The Great Indian Rape Flick
The Hindustan Times, March 11, 2007

You were writing your first novel and as much as you remembered all sorts of things from your past you were also puzzled by what you had forgotten. One day you realized that you could almost be a character in your book.

You must have been a teenager when you had watched Shyam Benegal's "Nishant." In that film, Shabana Azmi had played the wife of the village schoolteacher. She was young and beautiful and was fond of paan. She had put paan in her mouth and tied a red ribbon in her hair when going to the market.

That is when the landlord's sons had seen her. The youngest one, tender and unmanly, had fallen in love with her. His elder brothers abducted the young woman. How did the film end?

You might imagine that the character the writer had now become turned in his bed at night toward the partially-lit window—trying to remember what had happened to the schoolteacher's wife at the end of the film. But he couldn't.

All that he remembered was the red paan in her mouth, and the red ribbon in her hair, and the way in which she walked. Such a sense of abandon, in a small place that wasn't safe from violence.

You too had found very attractive the schoolteacher's young wife, and had then felt guilty when she had been taken away and raped. The film's name "Nishant" means "the night's end," but it is possible that you had found it easier to believe then that darkness lasts forever. That is why you had no memory of the film's ending. Perhaps.

In what you had written, in what would become your first novel, you had tried to imagine yourself as someone who was still a boy in many ways.

Around the time you had gone to the theatre to watch the film, it is possible that an incident had occurred in a nearby town. The wife of a college lecturer had been kidnapped by the local students. A report was published in the local newspaper "Searchlight" but there were no photographs accompanying the story and when you watched "Nishant" you had mentally transferred red-ribboned Shabana Azmi with her red mouth to the town near Patna.

Later, when you had grown up, you had read reports by journalists like Arvind N. Das. The pieces were straightforward and sociological—they were not written by a novelist—but they were difficult to forget. One article began with the following words: "In the 1930s the landlords of Gaya in Bihar used to demand at least one seer of milk a day from the Harijans. If they were unable to provide it, the landlords demanded the same amount of milk from their lactating womenfolk."

A lot of writers who worked in Hindi films have wondered why there is so much violence against women in this country. The irony is that much of this violence is staged in the films themselves with a degree of voyeuristic relish.

You had stepped into early manhood when B.R. Chopra's "Insaaf Ka Tarazu" was released. Your cousin Tinku had just completed his B.Sc. in Botany. He had watched the film several times. The film staged three rape scenes. Although the rapist was killed at the film's end, and the raped women had their revenge, Tinku kept going back to witness the rapes.

You went to the theatre with Tinku once. When the young, frightened Padmini Kolhapure was being raped by the villain—a businessman played by Raj Babbar—a bit of the light from the screen had shone on Tinku's smooth dark face. He was gazing at the screen, his mouth half-open. You wanted to write about that look because you had never forgotten it. Yet, in the book that you were writing, a man and a woman became lovers after he had raped her.

It is after you had found out that this is what happened in your novel that you made another discovery. In "Nishant," the character played by Shabana Azmi—her name was Sushila—ran away with the landlord's youngest son. You had forgotten this piece of the narrative. Sushila didn't return to her husband who had loved her and had been trying to get her back. Why did that happen?

You asked the film's director and he told you that when Sushila turned away from her husband it was the first time that she, as a woman, was exercising her sexual freedom. You grasped this argument, and thought you understood what was happening also in your own book, but then when you watched "Nishant" again some months later, you weren't sure anymore. After all, who had ever asked Sushila what she wanted?

In "Nishant" the camera looked at rape in a way that was fundamentally opposed to what you had seen in "Insaaf Ka Tarazu." But when you met Vijay Tendulkar, who had written the story for "Nishant," he told you that he had been disappointed by the film's conclusion. His script had presented a different ending. You remembered that in the film, oppressed villagers had rebelled one morning and bludgeoned to death everyone in the landlord's family. Eventually they had also found and killed the youngest son who had been hiding with the teacher's wife. In the original version, Sushila was pregnant with a child fathered by the landlord's son killed with her.

Tendulkar explained to you, "When they were killed, it was sunset. That single visual stayed with me. All the time, I could see a gory climax to the film. It had to be that way. It couldn't be bloodless."

It is possible that in Tendulkar's mind, the brutal violence of the weak called attention to the larger violence of the powerful. In the script he wrote for Govind Nihalani's "Aakrosh," which was released the same year that "Insaaf Ka Tarazu" was a hit in theatres all over India, Tendulkar had a tribal called Lahanya Bhiku kill his unmarried sister. This was because Lahanya, played with hypnotic power by Om Puri, didn't want his sister to be vulnerable to the same men who had raped his wife.

The violence was understandable. But you wondered. Whose fantasy is this, this frenzied dream of bloodletting? From somewhere a line you had read in a short-story came back to you: "As if life wasn't a rag wrapped around the sharpest blade."

An ordinary life is made up of many acts of humiliation. And also perhaps an equal number of small triumphs. But most of all, on any given day, a human being tries to find, against difficult odds, a little bit more space to breathe. It takes a great deal of courage, and also a fair bit of cowardice, to make a compromise. But people do just that, every day and every night, making a little calculation here and a little adjustment there. It is the defining quality of the middle class.

Righteous rage against rape is not only welcome but necessary; at the same time, righteousness by itself, in a man's world, routinely sends women to their death. There is no glory amidst so much shame. This is what you remembered, and yet inevitably forgot, when you were writing your book.

Amitava Kumar is the author of the novel Home Products published this month by Picador-India.