravi Udyawar
Cast: Language:	Sridevi, Sajal Ali, Adnan Siddiqui, Akshaye Khanna, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Abhimanyu Singh, Vikas Verma, Adarsh Gourav Bhagvatula, Pitobash Tripathy Hindi

How could you get the politics of your film almost perfect in the first half, then descend into eternal Bollywood clichés about rape and maaaaaaa in the second? How could you go from low-key to high-pitched within the span of a single narrative? How could you assemble some of the most talented screen performers ever seen together in a film, then limit many of them with one-dimensional characterisation?

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Debutant director Ravi Udyawar’s Mom revolves around a mother whose teenaged daughter is sexually assaulted in the most gruesome fashion imaginable.

Sridevi plays the central character, Devki Sabarwal. She is not your typical old-time-Bollywood Nirupa Roy kind of perennially weeping madre who was restricted to keeping house, longing for a bahu and shouting at God for being a patthar ki murti unmoved by her adoring son’s hardships. Devki is a senior school biology teacher, and is struggling to gain the affections of her husband’s first child Arya. Her mild demeanour camouflages a tough-as-nails personality though. That hidden Durga goes on a rampage – quiet at first – when Arya’s torn and ravaged body is found one day in a ditch, and the girl is let down by the judiciary.

You probably know this much already if you have been following the film’s publicity and have read its Wikipedia page. What you do not know yet is that the pre-interval portion of Mom goes beyond the expected, the initial treatment of the mother-daughter relationship is unconventional, and the long-drawn-out scene of gangrape is chilling yet sensitively done – what unfolds before our eyes is designed to horrify, yet we are not shown a single shot of what actually happens to Arya, which is a relief considering how Bollywood of an earlier era often used rape to titillate audiences rather than evoke empathy for the abused.

In the opening half of Mom, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably and moved to the point of speechlessness. I remember quickly pretending to check my phone during the interval for fear that a colleague at the press preview might strike up a conversation with me and realise I had lost my voice.

Understatement is the hallmark of Mom up to this point, and the gender politics is just so. But for a passing comment by Devki, which is atypical of this seemingly liberal woman, the writing does not stereotype women or sexual violence until then. (Credits: story by Ravi Udyawar, Girish Kohli and Kona Venkat, screenplay and dialogue by Girish Kohli.)

Perhaps that comment should have given us a hint of what was to come though. When Devki goes to a police station to report a missing daughter, cops brush aside her fear, with one going to the extent of saying that the girl has most likely taken off with her boyfriend since it is Valentine’s night. You may have come across many such girls but my daughter is not that type, Devki retorts. That type? Really? 

If those words had come from a character who had already been established as a conservative by the screenplay, it would have made sense, but since Devki is portrayed as an open-minded person, this sounded more like the writers unwittingly betraying their inner conservatism.

Still, that remark was overshadowed by the poignance of the film up to that moment.

Sadly, the post-interval portion of Mom leaves behind normal human beings with normal reactions to crimes against themselves and their loved ones, and gives way to cinematic clichés. Devki becomes an avenging angel in the mould of Dimple Kapadia in 1988’s Zakhmi Aurat, and Mom begins its downhill slide.

This is why last year’s Pink was so unusual – because for the most part, it showed us how ordinary people react to sexual violence in particular and injustices in general, despite the frustrations of inhabiting an unjust world.

Revenge sprees are less challenging to write though than nuanced normality. They also serve to satisfy the bloodlust of the audience, which is why commercial cinema has opted for them so often down the decades. If it was not a zakhmi aurat (wounded woman) it was a brother out to avenge the loss of his ghar ki izzat (family honour). In A Wednesday (2008), director Neeraj Pandey extended this populism to mob justice in terror cases, with a Common Man taking the law into his own hands to punish aatankvaadis who he feels are being needlessly given fair trials in the Indian system. In Mom the argument is articulated thus: “Galat aur bahut galat mein se chun-na ho toh aap kya chunenge?” (If you have to choose between what is wrong and what is very wrong, what would you choose?)

To be fair to Bollywood, it is not the only Indian film industry guilty of this charge. The Malayalam film industry a.k.a. Mollywood, for instance, has in recent years given us Puthiya Niyamam (2016) and 22 Female Kottayam (2012), which too were crowd-pleasing portrayals of rape.

Even for those who do not care about realism and reality, Mom is problematic for its lazy writing in the second half where loose ends are left hanging so openly that an intelligent person might spot them from a mile away. A criminal leaves behind a mega clue at a crime scene, but casually outwits a supposedly smart cop who gets his hands on it and who, at that point, is not sympathetic to her cause, which means he cannot be assumed to have deliberately let it go. Two people who show considerable deftness in committing three crimes, suddenly become really stupid with their fourth potential victim. And those same accomplices vow to hide their association from the world, yet subsequently provide elephant-sized evidence of it to the police.

So yes, Sridevi’s acting is wonderful; the actors playing her supportive husband Anand (Adnan Siddiqui) and Arya (Sajal Ali) have immensely likeable personalities; the use of A.R. Rahman’s music in the first half is effective; the always amazing Anay Goswami’s cinematography summons up stunning grandeur and intimacy by turns, depending on the requirement of the situation; and a particular mention must be made of the brilliant sound design by Nihar Ranjan Samal during the assault on Arya; but none of that can compensate for the post-interval increase in the film’s volume, the limited use of a talented actor like Akshaye Khanna (as the policeman Mathew Francis), the over-use of Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s histrionics for the character of the detective Dayashankar Kapoor a.k.a. DK, the re-stressing of gender stereotypes through a transgender character in the film, the loopholes and, above all, the cliched portrayal of the response to sexual assault. 

As if all this is not bad enough, Mom’s handling of the judicial process too lacks clarity and is misleading to viewers who do not know the nitty-gritty of India’s laws governing rape. I hope a lawyer will review this film in the coming days.

Ultimately then, despite its pretensions to non-conformism, Mom does nothing more than aim at easy applause. That goal is best illustrated by its predictable, horribly maudlin ending about maaaaaaaaaa.

Perhaps it was foolish to expect anything better from a film in which one character says, “Bhagwan har jagah nahin hota, DKji (God is not everywhere),” to which DKji a.k.a. Dayashankar Kapoor replies, “Isiliye toh usne maa banaayi hai (yes, that is why he made mothers).” If you want to be Manmohan Desai or Yash Chopra, why not go all out and not pretend?

The emotional pull of the first half and Sridevi’s acting excellence notwithstanding, Mom in many ways is as dangerous as the loud, raucous, not-even-pretending-to-be-progressive-about-women commercial Bollywood of the 1970s and ’80s.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/4

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	147 minutes 43 seconds

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/mom-movie-review-goddess-sridevi-is-lost-to-bollywoods-eternal-cliches-on-sexual-assault-3785625.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mom_(film)