The Misplaced Outrage Surrounding India’s Daughter

Rape is not the fault of the victim, therefore to focus on the victim or those fighting for her doesn’t help us understand rape. Understanding the rapist’s thinking is what’s key and the interview with Mukesh Singh, one of the December 16 rapists, does that.

In the aftermath of the Nirbhaya rape, we branded the rapists “animals”, “monsters”, “psychos” and the like. Did they deserve these labels? Probably. But did we ever truly understand why they did what they did? We certainly tried. We tried to understand their mind set through a gamut of articles and news reports, but we never truly understood them, because we were never exposed to the minds of these men, only their actions.

Today, in the form of Leslee Udwin’s documentary India’s Daughter, we finally get a glimpse into the mind of one of these rapists, but far from using this as an opportunity to understand a widely prevalent mind set in India, we’re in outrage mode.

The documentary, which is to be broadcast in various countries on March 8, International Women’s Day, carries an interview with Mukesh Singh, one of the rapists in the Nirbhaya case and this has upset a lot of people.

There are two aspects to the outrage surrounding this interview, the legal aspect and the aspect of its journalistic merit and propriety. To be clear, this piece is not about the legal aspect. That aspect is not really arguable – if the makers of the documentary did not obtain the necessary permissions for the interview, then yes, hold them accountable for that. This piece is meant to address the flurry of opinion pieces that appeared overnight criticising the documentary for its content, intent and message even before it had been released.

The biggest sticking point of the documentary is the interview with the rapist. People are upset that the rapist has been given a platform for his views, with one article in The Guardian even worrying that it would make him a “Twitter celebrity”. This argument seems absolutely bizarre. If anything, in the interview where Mukesh Singh speaks unapologetically about the incident, his misogynistic views are exposed for all to see. Far from glorifying him the interview achieves its objective of exposing the attitude of a rapist towards women. If someone associates with his views then the documentary also provides a context that would help them understand how wrong those views are.
The same article talks about how the documentary focuses on the rapist rather than those who spoke out in the aftermath of the rape. But the intent of shining the spotlight on the rapist is not done to leave the victims and those fighting for the victims in the shadows. It is to truly understand the cause of rape.

Times Now, India TV and some other news channels that have been outraging about the backward views of the rapist being given a platform would also do well to introspect. They routinely telecast insensitive and misogynistic statements by politicians. I’m assuming that is done to reveal the mind set of our policy makers rather than encourage all the viewers to embrace those views. So why is it different in this case?

Even the title of the film has not been spared, courtesy of India’s feminists. The argument, “Why refer to the victim as a daughter when she’s an independent woman?”, is a study in getting caught up in trivialities while missing the larger message. The documentary is meant to examine the attitudes of Indian men toward women, using the December 16th rape as context. It is not an attempt to prove the director’s feminist credentials.

In fact, the few pieces that criticise the documentary from a feminist point of view seem like attempts by Indian feminists to monopolise the discourse surrounding rape and women’s issues in the country. Take for example this piece where the author’s takes issue to Udwin’s lack of familiarity with Indian women’s movements as if this alone should qualify a person to make a documentary concerning rape in India. Lines like “I am concerned at the sheer confidence with which a single film, made by someone with scant familiarity with the daily decisions, dilemmas and struggles of India’s activists, can claim to set the agenda for change in India.”, further underline this view. It also glosses over the fact that Udwin spent two years in India working on this documentary, portraying her instead as a clueless foreigner playing the role of the white saviour.

In fact, this exact sentiment is mentioned by the same author in another piece when she complains about a “white saviour” school of thought. The problem with this argument is that the examples cited to back it come not from the documentary itself, or from the maker of the documentary, but rather from articles and quotes about the documentary. To extend this criticism to the documentary itself is unfair. Even if we’re to address the “white saviour” argument in terms of the articles themselves, the argument appears flimsy. The mention of Nirbhaya speaking “excellent English” is problematic to the author even though it serves to provide context to the social dynamics of the situation.

There’s also the argument that the documentary damages the image of India. This is reminiscent of the outrage surrounding Slumdog Millionaire when the movie was first released. The difference between Slumdog Millionaire and India’s Daughter is that the latter is not a fictional story. These are real people, real mind sets and real incidents. To worry about the image of the country being tarnished is a superficial mind set that’s willing to sweep dirt under the carpet rather than actually clean it up. The increased national and global scrutiny that the documentary will achieve is exactly the sort of kick up the backside that we need as a nation to get our act together regarding women’s safety and rights. If we truly love our culture then do we not have a responsibility to confront its darker side and reform it rather than ignore it and let the rot spread further?

We seem to be setting expectations of the documentary that the film maker didn’t claim to achieve and then criticising the documentary for failing to meet these expectations. The same Guardian piece mentioned earlier also achieves that with this line, “Leslee Udwin didn’t set herself an easy task, representing women in a country as socially diverse and rapidly changing as India.” The problem with this is that Udwin didn’t set that task for herself, the author did.

At the end of the day, without having seen the documentary itself, all the criticism against the documentary is devoid of context and without that context, the critics of India’s Daughter seem to have jumped the gun in criticising it.