Predatory male attitudes, which constitute the immediate instrumental cause of rape and other crimes against women, have been sharply aggravated in India by a complex interplay of social, economic and cultural forces
In view of the controversy generated by Ms leslee Udwin’s, India’s Daughter, it is important to examine how good or bad a film it is and what it stands for. Those praising it say that it attempts to document the horrendous criminality as well as tragedy involved in the rape of a brave young woman in Delhi on the night of December 16, 2012, leading to her subsequent death, and also to draw attention to the rising incidence of rape and other crimes against women in India.
If so, the film is a rather poor effort. The three broad messages it seems to send is that rape is the outcome of warped male attitudes toward women, that there are some very reactionary men around in India, and that at least one of those sentenced in the December 16, 2012, case is unrepentant and believes that the victim was to blame for her travails. The first two are widely known. The third is hardly surprising.
Predatory male attitudes, which constitute the immediate instrumental cause of rape and other crimes against women, have been sharply aggravated in India by a complex interplay of social, economic and cultural forces. The foremost among these is the projection of women in entertainment, advertising, films and the media, as commodities meant for sexual pleasure and, by implication, not human beings.
The worst offender is the Indian Premier league in cricket, with its briefly-clad women cheerleaders, who often gesticulate provocatively. This writer fully agrees with the view that women have the right to wear whatever clothes they want to and the nature of their dress can in no way justify crimes against them. It is, however, one thing for a woman to exercise her legitimate right as an individual and quite another for an organisation to trade on women’s sexuality to attract male attention. That this is so with the IPl is clear from the fact that the cheerleaders have nothing to do with the matches being played. Their bodies and sexuality are on display. People perceive them, at least subconsciously, not as individuals but as objects of sexual pleasure, to be possessed and enjoyed.
Many advertisements of cosmetics and clothes for men — shaving creams, after-shave lotions, deodorants, colognes, under-garments and so on —heighten the projection of male sexuality and of women as mindless beings waiting to be turned on. While this undermines respect for women, their use as models in advertisements for cars, motor bikes and so on, conduces to their projection as commodities used for attracting attention to other commodities.
There is no reference to all this in Ms Udwin’s film. Nor is there any attempt to explore the underlying social and economic causes of the factors mentioned above, which stem from the advent of a new stage in capitalism. Max Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that Calvinism, which viewed success in a person’s secular vocation as a sign of being predestined to salvation, encouraged enterprise while its disapproval of wasteful and ostentatious expenditure, alms-giving (purportedly because it encouraged begging) and donations to many religious organisations, led to savings and investment. This gave capitalism its initial thrust.
Capitalist growth intensified competition and the search for markets. The shrinking of colonies, which provided markets for a couple of centuries, the rise of globalisation and new industrial powers like India and China, boosted competition to unprecedented levels both nationally and internationally, triggering a growing scramble for market shares, making marketing and its cutting edge, advertising, perhaps the most important components of the capitalist system. Boosting sales is what matters; scruples have been progressively defenestrated and women increasingly, and crassly, used in advertisements. This is hardly surprising. In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, RH Tawney showed how the rise of capitalism eroded the influence of Christian morality on economic activity in the West. The trend is becoming global. Despite protestations to the contrary, the quantum of profit has now become the only justification for the means of maximising it.
Other factors have contributed. The advertising-led market economy has spawned a consumer culture in which the possession of commodities and enjoyment of services — and not austerity and prudence — head the value scale. Given continuing sex segregation among the overwhelming majority of the population, a large section of males in India do not come to know women as sensitive, intelligent human beings with feelings and aspirations. Hence, women, other than mothers, sisters and other relatives, toward whom attitudes are traditionally defined, are seen as objects of sexual pleasure. Add to all this the still widely-held tendency to view women who go out, mix with men, or wear certain kinds of clothes as immoral, and one has another explanation of crimes against women when the latter are playing increasingly valuable roles in society and exercising their rights to freedom as individuals, which increasingly keeps them in public spaces, alone or in company.
Besides, development in India has led to mass migration from rural to urban areas. People away from their communities are without the restraint of the moral codes, supervision and surveillance, at work at home. They are also without the human relationships and the sense of identity they have in their villages and, hence, are oppressed by a feeling of anonymity, loneliness, deprivation, marginality and powerlessness. The consequent resentment and alienation often turns into aggression, conducing to violent crimes both as a means to forcibly acquiring money for items the perpetrators cannot afford lawfully and existential acts of warped self-assertion.
The glaring inadequacy of India’s Daughter lies in its failure to dwell on these critically important issues and — while much remains to be done — on the significant progress made in India in arousing public consciousness and framing legislation on crimes against women since the Mathura rape case in 1972. As a documentary (and not a feature) film it should have had a comprehensive approach. Besides, apart from issues like revealing the name of the victim, parts of the film, such as interviews with the convicted persons’ family members, which can generate sympathy for them, is absolutely unacceptable when an appeal in the case is pending before the Supreme Court. Justices Badar Durrez Ahmed and Sanjeev Sachdeva of the Delhi High Court were absolutely right when they stated on March 12, that in their opinion the film should not be screened until the Supreme Court gave its final verdict.
(The accompanying visual is of students protesting against the Government’s ban on the documentary film, India’s Daughter, in Bangalore)