India’s Daughter and How Not to Talk About Rape
India’s Daughter and How Not to Talk About Rape
Before India’s Daughter premiered in New York the day after International Women’s Day, Meryl Streep lit a candle to honor the protagonist of Leslee Udwin’s new documentary. “She was India’s daughter,” declared Streep, referring to twenty-three-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey, the student whose rape and subsequent death sparked India’s most spectacular protests against sexual assault in recent history. “Tonight,” she continued, “she’s our daughter too.”
The film couldn’t have elicited a more different reaction in India. When the documentary was first promoted on national television channels, one of the previewed excerpts of the film generated particular controversy. In this clip, Mukesh Singh, one of the four men convicted for Jyoti’s sexual assault and driver of the bus in which the attack took place, says, “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.” He continues, “When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have dropped her off after ‘doing her,’ and only hit the boy.”
Publicity generated by the interview prompted objections from Indian politicians that the film was part of an “international conspiracy to defame India” and “highly derogatory and . . . an affront to the dignity of women.” Indian feminists were concerned about the film’s potential to sensationalize the already contentious issue of sexual assault; author Nilanjana S. Roy, for example, criticized it for giving a killer “a platform from which to justify his terrible actions.” Udwin did not help matters by declaring that the documentary was motivated by her desire to address the question, “Why do men rape?” In Udwin’s attempt to understand the “mentality” of the rapists, critics alleged that her film risked reinforcing stereotypes of all Indian men as barbaric and as misogynists. Lawyers also expressed concerns about the timing of the interview’s release, since Jyoti’s assailants, though convicted of the assault that led to her death, are currently appealing their sentences at the Indian Supreme Court.
The Delhi Police filed a report stating that “ . . . in the said interview, the convict Mukesh Singh has made malicious, derogatory, offensive, insulting remarks against girls, causing harassment and disrepute. The excerpts of the interview as published are highly offensive and have already created a situation of tension and fear amongst women in the society.” Following this, the government proceeded to place a restraining order on any further telecast of the interview in the Indian media, in line with the police’s plea to preserve “justice and the maintenance of public order.” The decision to bar further screening of the interview effectively became a restriction on the film, leading to a public outcry against censorship, even as opinions differed as to what the film contributed to discussions of women’s rights in India.
Since 2012 when Jyoti’s rape and the ensuing protests made headlines, Indian scholars and activists have criticized the international media for portraying India as brutal, backward, and patriarchal. But rather than making this criticism in order to deny or downplay the issue of violence against women in the country (as conservative voices have), feminists have done so in order to challenge the representational politics of depicting societies like India as “traditional” in their attitudes toward women. While Indian and other feminists have long argued against the use of cultural practices to justify violence against women in their own communities, they have found it equally necessary to challenge the tendency of other women’s rights advocates to provide cultural explanations for violence against women in non-Western communities. For instance, cultural norms relating to honor and chastity have long been used to explain gender-based violence in South Asian and Arab countries and their diasporas. In presenting violence against women as a “cultural problem,” advocates for women’s rights unwittingly legitimize the very norms that perpetrators of violence use to justify their behaviour. On the other hand, even as sexual violence against women in European or American contexts is often explained as a consequence of “provocation,” where female victims are blamed for “triggering” violence through their appearance or their behavior, neither the way women are sexualized nor the violence they encounter is presented as a cultural trait. The fact is that both rape and victim blaming are common—in varying degrees—to many societies, which indicates that rape occurs due to a variety of factors rather than purely “cultural” ones.
Despite the fact that rape and sexual assault on university campuses and in the military have been the subject of increasing attention in the United States, these issues are seldom articulated as “national” problems in the way we have seen in India. Jessica Valenti has noted, for instance, that unlike the indictments of India’s “sexist culture” that followed Jyoti’s rape, mainstream American publications hardly described the Steubenville rape case as a symptom of a similarly pervasive problem in the United States. Even the recent focus on campus sexual assault tends to isolate the campus as a “hunting ground,” rather than acknowledging that rape occurs both outside institutional walls as well as within them. Such distinctions between countries with “rape problems” and countries where rape is an anomaly arguably distance the problem of rape “here” in the United States, from what occurs over “there,” in societies dismissed as less “civilized.” In some cases, Indian feminists have also pointed out how offers of support, while well intentioned, reinforce this power dynamic. Harvard University, for example, offered to provide Indian activists policy recommendations on how to address rape in the wake of the 2012 assault, without acknowledging the extensive work already being done on the issue by activists in India.
It is this pervasive language of aid, rather than solidarity, that irked many who responded negatively to Udwin’s film. Secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA) Kavita Krishnan, who appears briefly in the film, later accused Udwin of embarking on a “civilizing mission” to an India that was presented “as a place of ignorance and brutality towards women, that inspires both shock and pity, but also calls for a rap on the knuckles from the ‘civilized world’ for its ‘brutal attitudes.’” Responding to Mukesh Singh’s filmed interview, Krishnan pointed out that Udwin, in focusing on Jyoti’s case alone, had picked an ideal candidate for a “global rescue mission.” The film, ostensibly pitched to middle-class, liberal, English-speaking audiences, presents Jyoti as someone they can relate to: educated and speaking “very good English,” in step with a young, aspirational India. Jyoti—working her way out of poverty and into the shining light of India’s promised economic future—is the ideal neoliberal subject and poster-child of a film about activism against rape. On the other hand, in an attempt to explain the origins of violence, Udwin presents Mukesh Singh and his companions as victims of poverty, unable or unwilling to break the cycle of misogyny. The way in which Udwin emphasizes their poor backgrounds, ostensibly to broaden our understanding of their circumstances of deprivation, reinforces the damaging view that men like them—poor, rural, migrant men, men who have failed to reap the rewards of Indian liberalization—are also prone to criminality. This stereotype is not the preserve of white women filmmakers in India; it is a view that has also been widely reflected in Indian media coverage of sexual and domestic violence as well.
By focusing on Jyoti’s rape by strangers, the film also reiterates the widely held belief that rape is a crime committed by “the man on the street” (the majority of whom are non-English speaking, poor, or working-class Indian men), when on average, such instances account for a mere 2 per cent of cases in India. But Mukesh Singh’s words are recognizable and familiar precisely because politicians, judges, religious figures, and policemen have made nearly identical remarks, and not only in India; patriarchy, as we know, cuts across class lines. Additionally, by focusing on individual perpetrators in isolation from the institutions, norms and practices that sanction their behavior—silence around domestic violence, systemic use of sexual assault by the military, the gendered ways in which caste and religious majorities exert power over marginal groups—the film cannot but offer an incomplete picture of why women in India face violence and from whom.
Ironically, Udwin’s poor treatment of class, the film’s greatest failing, is mitigated by its strongest element—its intimate treatment of the families of the assailants as well as of the victim’s. In doing so, the film cedes space to voices that have until now remained unheard in coverage of Jyoti’s case. We meet Puneeta Devi, wife of one assailant, who believes in her husband’s innocence. She baldly asks the viewer, “Am I not a daughter of this country? Don’t I have a right to live? . . . Will you hang all rapists? A woman is protected by her husband. If he’s dead, who will protect her and for whom will she live?” She gazes unflinchingly into the camera as she speaks, driving home the complexity of both patriarchy and the role of the state in mitigating it. Devi, whose husband may hang for his crime, sees herself as a victim of the state’s decision to award capital punishment for rape. At the same time, as she implies and as Mukesh Singh’s lawyer states outright, those who are wealthy, influential, or themselves politicians— unlike her husband—not only manage to stay out of jail, but remain leading public figures. Such forms of harsher punishment also wrongly assume that the law alone can act as an effective deterrent, when the real problem is the low rate of conviction for violent crimes against women.
While many have charged Udwin’s film with making too much of Jyoti’s story, this singular case and the protests it inspired have shaken up conventional ways of talking about rape in India. Breaking the culture of victim shaming and blaming, many have started to speak out about their experiences; more Indian journalists, whether through satire, sarcasm, or exposés, are gradually widening the public space in which to discuss rape and criticize misogyny. Most significantly, the extensive media coverage of the 2012 protests gave scholars, lawyers, and activists an opportunity to draw the public into otherwise distant policy considerations. Building on the advances made in the 1980s, the Justice Verma Commission produced a groundbreaking report on January 23, 2013 that placed the physical and sexual autonomy of women at the heart of reforms. The report’s recommendations were widely covered by media during the protests and helped familiarize ordinary citizens with the contours of a highly specialized debate. Despite the fact that the government of the day did not approve most of these recommendations, sexual assault and the rights of victims have acquired new standing in India.
India’s Daughter offers no closure to any of these issues, but it does offer moments in which to consider what justice means, both in Jyoti’s case and in others. In the film, Mukesh Singh argues that he was present during the assault, but was driving the bus and so does not deserve the death penalty. Puneeta Devi’s testimony shows us how her life is inextricably bound up with her husband’s. For Jyoti’s parents, death for the rapists is the very least they expect from the state. There are, in short, few easy conclusions to be drawn from the film, and the absence of an omniscient directorial voice suggests Udwin’s understanding of this. If Udwin’s film achieves one thing, it is that it encourages us to question how we, at home and abroad, have so far understood India’s problem with rape.
Amrita Ibrahim has a PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on news media and journalism in India.
