The criticism over a documentary on the Nirbhaya rape incident of 2012 is a case of defensive patriotism. Instead of slamming the film-maker for having a 'Western perspective', we must address our own wrongs
Hours after the ban on India's Daughter became public knowledge, social media sites were replete with
links to online versions of the documentary. The minute one link 'disappeared', another appeared in its
place. The irony of a ban is that the banned subject draws more curiosity than it may have, had it not been banned. And, then of course, the rational person, having apprised himself, or herself of the content of the banned subject, will naturally ask: Why? I watched the documentary, as I'm sure many others have, partly out of curiosity piqued by the ban, and mostly because I remember the acute sense of despair, and outrage I felt in December 2012, as countless others did. Respected journalists, public figures, and citizens of the nation in general, have each come out in turn to either defend the ban, or argue against it. For my own part, I am compelled to agree with the latter. The waves of criticism encircling the documentary have tended to range from procedural questions, such as how the film-makers got access to the interviewee in the first place, to the more predictable critique of the film's title, and finally sinking almost inevitably into a post-colonial critique: How dare a foreign national create a documentary revealing the sordid reality in our country?I recognise the need to develop a nuanced approach to the situation, but with all due respect, a myopic perspective is not the same as a nuanced one. While it is true that referring to Nirbhaya as 'India's Daughter' runs the risk of pigeon-holing India's women into the role of 'the little women in need of protection', unduly focussing on this title and decrying the entire documentary largely on this basis can amount to nothing more than nit-picking. Just as one critic's pointing out that the Guardian article referred to Tihar Jail as 'Tahir jail', is nothing more than nit-picking. Defensive patriotism isn't patriotism in its truest sense. Being proud of our nation and its many wonderful achievements and attributes, on the one hand, and constructive criticism of its faults on the other, do not have to be mutually exclusive.
In fact, in order to sustain the former, we must vigilantly practise the latter. While it is necessary to consider the way the international media chooses/has chosen to portray our nation, particularly with regard to growing global unease with rape culture, it is important to judge every piece of journalism on its own individual basis. Creating a documentary on the rape culture in India, focussing on a rape case that gripped the nation (and the world) because of the sheer brutality meted out to the victim, is not the same as saying rape only occurs in India - and suggesting that this is the only perspective people will take away from the documentary, is equally problematic.
The documentary does not seek to sensationalise the case any more than the newspapers covering the attack in its aftermath did, but to use it as a focal light to draw attention to the fact that the rapist's words, and those of his defence lawyers, are troubling, because their views on women, reflect the views we've heard expressed so often. While proponents of the 'but rape culture is everywhere' camp are eager to suggest that this is a global issue, and it most definitely is, I'm concerned that our defensive patriotism may make it impossible to discern that the Indian rape culture as a subset of the former, takes on a particularly distinctive hue; manifesting itself in the misogynistic, 'women shouldn't be allowed outside their houses'; or that 'they shouldn't be out late at night'; or have the freedom to be in bars, or discotheques, simply because they were born women.By collapsing statements like this into 'universal' rape culture, instead of acknowledging that their particular origins lie in the way women in India are regarded, would be to ignore the deep-rooted, and patriarchal origins of these attitudes.
Omit the fact that it is a rapist who is telling you why the victim is to blame in this documentary. Forget that the man responsible for saying 'women have no place in our country/culture', is one of his defence attorneys. Disregard these details, and all that's left is a worrying sense of deja vu. These may be the words of a rapist, but they sound far too familiar. And that is where the problem lies.The incident in Hyderabad two springs ago, where a group of young women were videotaped by a local news station, standing outside a bar, to suggest that young Indian women should not have the liberty to drink, or dress the way they do, and the backlash that followed -which included some outfits claiming that there should be a specific curfew for women, or specific licencing laws regarding serving them alcohol - is yet another example of this.To collapse all of this into a 'universal rape culture' would be to ignore its distinct cultural baggage. As Member of Parliament Javed Akhtar rightly pointed out, in our eagerness to ban the documentary, we have failed to step back, and consider that we should be far more offended by the fact that so many people in our country believe, as the rapist does, that women's rights and liberties in respect of their attire, and freedom of movement, should be circumscribed on the basis of their gender. Some critics have suggested that the documentary, in focussing on the words uttered by the rapist interviewed and his lawyers, narrows our appreciation of the sheer breadth of rape culture, reducing it to the 'brutes' who rape women, and those who defend them. I have to disagree with this. Their misogynistic words are an echo of what we're already accustomed to hearing in India. Suggesting that gender inequality exists to an acute extent in India, is not the same as saying it is the only place where gender inequality exists. Roland Barthes famously propounded the 'Death of the Author' theory, suggesting that works should be viewed in isolation from their author and his or her background, to truly appreciate the work on its own, so as to restrict our criticism to content, and not extraneous detail. India's Daughter is being criticised for being a 'foreign' viewpoint on an Indian issue and, therefore, somehow less authentic and more Orientalist. Getting tied up in a post-colonial critique of the documentary, based on the film-maker's nationality, however, can serve no real purpose beyond being purely academic criticism.
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