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When I was 14, I had a crush on my stalker. A senior from school had devised an elaborate after-school schedule to follow me as I walked from school to home, home to tuition, and back home from tuition, post which he would hang around my house hoping I’d give him a glance from my balcony. Sometimes, I would indulge him, all the while pretending to be annoyed by his presence, because, like I said, I had a crush on him.
While so much has been said about how stalking has been normalised through cinema, there is no conclusive statistical evidence on the same. My fleeting adolescent feeling, however, intangibly proved the blurring of the “fine line” between Stockholm syndrome and whirlwind romances. The biggest stars of the day had won the affections of their love interests on screen by following them around, so I didn’t think it was out of place for this 16-year-old boy to have similar, noble ambitions.
We've been selling a terrible dream in our films for long. That any man can get the woman he wants just by wanting her enough. Must change!
— Siddharth (@Actor_Siddharth) July 17, 2016
Besides, films from the ‘80s and ‘90s which portrayed men tailing women, hoping to approach them or get their attention were not considered regressive. They were reflective of the times where romances were covert and such discretion was necessary even in consensual encounters. Cases in point would be Mani Ratnam’s suave heroes: Karthik in Mouna Ragam (1986), Arvind Swamy in Bombay (1995) and Madhavan in Alaipayuthey (2000).
Ten years later, it happened again: a man who saw me at a traffic signal decided to follow me home. Sure, so many heroes — including the idolised ones in the aforementioned movies — have persistently pursued their love interest after a single glance, and such behaviour has always been seen as an ode to the woman’s allure. But, since films no longer served as my single educational source for understanding the opposite sex, his behaviour did not seem flattering. It was truly, terribly frightening.
Following the gruesome Nirbhaya incident, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 was passed to include offences like acid attack, voyeurism, sexual harassment and stalking under its purview. The amendment acknowledged the latter as a prelude to more heinous crimes committed against women. According to the law, any man who “follows a woman and contacts, or attempts to contact such woman to foster personal interaction repeatedly, despite a clear indication of disinterest by such woman” can be charged for stalking, under section 354D IPC, with a jail term of no less than one year.
In 2014, stalking was treated as a separate offence by the National Crime Records Bureau for the first time: as many as 4,143 cases were reported across 29 States and the following year, the number shot up to 5,119. Incidence reported in Tamil Nadu remained unremarkable — one case in 2014, and 11 in 2015. However, in 2016, the spotlight on the sinister nature of the act was amplified in the State when 24-year-old Swati was hacked to death in a busy suburban railway station in Chennai. The man suspected of the murder, which made headlines on the national media, was said to have stalked her for weeks prior to the incident.
Later that year, the movie Remo hit screens, in which hero Sivakarthikeyan not only stalks the heroine, but also deceives her to win her affections. This theme, of course, is not new: Kamal Haasan did it in Singaravelan (1992), Ajith in Vaali (1999) and Madhavan in Minnale (2001). But this time, the Internet was outraged. A friend, however, earnestly confessed to not having realised the red flags in the hero’s behaviour — before reading feminist critiques of the same — because “the heroine seemed to enjoy the attention”. As far as a hero’s persistent pursuit of a woman goes, he felt this one wasn’t even the worst.
Actor Dhanush is infamous playing characters who use stalking to reel in disinterested women in films across genres and languages — think Thiruda Thirudi (2003), Thiruvilaiyaadal Aarambam (2006), Padikkavadan (2009), Raanjhanaa (2013) and Thanga Magan (2015). In a 2017 interview , a reflective Dhanush finally conceded that he had a social responsibility given his massive adulating fan base.
As American filmmaker Woody Allen once said, “Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.” Stalking to woo is social reality in India, as is stalking to abuse, harass and harm. Tamil Cinema’s selective portrayal of this act and its implicit approval of the same has clear consequences.
In a country where schools apply scant focus on sex education, and exposure to the opposite sex is morally policed and constantly restricted, these escapist romance films serve as a guide for courtship. Young boys repeatedly see an idolised star persistently pursue a woman who explicitly expresses her disinterest, only for him to eventually win her heart; young girls, on the other hand, are shown that eve-teasing, stalking and deception are a playful part of passionate love stories.
In the 2012 film 3 , Dhanush is shown following his high school beau as she walks home one evening. He is soon spotted by her father and subsequently slapped. In this particular scene, there is no question of the two walking side-by-side, safely and honestly expressing their feelings and fears to each other. For, in our society, mutual interest between young men and women is a cause for concern. Our cultural values dictate that girls and boys should not mingle casually, and this is reiterated even in urban co-educational schools such as the one I studied in.
When I was in class 9, childish enmity between the sexes was giving way to natural adolescent curiosity in the classroom. Trained teachers and friendly guidance counsellors could have helped us navigate this phase safely. Instead, a friend was appointed by her class teacher to turn on her female classmates if they looked at the boys while biting their nails, because, the teacher explained, “they are doing this to attract the boys”.
Cultural values need to be understood and respected, but instead, they are merely thrust upon unsuspecting adolescents.
Stories like this from our educational institutions are not rare, just like separate staircases for boys and girls are common. Chains in college buses divide physical space between young men and women. Trees on campuses are cut down so that there is no sheltered space for them to stand and talk. If witnessed, classroom interactions between the sexes earn the wrath of school teachers and college administrators. Because: what if they fall in love? what if they lose focus on their studies? what if their lives are eventually destroyed because, gasp, they conversed?
Cultural values need to be understood and respected, but instead, they are merely thrust upon unsuspecting adolescents. Owing to the implicit understanding that boys should always take the initiative, the onus of upholding cultural values rests with girls. They are immediately shamed for any interest they show in the opposite sex, while boys are not taught how to handle the lack of it.
With parents and teachers telling adolescents to quell and suppress natural curiosity and interest in the opposite sex, they turn to friends and films to help handle their feelings. This, in turn, blows new life into the time-honoured tradition of stalking. So, for the most part, the aforementioned scene from 3 would resonate with many who’ve been brought up with traditional patriarchal values and yet had one-sided/budding/flourishing high-school romances. Such notions of female coyness and male intrepidity are cultivated and carried forth into one’s adult years.
Women are conditioned to say ‘no’ when they mean ‘yes’ so as to not come off as too eager or “easy”. This confuses young boys, who largely have limited exposure to women beyond their own family — so they are taught to believe that women don’t know what they want, that they don’t say what they mean. So, in a way, a lack of interest gets construed as an invitation to pursue and persist. The simplistic portrayal of this equation in the media only exacerbates this problem.
While films deserve to be criticised for the normalisation of stalking, does it also not make sense to question normalised regressive practices and the institutions that pave the way for them? Staid cultural values and mindsets need to be tackled, not just in the media, but also in society. For, while stalking is a major problem, it is also symptomatic of a larger issue.
