Let’s Call It A Rape!
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The Satish Kaushik film that has provoked fresh nationwide debate over rape only reiterates that commercial concerns perpetuate stereotypes in Hindi cinema, says SONIA TRIKHA

In the past two weeks almost every conceivable forum of debate in the media has been focused on the issue of rape. The provocation did not come from the President of India picking on the subject in his Independence Day address to the nation wherein K. R. Narayanan referred to the rape of a five-year-old child that has so far gone unpunished and said: ‘‘Our women are still treated as less than human’’, and we live surrounded by ‘‘dark clouds of prejudice and callous unconcern’’.

The debate has instead been sparked by that all-pervading yardstick of all Indian social indices, a popular Hindi film, Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai, starring Anil Kapoor, Aishwarya Rai and Sonali Bendre. The film is directed by Satish Kaushik and has Aishwarya playing the mostly-hapless rape victim. She is comforted, housed and later husbanded by the astonishingly helpful Anil Kapoor, who along the film espouses the causes of not only victims of rape but also illegitimate children.

The film sparkles with moral tone and ardour. Very laudably, Kapoor tells his audience that ‘izzat’ is not a necklace that a husband gives his wife and which can be lost. It is a thing of the mind and a matter of self-dignity. The gullible Indian middle-class audiences, for their part, are looking impressed. According to Kaushik, in Small Town India, people have told him that they are identifying with Aishwarya’s character Preeti. Not because they are all victims, one imagines, but because, as Kaushik clarifies, they are all from the lower middle class strata of society and can identify with the trauma of the girl who suffers physical violation. Feelings apart, Kaushik’s film made Rs 60 lakh in the first week as opposed to his own equally dubious debate on marriage, Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rahte Hain which made Rs 42 lakh in the same period. Very impressive again and why not. Kaushik, by his own standards, has succeeded in creating a film that is impacting audiences from United States to Jalgaon. ‘‘In the first three days the film made $20,000 in the US,’’ says Kaushik.

All this must, in Bollywood parlance, translate to a successful film. End of debate. The issues, however, remain and it is as a response to these that Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai falls severely short. The fact that the film is riddled with stereotypes does not help. Aishwarya Rai is dressed in white when she is raped and thereafter returns home in soiled garb. The following day she wears black! Later in the film she tells Anil Kapoor that she will not marry him, not because she does not love him, but because she is not ‘‘fit’’ for him. All this deep-seated prejudice against rape victims, Kaushik is selling to us as ‘‘after-effect and mental disbalancing’’ of a rape victim.

The latter term applies more aptly to Bollywood. This is not to generalise because in recent times there have been more convincing films, despite being equally crassly commercial, like Tanuja Chandra’s Dushman and Kundan Shah’s Kya Kehna that have dealt with women’s issues such as rape and single motherhood with greater sensitivity. As Shah has said: ‘‘It is only through entertainment that you can stir audiences to serious thinking.’’ Kaushik, a man of incomparable talent in many ways, has obviously learnt the adage but failed to grasp its application.

Therefore, he feels the need to juxtapose serious sermonising on women’s rights, none of it by the female protagonist, with rankling noises from a formidable comic crew that comprises Jaspal Bhatti, Johnny Lever, Anupam Kher among several others who all speak Hindi in accents that oscillate from Jalandhar to Nellore. Kaushik says none of this detracts from the seriousness of the issue at hand, but only provides comic relief. ‘‘Dushman was a good film but it did not do well at the box office because it had no relief,’’ says Kaushik. The strange logic of his argument is that his does and therefore it is more successful. That this does not, however, mean that his treatment of the subject of rape is more accurate. For instance, why doesn’t the director think that Aishwarya Rai, who has been violated, is in a better position to justify her existence than a man, even if he is the hero of the film, who has had no involvement with the incident. Just to exemplify may we say, Preity Zinta defends her own position quite effectively in Kya Kehna, just as Kajol confronts her fears in Dushman.

Confronted with this, Kaushik says: ‘‘In earlier films, rape has been taken as an issue for revenge but here rape is not an issue, the real issue is disrespect to women and rape is only a symbol of that.’’ Rather an extreme symbol, one may point out, but if rape is not an issue in the film why are we debating it. Why are we not, instead, erring on the side of sociologist Ashis Nandy who says: ‘‘Commercial films have their own logic, cadence and rhythm and you get unnecessarily worked up by what they portray. After all, this is the medium in which the girl and boy go out of their home for a walk and end up in a tulip field in Holland.’’ Similarly, complex situations call for simple solutions and so women who are raped or struggling for another reason in society are rehabilitated through man and marriage. End of debate.

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