Rape Culture, Misogyny, and Urban Anxiety in NH10 and Pink

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Feminist Media Studies

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Rape culture, misogyny, and urban anxiety in NH10 and Pink

Tupur Chatterjee

To cite this article: Tupur Chatterjee (2017): Rape culture, misogyny, and urban anxiety in NH10 and Pink, Feminist Media Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2017.1369446 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1369446

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Download by: [University of Washington Libraries] Date: 29 September 2017, At: 01:21 Feminist Media Studies, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1369446

Rape culture, misogyny, and urban anxiety in NH10 and Pink

Tupur Chatterjee

Radio-Television-Film, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY One of the most pervasive aspects of Delhi’s post-liberalization Received 20 March 2017 psychopathology has been everyday violence against women. The Revised 13 August 2017 city’s rape culture was given an exceptionally sharp global focus after Accepted 13 August 2017 the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012. Recent KEYWORDS Hindi cinema has begun to engage with some aspects of the capital’s Delhi; rape culture; misogynist urban ethos. In this paper, I look at how the Delhi subgenre multiplex film; multiplex of the “multiplex film” has engaged with rape culture, misogyny, and viewer; anxiety; Bollywood; urban anxiety through a close textual and discursive analysis of two misogyny; Pink; NH10 recent films—NH10 (Navdeep Singh, 2015) and Pink (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, 2016). Specifically, I identify how the December 16 “trigger event” and Delhi’s notorious misogyny are finding newer modes of representation through the interplay of genre and exhibition space. In what ways do these films position and imagine the “multiplex viewer”? New engagements with the figure of the consuming middle-class woman and the public discourses that surround her sexual safety and navigation of space have taken a central position in understanding the present urban psychosis of the capital. I suggest that these films and the forms of spectatorial identification that they privilege are intricately linked to the gendered spatial politics of the multiplex.

Introduction A significant trend visible in recent Hindi cinema is the rise of the Delhi film—which can be seen as a subgenre of what has been popularly defined as the “multiplex film” since the mid-2000s. The term “multiplex film” at the first instance, emerges out of an understanding that when an upper middle-class Indian audience (economically sound, English-speaking, globalized) watches a film in a luxuriously designed expensive space (such as a mall or a multiplex), they are also more receptive to a more challenging and hatke (different) type of Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 film that is not the melodramatic and unrealistic commercial fare that they have been offered for so many decades. Several of these new “multiplex films” have much smaller budgets than the usual Bollywood film, as well as shorter durations and songless and stylized narratives. These films often privilege deeper explorations of the individual and social psyche of characters in ways that present significant diversions from the generic and popular conventions of Hindi cinema.

Among the 80 or so “multiplex films” in the last decade (2006–2016), around 30 can be classified as Delhi films. Examples of these include Khosla Ka Ghosla (Mr. Khosla’s House, Dibakar Banerjee, 2006), Delhi-6 (Rakesh Omprakash Mehra, 2009), Oye, Lucky, Lucky Oye! (Hey Lucky!, Dibakar Banerjee, 2009), Dev D (Anurag Kashyap, 2009), Love Sex aur Dhoka (Love, Sex and Betrayal, Dibakar Banerjee, 2010), Band Bajaa Baraat (Bands, Horns and Revelry, Maneesh Sharma, 2010), Do Dooni Char (Two Times Four, Habib Faisal, 2010), Delhi Belly (Abhinay Deo, 2011), No One Killed Jessica (Raj Kumar Gupta, 2011), Vicky Donor (Shoojit Sircar, 2012), B.A Pass (Ajay Bahl, 2012), Fukrey (Wastrels, 2013), NH10 (Navdeep Singh, 2015), Titli (Butterfly, Kanu Behl, 2015), Pink (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, 2016), etc. This is entirely new—Delhi’s distinct urban identity had barely existed in popular Hindi cinema before the mid-2000s “multiplex moment,” barring one or two films (such as Chashme Badoor [Sai Paranjape, 1981]). Traditionally, Bombay has dominated representations of the city and its psyches in popular Hindi cinema (see Ranjani Mazumdar 2007). The recent Delhi films are contemporary narratives of the post-globalized landscape of Delhi, sharply commenting on new aspirations for homes, commodities, money, and romance. Often, these desires clash against restless worlds of urban congestion, fear, rumor, violence, panic, and crime. This paper looks at how the Delhi subgenre of the multiplex film has engaged with gender, anxiety, and rape culture through a close textual and discursive analysis of two recent films— NH10 (2015) and Pink (2016). Both these films are about everyday violence against middle-class, urban women in the capital, and have been critical and commercial successes. However, any reading of the cinematic address of these films must be contextualized within both the spatial environment of their exhibition and the contemporary discourses surrounding the consuming middle-class woman. Ravi Sundaram (2007, 31) has argued that Delhi’s psychosis, which is marked by two major events of large-scale, visceral communal violence (Partition, 1947 and the Congress-organized Sikh massacres following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, 1984), presents a unique case of a post-colonial media-satu- rated city where “fear has become implicated in the larger social theater of urbanity.” I extend this argument and delineate an additional layer of the city’s present pathology: rape culture, and the aftershocks of the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012. Initially, the Delhi subgenre of the “multiplex film” did not tackle this fundamental underlying anxiety of urban life in the city. Most of the narratives sought to revise older representations of women on screen, sketching new female characters—economically independent, ambitious, sexually active, etc. Examples of these include films such asBand Bajaa Baraat (Maneesh Sharma, 2012), which draws upon the linguistic flavor of the city to tell the story of an ambitious middle-class girl who wants to become the city’s best wedding planner. Post-2012, however, the Delhi “multiplex film” has started to veer into the anxious realms of everyday Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 gendered violence. This moment has arrived after an initial celebration of the globalized “New Indian Woman” as an empowered, modern-yet-traditional consuming subject. Leela Fernandes has called gender the “central ideological site for the production of a new script which can manage the contradictions of liberalization and mark the boundaries of the future of the globalizing nation” (2001, 157). As several scholars (Leela Fernandes 2001; Purnima Mankekar 2015; Patricia Uberoi 1998) have pointed out, the dominant post-liberalization middle-class anxiety centered on the loss of “Indian cultural values.” Specifically, these concerns were regarding the loosening of sexual and moral codes of behavior that middle-class Indian women were expected to follow. The constant reiteration of “contradiction” and “modern-yet-traditional” FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 3

as the two defining characteristics of the “New Indian Woman” (see also Radhika Parmeswaran 2004 and Rupal Oza 2001) reflects the need to make a sexualized and desiring subject-position a nonthreatening one in the contemporary narratives of heightened consumption-in- duced utopia. While the big-budget Bollywood films from the mid 1990s (also targeting the diaspora) tried to mitigate these anxieties through the trope of the Hindu woman who remains steadfastly moral/sexually chaste in the face of unsettling changes (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge [The Braveheart will take the Bride], Aditya Chopra, 1995), the “multiplex film,” meant for a niche audience at home, began to slowly muddle these conservative representations. These changes in the nature of the popular Hindi film are a part of the beginning of a larger change in the industry with regard to both the representation of women on screen and the place occupied by the female star. In the recent past, several female actors have spoken up against sexism in the industry and the significant gap in wages, and have refused roles in male-dominated narratives where they would have been merely interchangeable props. Several of them now continue to work post-marriage. A-list actresses have begun to produce their films and many directors and production houses have made films with only female leads and no major male actor (unthinkable for the pre-multiplex era in India). These films have succeeded at the box office. Female actors have also begun to take on roles that deviate significantly from earlier multiple variations on the stereotypical sexually chaste “good Indian girl/wife” (see Sumita Chakravarty 2011 and Jyotika Virdi 2003). In The Dirty Picture (2011), for instance, Vidya Balan plays an overweight sex siren from 80s B-grade South Indian films, Silk Smitha. This choice met with enormous positive press for her courage to accept such a role and for displaying a body type that defied norms of conventional beauty. In Margarita with a Straw (Shonali Bose, 2015) Kalki Koechlin is a bisexual young girl with cerebral palsy, coming to terms with her sexuality and revealing it to her mother. A second crucial facet of the multiplex film is the return of the city to the cinematic screen. Post-globalization, Bombay, for instance, began to disappear from its cinema. Instead, it was replaced by a “generic city” filled with 20th-century brand names, which could be present anywhere (Jyotsna Kapur and Manjunath Pendakur 2007). The Bollywood film retreated into what Ranjini Mazumdar (2007) has called “the panoramic interior.” The bright interiors of these “family films” (homes, colleges, malls, coffee shops, and restaurants that the characters occupy) mimicked the experience we have in shopping malls—which can only be made available in South Asia through simulation. The physical spaces of the actual city stood in contrast to the desires for other spaces and other worlds. The Delhi multiplex film often pushes the theater of the urban to intimate and disturbing portraits of India’s uneven urbanization and the things that it cannot conceal or control. The arrival of women in the workforce Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 and the public space in previously unprecedented numbers is central to these representations. These films speak a language that will immediately be recognized by the upper- and middle-class “multiplex audience,” as we will see in the two case studies below. Delhi, however, presents a particularly vehement case of the backlash against the presence of women in the public space, often expressed through brutal sexual violence. Therefore, the Delhi multiplex film’s penchant for the realistic aesthetic often engenders triggers for gendered anxieties and fears, but within the carefully controlled environment of the multiplex. 4 T. CHATTERJEE

The rise of the Delhi film One important reason for the rise of this subgenre is that many of the directors of these films draw upon their own experiences of growing up in the bedlam of globalization and media frenzy in Delhi. Eschewing the designer city of the Bollywood film, these directors privilege close explorations of the city’s various neighborhoods, with considerable attention to the cultural details of speech, mannerisms, and costumes along with careful locating shooting. Dibakar Banerjee1 is one of the most prominent directors and producers associated with the multiplex film, and especially the Delhi subgenre. His first two films, Khosla Ka Ghosla (Mr. Khosla’s House, 2006) and Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye! (Hey Lucky! 2009) both chronicled, in different ways, the lives of Delhi’s middle-class Punjabi residents after liberalization. Banerjee exten- sively drew upon his own experiences of growing up in the city, and said in an interview (Conde Nast Traveller, November 13, 2015) that in Delhi, “absolute feudalism conflicts with absolute consumerism.” The Delhi films also often draw upon real incidents that have happened in the city in the recent past, reflecting the uneasy, sometimes comedic and frenzied responses to globalization. Banerjee’s Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye!, a story about middle-class aspirations, for instance, is based on the life and stories of the notorious thief Devinder Singh, alias Bunty, who startled the police with his peculiar thefts: besides stealing hundreds of consumer goods, such as television sets and VCRs, from people’s homes, he stole two pet dogs, 475 shirts, a framed photograph of a family playing in the snow and one greeting card. Another example is Delhi 6 (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2009), which uses the bizarre case of the monkey man that terrorized the working-class residents of the city in the summer of 2001. Newspapers had initially reported that a black monkey (kala bandar) was attacking people at night. This creature soon morphed into a monkey–human hybrid, stirring up intense media frenzy and several hoax calls to the Delhi police. The authorities finally concluded that this was an illusion, a result of “mass hysteria” and “fear psychosis,” but the lower- and working-class residents of East Delhi insisted that there was a real monkey man (Sundaram 2007). Delhi 6 illustrates the complex interplay of rumor, technology, memory, history, and fear circulating in the city. In foregrounding the realistic aesthetic, the Delhi multiplex film also draws upon the contemporary culture of the reality spectacle. Moinak Biswas (in Jyotsna Kapur 2009, 162) has discussed the “reality effect,” which is essentially an aesthetic of immediacy directly inspired by television’s obsession with the contemporary. Kapur (2009, 162–163) traces the arrival of the genre of the “conspiracy thriller” in neoliberal India and argues that unlike live television, where anything can happen, cinema is a more controlled rendition of the event, Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 giving it “closure.” As she writes, “close readings of cinematic texts can, therefore, offer significant insights into ideology because closure domesticates the event into social relations of power.” While the films I discuss here do not explicitly draw upon a singular urban event in the city, like Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye!, Delhi-6, or No One Killed Jessica, in several ways they allude not only to the gruesome events of December 16 but also draw upon widespread incidences of random rage-related deaths and murders in the capital, as well as molestations, harass- ments, kidnappings, etc. They comment on the larger and acute urban crisis that has spread, which cannot be contained within a singular event. In using this form of the realistic aesthetic—where several small and large events collapse into the creation of a palpable anxious FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 5

landscape on screen—these films intend to display the familiar and disquieting experience of being a woman in the city.

A “trigger event” Delhi is notorious for its rape culture and is informally known as the “rape capital of India” due to the extremely high levels of violence, everyday harassment and sexual assaults on women in the city. On December 16, 2012, a 23-year-old woman, Jyoti Singh, was brutally assaulted, tortured, and gang raped by six men when she mistakenly got on a private bus in New Delhi. She boarded the bus after having watched a film at the upmarket Select City Walk mall in the posh South Delhi neighborhood of Saket. She succumbed to her injuries 11 days later, with doctors reporting that an iron rod was used for the assault. This horrific incident led to unprecedented and large-scale public protests about the unsafe public environment of the country and the need for more stringent laws for dealing with rape and gendered violence. The English-language press played a major role in shaping the discourse on rape and women’s safety following the December 16 incident. However, much of the coverage was sensationalist, supporting the public outcry for a quick solution—death pen- alty to the accused rapists—without pausing to interrogate the deeper social, cultural, and economic causes that led to continued and increasing violence against women. Joanna Jolly from the Harvard Kennedy School published a report in 2016 on the role of the press in the aftermath of the December 16 gang rape and murder. According to this report, rape cases in India were usually restricted to 300 words, and not carried on the front page. When news of this incident first reached the Times of India, three things struck the editor: “the girl was a student, she had been to an upmarket mall, and she had been watching an English-language film, The Life of Pi. He told the crime reporter to write 500 words for a page 1 lead” (Joanna Jolly 2016). This incident was considered a major “trigger event” in the discourse around rape in the country, and especially Delhi, because “the victim was perceived to be from the right class, she was perceived to have been blameless for the crime, and she was raped by strangers” (Jolly 2016). In other words, the incident in many ways fed into the deepest fears of middle-class Indian society—sexual violation of their own women by working-class migrant males. It must be noted that incidents of sexual/domestic violence and child abuse among middle and upper classes perpetrated by family members or others known to the victim are largely unreported. The same applies to the rapes of rural, lower-class, and lower-caste women. In fact, over 90% of lower-caste women are most vulnerable to sexual violence in India. Despite several horrific cases of their rape and assault being reported over the years, neither the press nor the public has given much attention to the issue. Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 The Kennedy School report states that, initially, the English-language press considered Jyoti Singh to be “PLU” (people like us)—i.e., from an upper-class, upper-caste background similar to that of employees at these newspapers and the middle classes who read them. PLU also means that the person has a social life, goes out, and is employed. However, Jyoti Singh was not PLU. She came from a lower-middle-class background, and her father was a laborer at Delhi airport. It was reported that she was a medical student, which, coupled with her presence in an upmarket mall, led to the confusion about her status—Jyoti was very much “PLT” (people like them). According to Manoj Mitra from Times of India (in Jolly 2016), “She was actually from the PLT (‘people like them’) side. But people didn’t realize that because she happened to come out of a mall in South Delhi which was frequented by middle-class 6 T. CHATTERJEE

people.” As noted above, women who are raped and who belong to the PLT category—non- urban, non-English-speaking, lower-class, lower-caste, older, etc.—rarely find space in the press. In the case of Jyoti Singh, by the time the newspapers had managed to clear the confusion regarding her social and economic status, the story had taken on an independent life. The horrific December 16 gang rape was a watershed moment in acknowledging the many violent reactions to women’s arrival and mobility in public spaces in the city. It also pointed to the tendencies towards selective public outcries—dependent on whom the victim is perceived to be. It gives us crucial insights into understanding why the sexual safety of middle-class women has become so prominent in the contemporary moment. What registers of this “trigger event” do we find in the Delhi multiplex film? How does the spatial politics of the multiplex help absorb the shock of these anxious triggers?

NH10: the new psychopathology of the rural–urban divide NH10 is a recent film that belongs broadly to the “road-trip-gone-wrong” genre popular in American cinema, but offers a stark, destructive portrait of clashes between the designed global city and what lies just outside it. It taps into one of the most pervasive fears of being a woman in Delhi: the terror and anxiety of navigating the city alone at night. Anuksha Sharma, the female protagonist of the film, is also its producer. NH10 effectively used the advanced multi-channel sound technologies of the multiplex to make audiences feel a palpable sense of suffocating and paralyzing fear: the suburban city experienced through glass—high-rise apartments, offices, malls, and car windows—unknown figures trailing you on the streets, dense smog, hushed whispers, screeching tires, shattering glasses, unheard pleas for help, and the sound of a heavy iron rod scraping against gravel. NH10 is named after National Highway 10—a 405 km road running from Delhi to Punjab and crossing the state of Haryana. The film opens with shots of Gurgaon, 32 km Southwest of Delhi—part of the National Capital Territory. It is part of the state of Haryana, which is infamous for all kinds of crimes against women, especially female infanticide and honor killings2, leading to the state having one of the lowest sex ratios in the country. Gurgaon, however, is the IT hub of Delhi, and in the last two decades over 250 Fortune 500 companies have set up their India headquarters here. It is dotted with high-rise apartments, fancy condominiums, several malls and shopping centers, and a host of fine-dining restaurants (see also Anthony King 2004). This lies in sharp contrast to the predominantly agrarian state of Haryana—with rampant electricity and water shortages. Gurgaon is a template for India’s jagged urbanization, with crime rates—rapes, robberies, assaults, etc.—on the rise. In NH10’s Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 establishing shots we see Gurgaon at night, through the windows of a car, and hear a couple casually arguing about having to go to a work party (Figure 1). We are then introduced to Meera (Anuksha Sharma) and Arjun (Neil Bhoopalam), an upper-class, corporate couple who live and work in Gurgaon (Figure 2). The plot of the film centers around a weekend trip the couple decides to take and things that go wrong on this journey. Following the classic tropes of the American slasher and rural/urban horror films (NH10 is very similar to Eden Lake), the sheltered urban couple encounters a gang of violent and ruthless men from the village, leading to a gruesome clash of worlds. Despite borrowing from the American slasher genre, NH10 contextualizes its plot within the contemporary realities of the Delhi/Gurgaon–Haryana divide. It incorporates within its narrative the real-life honor killing case of Manoj and Babli—a FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 7

Figure 1. Establishing shots of NH10, Gurgaon at night.

Figure 2. The cityscape through Meera and Arjun’s car. Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 young couple who married out of choice, but were brutally murdered by the extra-judicial caste-based Khap Panchayat of their village. In NH10, Meera and Arjun find themselves wit- nessing this honor killing and then entrapped in a space where the world they come from (which lies only a few kilometers away) may as well be fantastical. Arjun is grievously injured early on in the film, and so the precious Gurgaon girl Meera emerges as the classic “final girl” and ultimately brings the story to its violent resolution. The tension between the city and the village has been a narrative trope of several national cinemas. In Hollywood, for instance, genres such as the slasher (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper, 1974) and the rape-revenge drama (I Spit on Your Grave, Steven. R. Monroe, 1977) have been particularly associated with the psychology of the rural–urban divide. Carol 8 T. CHATTERJEE

J. Clover (1992) has argued that these films, in which the woman takes revenge on rapists/ perpetrators of horror, are allegories for the city’s revenge on the country. Accordingly to Clover (121), it is the group dynamics of the male sport that lead them to acts they may not be capable of singularly—emphasizing that the “dynamic of the male group is larger than the sum of its parts.” We see this group dynamic of men echoed powerfully in both Pink and NH10. They both also foreground another characteristic trait of the rape-revenge genre: “patriarchy run amok” (Clover 1992). While the city–country divide has long been prevalent in the narratives of Hindi Cinema (classically caught between a Gandhian celebration of the village and the Nehruvian dream of industrial modernity), use of the identifiable American slasher genre to depict the contemporary tensions between the city and its suburbs is entirely new. This is not coincidental: Gurgaon itself is modeled on metroplexes such as Dallas/Forth Worth, dotted with the most visible signs of the globalized corporate work culture with a distinctly American ethos: chrome and steel buildings, glass, high-rises, chain restaurants, caffeine-addicted workaholics, etc. The protagonist couple in NH10, Meera and Arjun, move from one closed space to another, and before the horror on the highway unfolds we only see them in a car, an elevator, their bedroom, and a colleague’s party in an upscale apartment. It is clear that they are a nuclear couple entirely unused to the public space or the codes of social life that govern other parts of the country. In an early scene in the film, we see Meera and Arjun at a party. Meera is interrupted with a late call from her office—she has to leave the party and head back to work. Her husband Arjun stays on, while she gets into their car and drives through the deserted streets of Gurgaon. It is winter; there is dense fog. She notices two men on a bike following her, and soon they begin to obstruct her way. They stop the car and smash her windows—Meera drives away and manages a close escape (Figure 3). Next, we see Meera and Arjun at the police station, reporting the incident. The officer in charge asks Arjun why “he lets her travel alone at night.” He recommends they apply for a gun license for her safety and lets them go with a comment on the state of affairs, “this city is a growing child, sooner or later, it’s going to jump.” The smashing of Meera’s car window early on in the film is a symbol of one space invading another—a metaphor for the violence that is about to ensue. Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017

Figure 3. Meera is attacked; a heavy rod smashes her car window. FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 9

In part as an attempt to make up for his absence on the fateful night when Meera is attacked, Arjun suggests a weekend getaway. When crossing the Delhi–Haryana tollbooth on the highway, the toll keeper tells them that one of his colleagues was recently killed. Four men in a Pajero shot him when he asked them for the toll fare. Here, NH10 draws upon the realistic aesthetic by bringing in references to what has been called rage-related “acts of random violence” in Delhi. This is a bizarre and dangerous phenomenon—in the last two decades, the city has witnessed several incidents of people beaten, shot, or killed over minor scuffles on the road or at home. In 2011, four men killed a 17-year-old boy because he did not give them a screwdriver. In Khan Market, one of the city’s wealthiest areas, an airline pilot ran over a restaurant manager when their vehicles grazed each other.3 A man killed his friend for not giving him a cigarette; a call-center worker was shot for spilling someone’s plate of food. In a very well-known case, a model, Jessica Lal was shot in a bar where she was working as a celebrity bartender. Manu Sharma, the son of a high profile politician shot her for refusing him a drink after the bar had closed (No One Killed Jessica was based on this incident). Urban alienation, frustration, and quick accumulation of wealth have often been cited as reasons for these unfathomable crimes. According to eminent sociologist Ashish Nandy, “there is something increasingly desperate in people” (Mark Magnier 2011). On their trip, Meera and Arjun stop at a roadside eatery, and Arjun gets into a scuffle with a group of men violently dragging a young couple into a car. In a displaced act of bravado, he decides to follow this car and “teach the idiot villagers a lesson,” possibly by scaring them with his newly acquired gun. This decision proves fatal for him. Meera and Arjun witness the brutal honor killing of the young couple, Pinky and Mukesh. Pinky is force-fed poison and then shot, while Mukesh is repeatedly stabbed with a rod. They are then dumped into a makeshift grave. By this time, the group of men (Pinky’s brother Satbir, her cousins and uncle) have also found Arjun and Meera spying on them and captured the two. The rest of the film traces Meera’s harrowing journey through the night trying to find a way out of this horror for the both of them (Arjun is fatally injured and eventually dies). In a particularly unnerving scene in the film, Meera manages to locate a lone police station, but the officer refuses to help her the moment he hears about the murder she has witnessed. He tells her that the police do not function in a vacuum and are part of the society in Haryana. He asks her about her caste, but Meera has no idea what her caste is. Surprised that she can function in society without even knowing her caste, the officer informs her that any 12-year-old in these villages will know all the details of their caste—“jaat, gotra, patri.” He makes her well aware that she belongs to an entirely different world—and delivers one of the most candid dialogues in the film, “Gurgaon mein jahan aakri mall khatam hota hai, wahan aapki democracy aur constitution bhi khatam ho jata hai” (“Democracy and constitution end with the last mall in Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 Gurgaon”). He then insinuates that Mukesh and Pinky should not have gone against their caste laws. Meera realizes that the police and the state are complicit in the murders and stabs the officer in the eye with a pen and escapes. In the final scenes of the film, Meera finds herself at the house of the murdered Pinky (who happens to be the daughter of the village matriarch). By now, Arjun has succumbed to his injuries. Meera becomes ruthless and una- fraid, actively chasing the gang that has been chasing them throughout the film (Figure 4). She crushes a couple of them with their own car and bludgeons one to death with an iron rod. As the sun comes up, Meera walks alone on the deserted village-streets, dragging the screeching rod along the pavement (Figure 5). 10 T. CHATTERJEE

Figure 4. Meera walks the streets of the village with an iron rod. Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017

Figure 5. Meera smokes a cigarette after crushing two of the gang members with the jeep.

Despite portraying an awry world where the woman must seek retribution herself, NH10 breaks with the dominant ideology of the earlier “avenging woman” films. In the 1980s, a spate of such films emerged in popular Hindi cinema. This was a response to women’s move- ments and protests over violence and several publicized rapes that occurred in the country at that time. In most of these films, the woman-as-protagonist is raped, and then goes on to seek revenge and retribution. There is some debate among scholars about whether this FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 11

figure (in films such as Insaaf ka Tazaru, Khoon Bhari Mang, Parighat, Sherni, Kali Ganga, etc.) offered anything new or resistive from earlier representations of women, because, as Jyotika Virdi rightly points out, “when women are afforded centrality, they suffer: their sacrifice, restraint, forbearance, chastity, and stoicism strengthen and ennoble them in the face of hardship” (2003, 122). Virdi posits that the main difference between these “women-centric” films from their earlier counterparts, such as Mother India, is that in those films the woman’s fury helps in cementing patriarchal ideologies, whereas in revenge narratives, women are agents acting in the name of womankind. Second, women took to retribution themselves, instead of fathers, brothers, or boyfriends. Lalitha Gopalan (1997, 51–52) argues the state is a major factor in reading these films because before the revenge aspect comes in, the rape can be seen as a substitute for sex, relentlessly eroticizing it. She suggests that because female bodies in Indian cinema have been used as a stand-in for sex and scopophilic pleasure, rape is never neatly cordoned off from this ideology. Therefore, even the avenging woman genre is ultimately a masculine creation because, despite giving the woman center stage, she must assert her power in a violent and masculine manner, while keeping the authority of the state intact in the end. Gopalan writes: Faced with an orderless universe, the avenging woman narrative proceeds on a transgressive vigilante path, incites masculine anxiety about the phallic female, and opens the representational circuit for women on the Indian screen, but this unfettered power is undercut by finally reeling in the authority of the State and revealing the avenging woman’s own overwhelming invest- ment in the restoration of the social imaginary. Casting women as embodying and sustaining tradition recycles an old stereotype in Indian films; however, the forced closure in this genre only provisionally irons out the anxieties between patriarchy and the state. Despite having a similar ethos, NH10 breaks with the earlier ideologies of the avenging woman film in several important ways. As a multiplex film, NH10 privileges explorations of spatial tensions between categories such as “civilized,” “savage,” “urban,” and “rural,” which was not a significant aspect of the prior avenging woman narrative. First, Meera is unable to reign in the authority of the state or restore an acceptable social imaginary in the final moments of the film (as was the custom with the “avenging woman” narrative of the 1980s), because it is evident that the state in the form of the police is complicit—and a parallel system of filial justice operates outside it. The tension between patriarchy and the state is left unresolved and the “phallic female” does not find restitution within the moral world of state-judiciary. The state approached midway through the film is quickly dispensed with (a stab in the eye with a pen) and all but disappears in the end. In an interesting twist of events, we find out that the murder of Pinky was ordered by her own mother—the village matri-

Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 arch—Ammaji. This figure appears at the very end of the narrative, as throughout the audience is led to believe that it is the family’s men who are the sole perpetrators of the murder. Second, besides the explicit misogyny and violence of the honor killers, who belong to a lower class, the film comments on the deep underlying discrimination and sexism even in the corporate offices of “modern” India. Further, the “phallic female” is no longer a figure that emerges under duress/rape but has begun to assert herself in everyday spaces. As we see in the initial scenes of the film, despite making a successful presentation, Meera is chided by a male colleague for being favored by her boss for being a woman. Soon after, unknown men attack her on the road, but the policeman tells her that she invites danger by traveling alone at night. Twice in the film (once at the roadside eatery and once in the tunnel where 12 T. CHATTERJEE

Arjun is hiding/murdered), Meera spots abusive messages about women written on the walls. After murdering Arjun, the message that the gang of honor killers leaves for Meera (written in Arjun’s blood) is “Bloody Whore.” Meera is not raped in the film (though she is brutally beaten at one point), and her final acts of resolution do not seem to follow a desire to regain the lost “honor” of the brutalized female body/family. The lines between Meera’s own trials and those of the lower-class murdered girl Pinky have blurred by now. Third, the audience that the Delhi genre of the multiplex film is addressing is entirely different from the spectatorial imagination of the avenging woman films from the 1980s. The 1980s saw a retreat of the middle classes from the public spaces of the cinema halls into the new private worlds of the VCRs and color televisions. As scholars such as Virdi and Gopalan have already pointed out, the rape scene was often used as a stand in for sex and titillation. The rape scene—and, for that matter, most scenes of violence against women— entirely disappeared from the post-1990s “clean” family film that consciously tried to eschew the “gaudy” production aesthetics of the 1980s. The sex/sexual titillation slot was filled by a few new trends: the heroine began to dance in a sexually aggressive manner across exotic landscapes in fashionable clothing (Mazumdar 2007), and the “item number” appeared, where a female (and sometimes male) actor is displayed in an erotic/highly sexualized manner in a song with “bold” lyrics (collapsing the earlier distinctions between the heroine and the vamp). Stringent codes around kissing and scenes of physical intimacy have also slowly loosened—as a result of this, the rape scene as titillation became unnecessary. The multiplex film is slowly bringing violence against women, sexual and otherwise, back to the screen in noncaricaturist ways. This removal of clichés and titillation from scenes of brutal violence makes them much darker that what we have witnessed so far; for instance, in another recent multiplex film, Udta Punjab (Punjab is Flying High, Abhishek Chaubey, 2015), the heroine (Alia Bhatt)—a lower-class migrant girl—is repeatedly gang raped and drugged by a group of men who have kidnapped her. The audience does not see any graphic rape scenes—the screen repeatedly fades/cuts to something else when the ferocious violence is about to ensue, leaving the imagination to do its disquieting work. The actual rape scene—which was crucial to the avenging woman narrative—is now situated both in and beyond the screen. Given the realistic aesthetic of these films, the audience is already well aware— through press, television, Web, etc.—of the gory details of several rapes. These new modes of addressing the spectator alter the meanings of not only the avenging woman narrative in Indian cinema, but also, crucially, the gendered relationship between the city and the village. In this respect, NH10’s approach towards violence against women across the class divide is novel. A major distinction between NH10 and Pink is that the latter restores the authority of the state in the final resolution of the plot, through the negotiating capacities Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 of the nation’s aging patriarch, Amitabh Bachchan. As we will see next, despite this, Pink reworks the courtroom drama and presents significant deviations from the earlier state– patriarchy nexus.

Pink: privilege and rape culture in the city Pink (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, 2016) is one of the most provocative recent films within the Delhi subgenre of the multiplex film. This film is based on a violent incident that occurs between two groups of friends. The first half of the film unfolds slowly, and the details we gather about the fateful night are as follows: A group of young women and men were FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 13

together at a rock show, after which they all went for drinks in a hotel room. One of the women, Meenal (Tapsee Pannu), swung a beer bottle at one of the boys—Rajveer (Angad Bedi), after which the three girls fled the hotel. Post this incident, we see the three female protagonists, Meenal, Falak (Kriti Kulhari), and Andrea (Andrea Tariang)—young working women and roommates in a Delhi suburb—harassed and shamed by the boys with whom the altercation happened. The girls know the boys (Dumpy, Vishwa, and Rajveer)—Rajveer is also the nephew of a well-connected politician in the city. Vishwa and Meenal have known each other since high school, and are the common connection between the groups. A fourth member of the boy’s gang, Ankit Malhotra (Vijay Verma), who was not even present at the rock show, is especially vindictive towards the girls for daring to hurt his friend Rajveer. The rest of the film is a courtroom drama: Rajveer and his friends accuse Meenal and her friends of attempted murder and prostitution. The girls, in turn, counter-accuse the men of several forms of harassment, attempt to rape, stalking, threats, and one particularly chilling incident where Meenal is kidnapped and molested in a car while it moves around the city. The desperate young women find help in their aging neighbor—retired lawyer Deepak Sehgal (Amitabh Bachchan)—who volunteers to fight the case on their behalf. Pink offers an uncomfortable look at how these women are slowly broken down through character assassinations and slut shaming in court. Several personal details of the women’s lives are exposed in the process: their families, financial histories, regional affiliations, previous sexual relationships, etc. Halfway through the film, the courtroom debates shift from an investiga- tion into whether the girls are prostitutes to a matter of consent after one of them (Falak) breaks down and admits that they did take money from the boys, shocking everyone in court. Though this turns out to be false, it marks a key moment in the film—the debate changes from “what if” the girls are prostitutes to “so what if” they are—ultimately, Meenal had refused Rajveer’s overtures, irrespective of whether she asked for money. The film ends with a powerful closing dialogue from Deepak Sehgal: No is not just a word but also a complete sentence unto itself. It does not need an explanation. The person saying it could be somebody known to you, your friend, your girlfriend, sex worker or it may be your own wife. No means no and someone says no, you stop. Pink paints an especially dark and realistic portrait of Delhi. Most of the actors in the film, except the two lawyers, played by Piyush Mishra and Amitabh Bachchan, are relatively unknown. The city is seen as an anxious and dangerous space for women, who are always looking over their shoulders. Meenal’s abduction and sexual harassment in a moving car is one of the most terrifyingly recognizable scenes in the film—as Delhi is infamous for women being dragged into passing cars. Despite the filmmakers denying that the December 16

Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 incident influenced Pink, we do see several traces of the misogynist views expressed in the documentary India’s Daughter (2015) by both Jyoti Singh’s rapist and his defense lawyers. As repeatedly expressed in the documentary, the very fact that women are out in the public space is considered reason enough for them to be violated, and Pink is a provocative portrayal of this. According to A.P. Singh, the defense lawyer interviewed in India’s Daughter, If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight. In Pink, the character of Rajveer also makes a distinction between the “decent” women of the house and the “prostituting” women in public. He says that his mother and sister do not 14 T. CHATTERJEE

go to parties; they only go to family gatherings. He also insists that his sister does not drink. When Sehgal shows him a photograph of his sister drinking at a party, Rajveer loses his temper and makes the comment that ultimately costs him the case: “the girls got what they deserved.” However, Pink makes an important intervention in the discourse around rape culture and the one that is specific to Delhi. Moving away from the tendency to frame uned- ucated, lower-income migrant males as the primary threat to the sexual safety of middle-class women, Pink comments on the more prevalent trends of rape and sexual violence in society: intraclass and often perpetrated by men known to women. Rajveer is shown to be an upper- class man, from a wealthy family, and with an MBA from London. He and Meenal not only have a common friend but also inhabit the same spaces. His views on women, as presented in this film, are shockingly similar to those expressed with extreme nonchalance by the perpetrators of the December 16 rape and murder. Despite being a commercial and critical success, most viewers felt that Pink ended on a “wish-fulfilling” note, well aware of the difficult and socially embarrassing process of reporting and fighting court cases that deal with rape in India, especially if the criminal belongs to an upper-class, upper-caste, political family. As a young master’s student in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University wrote after watching the film (Reina Gattuso, The Ladies Finger, September 24, 2016), Of course, the film is a fantasy. In the actual Indian legal system, one can hardly imagine an old feminist male lawyer patiently and emotionally explaining slut shaming to an engrossed courtroom and receptive judge. One can hardly imagine the misogynist rich boy going to jail; the independent bourgeoisie girls getting off scot-free… Unlike NH10, Pink chooses to uphold the state as a just dispenser of justice. The contextual setting and genres that the two films evoke allow for this difference in approach. NH10 unfolds largely in the course of one night in the desolate, dangerous lands of Haryana; it is meant to show a nihilistic breakdown of the urban machinery of social/state order. Pink is set over a period of a few months in Delhi and uses everyday gendered violence and harassment in the city itself as narrative fulcrum. While NH10 is a slasher/horror, Pink is a courtroom drama; both eschew the classic melodramatic mode in Hindi cinema. Particular attention is paid to dialogue, written in more colloquial tones. Long monologues about the moral space of women, family, nation, etc. are absent. Both the films are shot on location; the audience is meant to navigate the tense streets of Delhi and the maze of small villages in Haryana along with the characters. Elaborate sets, costumes, houses, and song-and-dance routines, as well as the presence of the parents and joint families of the protagonists (all of which were important elements of the melodramatic mode) are dispensed with. Even the poetic Urdu of the classic courtroom drama in Hindi cinema, where cases were argued using Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 dramatic words like adaalat (court), muqadama (case), mujrim (accused), kanoon (law), haazir (appeared), ba-izzat bari (acquitted with honor), and quaidi (the arrested), is replaced with a more colloquial mix of English-Hindi. We hear words like consent and marital rape. In Pink, the space of the courtroom itself transforms from an expansive, elaborate colonial set where the patriarchal state delivers its justice to a cramped, overwrought, and disorganized room where people, police, and lawyers all jostle for breathing space. Like No One Killed Jessica, Pink attempts to show the nexus between the powerful political elite, the corrupt police, and the buying/bribing of witnesses. Yet, by casting superstar Amitabh Bachchan (who chan- nels both the angry young man and globalized Bollywood “father” figure) as the girls’ defense lawyer—ultimately instrumental in bringing them justice—the film uploads the power of FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 15

the state while underscoring the importance of male allies. Pink is also a powerful comment on the relationship between the state and the single woman in the city; the female protagonists of the film are all unmarried and do not have stable male partners, which adds a layer of societal and legal scrutiny and discrimination against these women. The audience is not witness to the actual events that transpired between Rajveer and his gang and Meenal and friends, until the very end when the credits roll and we see a flashback—marking another mode of suspension of the necessity of the actual rape scene. What is the relationship between these films and the multiplex viewer? As mentioned above, the multiplex seeks to eliminate all outside “dirt,” “disorder,” and potential class mis- cegenation to create a “safe” and sanitized environment for film viewing. All psychogeo- graphic uneasiness is transferred to the space/site of the screen—the multiplex film. As Jyotsna Kapur (2009, 156) states: “it is the world that has been shut outside the mall that reappears on the multiplex screen as a thrill for those who live as tourists in their home cities.” The multiplex creates a gendered environment that privileges domestic and familiar comfort for middle- and upper-middle-class viewers. In literature and art, the home has always been the primary site for haunting, doubling, and dismembering, while the modern city, with its labyrinthine spaces, has been the predominant site for modern anxiety. Freud’s 1919 essay shows that the origins of the uncanny, or the unheimlich, lies in the domestic environment or the heimlich, thus making it forceful in interpreting relationships between psyche and dwelling, body and the home, the individual and the metropolis (in Anthony Vidler 1992, x). The uncanny often refers to the domestication of terror—the “fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream” (Vidler 1992, 7). The uncanny was thus, in its first incarnation, a bourgeoisie fear, best experienced within the material security of the interior, where the pleasures evoked by terrors were kept under control. In the postcolonial context, Homi Bhabha (1992, 141) has discussed the “unhomely” as its relationship to space: In a feverish stillness, the intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting. In the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible. Within this framework, if we read the multiplex as a site that seeks to project itself as an extension of the “home theater,” then it becomes “unhomely” by making another disorienting world full of hidden psychic histories visible through the multiplex film, but within carefully constructed interiors. Lalitha Gopalan (2002) argues that Indian cinema’s unique generic conventions—or “interruptions”—are attuned to viewing pleasures by being able to read Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 audience desires. Similarly, I suggest that the “multiplex film” can read their audience desires for safe anxiety-tourism. The multiplex creates an environment that invites the audience to partake of the multiplex film of worlds both familiar and unfamiliar to them. In a nonthreatening environment, surrounded by others of the same socioeconomic class and under the garbs of attending a spectacular “moviecation” replete with new technological and gastro- nomic delights, the “multiplex viewer” can mirror their subjectivity back to themselves. The multiplex takes the audience into a space where the film can address the most complex or uncanny aspects of urban traumas and at the same time negate the need to make this experience “public” when it can so easily be appropriated in “private.” 16 T. CHATTERJEE

In conclusion, this paper looks at the new genre of the Delhi multiplex film and its relationship to gender, especially in how it revises the earlier melodramatic narrative tropes of the avenging woman and the courtroom drama to address a new kind of spectator—the multiplex viewer. The everyday violence against women and misogyny of the city has become especially prominent onscreen, and it is now being stripped of caricature and cliché. The “multiplex audience” that these films address are familiar with the several real-life incidents that these narratives draw upon—Hindi cinema’s contemporary realistic aesthetic is now reading middle-class audience desires by offering them what is already disturbingly familiar. These films are made palatable to an upper- and middle-class audience through several visible tropes of techno-architectural “security” and the cultures of light space at the mall and the multiplex. Ultimately, the multiplex film and the spatial politics of the multiplex must be read as two sides of the same coin, with narratives of pleasures and anxieties satu- rating both spaces. The dark spaces of the film are fundamentally dependent on the light spaces of their exhibition. These offer new regimes of pleasurable anxieties surrounding the cinematic event in India—marking significant departures from earlier cultures of the single-screen cinemas, where unpredictability and excess could not be safely controlled.

Notes 1. Besides Delhi films, Banerjee has directed two landmark multiplex films:LSD (Love, Sex aur Dhoka)—three intersecting stories about honor killings, voyeurism, and exploitation shot with handheld cameras and shown through CCTV footage; and Shanghai, a dark film about India’s march towards globalization. 2. Honor killings in India usually refer to the murder of women or couples by family members for marrying or engaging in romantic liaisons outside their social norms and code. It is usually associated with intercaste marriage. 3. These incidences were reported in an article in the LA Times on January 13, 2011. https://articles. latimes.com/2011/jan/13/world/la-fg-india-rage-20110113.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor Tupur Chatterjee is a PhD candidate at the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin. She works on film and architecture, gender, and visual culture in the global south. Her work has been published in Synoptique and Porn Studies. Email: [email protected] Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017

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