Mothers and vengeful others: Women as dispensers of justice in Bollywood

Over the years, character of women out to seek justice, vengeance has changed in Hindi cinema

In her 300th film, Mom, Sridevi turns into a vengeful mother, out to get justice for her stepdaughter, Arya (Sajal Ali), when the legal system fails to punish her four rapists. One of them, she gets castrated; another paralysed by feeding him crushed apple seeds, a source of cyanide (Sridevi’s character Devki is a biology teacher); the third she implicates in this; and finally, shoots the fourth. Playing a vengeful woman is nothing new for her — her character wrecked fury on her husband’s murderer in Army (1996).

Women as dispensers of justice on screen have been around since at least Mother India (1957), where Radha (Nargis) shoots dead her bandit son Birju (Sunil Dutt), when he tries to kidnap the village moneylender Sukhilala’s daughter Rupa. But, over the decades, the character of women out to seek justice and vengeance has changed considerably in Hindi cinema, coming into their own in the late Seventies and Eighties. This is probably because of the strong revenge-for-rape narratives in Western films such as the Swedish Thriller — A Cruel Picture (1973) or the American exploitation drama Ms 45 (1981).

The first mainstream Bollywood film to grapple with the revenge-for-rape theme is possibly B R Chopra’s Insaf ka Tarazu (1980), inspired by the 1976 Hollywood film Lipstick. Millionaire Ramesh, played by a suitably sleazy Raj Babbar, rapes first Bharti (Zeenat Aman) and then her teenage sibling Neeta (Padmini Kohlapure). He is finally shot dead by Bharti. The bare bones of the genre are established in the film: Strong, independent women; affluent, entitled antagonists; the rigidity of a patriarchal judiciary. Bharti’s lawyer, played by Simi Garewal, establishes the concept of consent: “Ek aurat ko na bolne ka haq hain (A woman has the right to say no).” These tropes are reiterated, albeit in different forms, even in Mom.

A more visceral example of the genre is Bandit Queen (1994) — Shekhar Kapur’s biopic of Phoolan Devi. It was not your run-of-the-mill revenge drama. Derek Malcom wrote in The Guardian, “...it has the kind of story, which, if it were a piece of fiction, would be difficult to credit.” The violence in the film, which also grapples with caste and the use of rape as a tool of domination by members of upper castes, was so graphic that it ran into trouble with the censor board. There were other troubles, with the real Phoolan Devi threatening to immolate herself in front of a cinema playing the film, as it was made without her consent. Arundhati Roy scuttled its Oscar hopes by critiquing — quite rightly — the on-screen representation of Devi’s rape, without her consent, in her essay “The Great Indian Rape Trick”.

While women wrecking vengeance on their oppressors and rapists might be satisfying poetic justice for the audience, it is not really sustainable, is it? In Bandit Queen, Devi (Seema Biswas) kills 22 Thakur men — as she had actually done in Behmai, Uttar Pradesh — on 14 February 1981, but except two, all the victims were innocent of any crimes against her. During wide-scale protests that broke out in New Delhi after the horrifying 2012 rape, many of the protestors demanded chemical castration for suspects, or death. This vengeful fantasy finds expression in Mom, and also in last year’s Bengali film Shaheb Biwi Golaam. While onscreen retribution might seem satisfying, it is on the whole absolutely unrealistic — and a travesty of justice at its worst.

For instance, the 2015 Dimapur mob lynching, when a crowd of 7,000-8,000 people broke into the central jail of the city, and dragged out a rape accused and beat him to death. Such actions are hardly different from the vigilantism of gau rakshaks and lynching of Muslim cattle traders — and rarely effective in preventing sex crimes. Since the 2012 protests, stricter anti-rape laws have been enacted.

The process of gender sensitisation is undoubtedly slow and the legal route often frustrating. One is immediately reminded of Bawandar (2000), the on-screen adaptation of the real tale of a lower-caste woman in Rajasthan suing upper caste men in her village for gang raping her when she refused to follow their diktat on child marriage. The court, corrupted by political and social hierarchy, provide her no justice, but Sanwari (Nandita Das) — Bhanwari Devi in real life — seeks no vengeance.

While, of course, the road to justice is more difficult in rural India, it is no easier in cities, where women are more economically and socially mobile. Damini (1993), more famous now for Sunny Deol’s “tariq” speech that earned him a Filmfare and a National award, and the more recent Pink (2016) demonstrate that even in urban centres, victims of sex crimes or those trying to bring perpetrators of such crimes to the book, face a sea of troubles. Victim-shaming, discrediting witnesses or exerting political and legal pressure are common tools of discouraging women who come forward. Yet, solidarity does win through in the end, and one must aspire to that in real life, too. Our efforts — on and off the screen — should be towards social and legal reform, rather than finding outlets for our outrage through vigilante actions.