There’s a revenge-seeking fiend in all of us
Deepa Mehta’s film on the December 16 gang rape asks how responsible are we for what we have become
Brutal moments. Personal moments. There is no person who has not suffered those, in different degrees. Some of us bury them. Until, yes until, a trigger reminds you of it and then a spiral of agony scorches through you. This is what I felt when I watched Deepa Mehta’s film An Anatomy of Violence. In Patrick Mullen’s review of the film, he wrote, “Is it true crime, mockumentary, hybrid film, or docu-drama? Anatomy of Violence is all of these forms and none. Let’s call it Mehta-fiction”.
Producers Trudie Styler and Celine Rattray spoke to Mehta about making a film about Jyoti Singh’s rape on December 16, 2012. Mehta, not wanting to dwell on the act itself, chose to make a film about the rapists. In an interview to The Globe and Mail, Mehta explained, “It was too convenient for them just to be ‘evil’, because we don’t become who we are in isolation. I really believe in that, looking at where they come from, to find some root cause. Maybe just get a glimpse of what it might be, because somehow I feel that we’re complicit in it.”
Mehta used the re-enactment technique in an acting workshop in Chandigarh as research for a feature film. During the workshop, she took a decision to not make the feature film but use the workshop footage as the film. Adult actors played the imagined childhood of the rapists. This includes poverty, sodomy, rape, abject loneliness and violence. There were threads from an imagined past which were woven into resent moments. These actors were not slum kids brought up in poverty. Can there be any verifiability of this imagined life of the rapists? Do their horrific imagined histories then mean that they had no existential choice but to become brutes?
Jyoti Singh’s barbaric rape has become a brutal, personal moment for Indians. I feel I own it. It is my personal pain. In that, no one should touch it. Leave it alone. Enough. But the film triggers all that you don’t want triggered. It devastates you. It questions that in our furious anger, we let slip the layers that led to such a merciless act. Predictably, we will respond with — “the film practically blames Jyoti’s rape on the grinding poverty and cruel society the rapists grew up in and lightens their guilt”. At the core, for some of us, it is impossible to be understanding and forgiving. We are all the father whose four-year-old has been raped; who in his rage wants to kill the rapist. I’ll admit to similar thoughts after Jyoti’s rape and death, thinking somebody might just do it. The anger in my core reduced me momentarily to a revenge-seeking rabid fiend.
But we need to look at the larger picture, howsoever distasteful it is to us. There is a presumption in the imagined lives of the rapists that they must have been povertystricken, sexually violated and repressed. Can we accept the authenticity of this presumption and projection? Why did these men become rapists when millions in similar circumstances did not? The book on Phoolan Devi by the late Mala Sen and Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen showed the bone chilling rapes Phoolan Devi suffered and the ruthless revenge she took. Phoolan Devi was considered a heroine by some feminists for killing her rapists. Others pointed out, not every woman who is raped becomes a serial killer.
There have been similar rapes of young girls, some as horrific as what Jyoti Singh suffered and we did not give them the same attention or vent the same fury. The Justice Verma Committee did change many crucial aspects of the law. Has it stopped women from being raped? We will never know how many potential rapists it stopped. We can never get the statistics of how many more women are likely to report rape than they did before. And, we will never know how many still go unreported.
In anthropologist Jean Rouch’s experimental film The Human Pyramid he had students in a racially mixed school in the Ivory Coast act out their own lives. In Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture, he uses clay figures and archival footage to recreate the atrocities of his experiences in Khmer Rouge labour camps. Their stories are not imagined.
The fusion of non-fiction and fiction is difficult and will create debate, which seems to be Mehta’s intention. It forces us to look at our lack of engagement with the discrepancies, economic divide and injustice that surround us. It surely raises the question: How responsible are we for the kind of human beings we have become? When an anthropologist studies a tribe, the premise is that those observed are exotic and different, almost alien, from the observer. When Anatomy of Violence is shown in international festivals, we will feel judged. I predict there will be resentment. How dare she tell our story her way? Yet, we learn from how others view us.