‘India’s Daughter’ Review: A Crime That Rocked the World by Dorothy Rabinowitz ****
http://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-daughter-review-a-crime-that-rocked-the-world-1447369613
India has banned this documentary that tells the story of a brutal gang rape in Delhi.
It is only one of the great distinctions of this film by Leslee Udwin, now officially banned in India, that the outrage it describes, among the oldest of crimes, comes with the force of the new, the unfathomable, the unforgettable. In December of 2012, a 23 year old Delhi resident just about to embark on her long dreamed of medical career, decided to see a movie with a male friend—her last chance for recreation for a good while before beginning her internship, she thought. The movie Jyoti Singh chose was “Life of Pi”. It was the last movie she would ever see, the last hours of a life brimming with happiness at the hard won goal she was about to reach. She was now about to become a doctor: to begin rewarding her parents, poor people who had willingly sacrificed all they had, sold their ancestral land, to pay school fees for their child—a daughter.
India’s Daughter
Monday November 16, 10 p.m. on PBS Independent Lens
On their way home, Jyoti Singh and her friend boarded a private transport bus they thought was going their way, only to discover themselves surrounded by the only other passengers—six young men, including the driver, who were using the vehicle for their private partying. After beating her friend, they dragged the struggling Jyoti to the rear of the bus where they subjected her to a gang rape of such brutality that the story of what happened to a young woman in Delhi—not some primitive backwater—made news around the world.
Rape, including gang rape, was common in Delhi and elsewhere in India. But there was about this rape—the exceptional detail, the unexceptional pronouncements of the rapists’ defense attorneys which told everything about the reigning attitudes toward women—that was enough to propel simmering awareness into explosive rage
With the aid of CCTV footage that had recorded the suspect movements of the bus, the rapists were quickly caught, and the story of the attack made known. Almost immediately huge throngs of university students, men and women, took to the streets in riotous demonstrations for justice that would continue for weeks, notwithstanding police water cannons and tear gas. The sights and sounds of these crowds stand in gleaming contrast to the dark story that unfolds in the rest of the film. It’s the antidote to this masterly picture of a society steeped in traditions and attitudes that had led inexorably to the view of women that made it possible, routinely, to dismiss the most vicious of sexual crimes against them as deserved. The woman has done something—indeed, everything—to bring her attack on. She was the author of her own suffering, the explanation given repeatedly in this story as well.
“India’s Daughter” is no ranting diatribe. It’s a relentlessly penetrating excavation of facts and attitudes in a single case, though one, clearly, that speaks for a multitude of others. The film’s great strength is the product of that potent combination—ambition and persistence. The filmmaker pursued and won near miraculous access to every side of this history, including one of the rapists, also driver of the bus, who speaks in his prison cell—a man of still unshaken confidence in his views of women. “A girl is far more responsible for a rape than the boy,” he tells his interviewer. “About 20 percent of women are good,” he further informs her. And, “a decent girl wouldn’t be roaming around nine o’clock at night.”
Here, too, are the talkative defense attorneys whose pronouncements provide, in their low way, some of the film’s highest moments. One pervasive theme—the woman is a precious jewel argument, a diamond despoiled by behavior that tarnishes her. When not a jewel, she is as a precious flower. M.L Sharma, defense lawyer declares, with riveting intensity, that a woman is indeed, “just like a flower” that must be protected, but “if you put it in the gutter it is spoiled.” There is no question as to who is responsible for the despoilment of this flower—it is the woman who has put herself in the gutter.
We meet, too, the families of the accused: dazed, humiliated, with no answers but the stark evidence of their poverty.
Above all, there are the parents of India’s Daughter, as Jyoti Singh came to be known in some of the coverage. It was crucial to know something of the life and character of the young woman so casually destroyed and tossed, naked, out of that moving bus in Delhi, and in this regard, her mother and father provide the essentials. Early on in the film we learn the nature of these parents, their pride in their daughter. When she was born, they gave out sweets—they celebrated—surprising behavior, their friends pointed out, since it was a girl and not a boy who had arrived. Their girl had wanted to be a doctor from the time she was a child. They valued her, a child ever curious who asked her father, he recalls, why the moon came out. And they relished her spirit and ambition. Which was, it seemed, tireless. She worked long hours in a call center to have enough to pay school expenses, and she slept little, and she found no reason to complain. It had to be done and she would do it. A friend recalls one of her most frequent assertions—“A girl can do anything.”
She lived two weeks more after her assault—far longer than the doctors who first examined her had predicted. India’s ban on showing this film about her case and its repercussions—those demonstrations had led to improvements in Indian law—will, inevitably, only bring more attention to this extraordinary documentary than it would otherwise have had. Not popular in official circles now, the film and its maker stand accused, apparently, of bringing shame on India. Still, at least one television channel, NDTV India, had the guts to show a black screen for the entire hour in which the film would have run. A gesture, one suspects, that would have delighted the heart of India’s Daughter.
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