The senseless brutality of the Swathi murder seems to stem not so much from active malevolence as from a helpless inability to cope with what life dishes out. The tragedy is the banal level at which it all plays out. Not some grand drama of betrayed love, but simply the absence of love, the imagining of insult, the need to prove machismo with murder. I find myself staring with fascination at the photograph of Ramkumar, a half-surly, half-shy face distinguished by a white splash of ash on the forehead. I wonder at the strength of rejected anger that consumed him as he slaughtered the girl in broad daylight. I wonder that onlookers should not have had the courage to stop this slip of a boy.
If you are a crime fan, you might recall the “Kitty” Genovese case in New York that became the basis for what would be called the Bystander Syndrome, where neighbour after neighbour said they did nothing to stop Kitty from being stabbed on the street because they “did not want to get involved”. Subsequent research showed that even if one neighbour had made the first move, all or many of them would have rushed to Kitty’s defence.
If just one person on our overcrowded railway platforms in our overpopulated cities had made that first move, a shout, a run forward, Swathi might be alive today. But I digress. Swathi was killed by her stalker. In other countries, a stalker is a criminal, but in India, to ‘stalk’ is to ‘love’. In a time-honoured, much-celebrated ceremony of love that is sanctified and legitimised by cinema, the stalker always (not sometimes or often) wins the girl.
My colleague writes elsewhere in The Hindu that we should not condemn cinema for our own frailties because ultimately what it does is reflect social reality. But because “movies are in the very air we breathe,” as he says, and because popular cinema shapes not just the clothes people wear but their attitudes too, we must look here for a modicum of responsibility. Cinema does not shape responses in a simple cause-and-effect manner — watch film, stalk girl — but in far more subtle ways by creating and sanctioning social mores. Ramkumar might never quote a Raanjhanaa as inspiration, but at a subliminal level, he has over the years absorbed the touted way to woo a girl.
Everything cinema says willy-nilly becomes the prevailing social discourse in a society, where cinema’s hold on the public imagination is immense. For a film to portray stalking as a social reality is not wrong; what is wrong is that cinema grants it implicit approval. Murder, for instance, meets with due cinematic comeuppance, even if that’s only a mild jail term for the hero. But rape a woman, and lo, the rapist is rewarded with marriage to the woman he rapes. Stalk a girl, harass her and you willbe rewarded with love. Handed down over the years by film stars with the status of gods, the custom today has the power of a socio-spiritual writ. When betrayed by a real life where stalking does not win the girl, our young men crack up.
Which is why it was so satisfying to watch Udta Punjab. A pure commercial film, it yet has the courage to outline the nameless girl that Alia Bhatt plays with fine sensitivity. Alia is captured, brutalised, and drugged into the sex trade, but she is never a victim. Plucky, angry, and eternally optimistic, she fights back with a realistic fortitude that rape survivors in Indian cinema are seldom granted. And she is not conveniently killed off either – she survives, makes it out, and sits on a sunny beach. Smiling.
The film does not say rape is okay; it says that to survive rape is okay. It turns the long-favoured “fate-worse-than-death” narrative on its head. And that’s the kind of forward-looking, taboo-breaking cinema we want to see. The stalking school of wooing must be given a quick and dishonourable burial.
