8 - The Female Counter-Strike: Terrorising Patriarchy in Hindi Cinema

Summary

Introduction: Gender-Based Violence in a Terrorist Frame

Terrorism has become a recurring theme in Indian cinema. This development is very much in tune with the world-wide emergence, since the mid-1990s, of a ‘new cinematic terrorism’ responding to global forms of political violence (Shaw 2015, 185–6). But terrorism can also be understood as a characteristically Indian concern. More specifically, the emergence of cinematic terrorism reflects India's increased exposure to terrorist incidents since the 1980s, with the 1993 ‘Bombay bombings’ and the surrounding events leaving an especially deep mark on the national imaginary (198). The surge of representations of terrorism in Indian film might also be symptomatic of a broader cultural tendency to showcase extreme brutality, cinematic terrorism being only one of its mediatised forms (Bannerji 2016, 3–7). The rise of spectacular depictions of violence in Indian visual media can be said to respond specifically to the society from which they emerge. It is unclear, though, if and to what extent such depictions contribute to serious discussions of the deeper causes underlying terrorism, or if they have a distorting effect on society by virtue of misrepresenting complex and often sensitive issues (3).

Among these issues is gender-based violence in India, a problem widely discussed in the country and abroad. These debates intensified in the wake of the death of Jyoti Singh in December 2012. A twenty-three-year-old medical student in New Delhi, Singh was beaten, tortured, and gang-raped on a private bus and died eleven days later. The repeated occurrence of such incidents calls for an investigation of the deeper social reasons for misogyny, structural discrimination, oppression, sexual harassment and violence against women and girls. While the problem is often downplayed as being over-represented by ‘detailed and frequent reporting’, critical commentators insist that the wider issue is evidently patriarchy, deeply anchored in traditional family-oriented social structures and typically safeguarded by corrupt institutions, all closely related to an aggressive neoliberal capitalism (Bannerji 2016, 3–7). More and more people are beginning to realise that respecting women's lives and securing their rights is hardly possible without undergoing a deeper process of societal transformation. However, such change is barely at hand, especially considering the cultural and political dominance of the governing far-right Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is known for undermining democratic institutions and processes as well as cementing traditional models of family and gender (Widmalm 2019).