After the Delhi Rape, Small Victories for Women in India’s Popular Culture

Kevin Frayer/Associated Press Protesters being hit by a police water cannon during a demonstration against the gang rape of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi on Dec. 23, 2012.

There are few better places to advertise products of mass appeal than the back of an auto-rickshaw. In the recent past, we have seen the gainful surface being used to sell, among other things, CDs of the self-help superstar Shiv Khera and books of the popular fiction phenomenon Chetan Bhagat.

Currently in Delhi, rickshaw rears are collectively employed by the Aam Aadmi Party to challenge the Delhi government about the safety of women. To make its point, the party is using posters that show angry protesters clashing with an impatient police in front of the India Gate. It may upset us to see the opportunistic party channel a public revolt it had nothing to do with, but Arvind Kejriwal, the party’s leader, has his eye on elections to Delhi’s assembly, and if earlier it was India Gate that represented the capital, now â€" as endorsed by no lesser authority than Bollywood â€" it’s water cannons at India Gate.

It is true that we needed a more realistic symbol for Delhi, with its well-known divides of power and resistance, than the stately monument. But is it our popular culture’s only contribution to “change” seven months after the horrific gang rape of a girl in Delhi jolted the national consciousness awake?

As everyone agreed in the crime’s wake, popular culture had a lot to account for. Furiously, advertisements, soap operas and popular cinema were scanned for signs of patriarchy and the respective industries were urged to be more responsible in their message. There are a number of ways in which the cultural establishment has since responded â€" consciously or not â€" revealing an enormous lot about both the scope and limits of our mainstream imagination.

In February, Gillette, a brand of shaving products known for its masculine appeal, released an ad that asked men to find the soldier in them â€" not to protect the country but to protect its women, because “when you respect women you respect the nation.” In March, Tata Tea’s socially conscious Jaago Re campaign got Shah Rukh Khan to pledge to run the female actor’s name above his own in film credits, because “auratein mardon se upar honi chahiye.” [“Women should be above men.”]

Also in March, Farhan Akhtar, an actor, director and film producer, kicked off an initiative called Men Against Rape and Discrimination, or M.A.R.D., which not-so-coincidentally is the Urdu word for “man”; the A in its logo resembled an upward-turned mustache as worn by many Rajputs. Through merchandise and concerts and an emotional poem by Javed Akhtar evoking terms like “aadar” (reverence), “izzat” (honor), “samman” (respect) and “suraksha” (protection), M.A.R.D. approached its objective exactly like most other popular interventions for better gender relations, which is by pushing chivalry on men, and not freedom, choice and equality for women.

It is even more ironic that their approach is the same as that of the conventional Bollywood film, where the hero’s masculinity is established through his ability to protect the women around him, and his hopelessness through the failure to do so. Ever since we started to see the male actor as hero, with no small contribution from Mr. Akhtar, the legendary scriptwriter, an Indian man has only been considered a mard if the women close to him could roam free without fear.

Even in a film as recent as “Singham” (2011), the title character’s machismo is revealed through his flattening with bare hands a bunch of goons who dared to bother the girl with him, after which he strides toward her with an inflated chest to return to her the ceremonial dupatta. Since what we need is for women to be able to roam freely, without needing male protection â€" whether in the form of a person or police â€" perhaps it is time to show them as doing so in the movies.

If it’s not easy to expect radical change from television in general, considering it is structured around the idea of routine, it’s nearly unreasonable to demand it of the current Indian programming. And it was without any expectation, or grand purpose, that on June 3 the popular Hindi entertainment channel Zee released “Connected Hum Tum,” a weekly prime-time reality show where six women in Mumbai - a radio host, a dentist who is also belly dancer, a brand manager, an aspiring actress, a corporate trainer and an activist for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights â€" take us, through self-handled mini cameras, inside their uniquely complex lives. Directed by Paromita Vohra, who has earlier made films about public toilets and gender identity, urban feminism and moral policing, “Connected Hum Tum” promised to show us “what being a woman in the year 2013 is all about.”

Preeti Kochar, the dentist-belly dancer, deals with her two conflicting careers on the one hand and troubles with mother-in-law on the other; Sonal Giani, the L.G.B.T. activist, is anxious about the hesitation of her partner, Jaanu, in validating their relationship; Pallavi Barman, the radio jockey, is reluctant to leave her imperfect but professionally fulfilling job to join her husband’s business as a glorified nobody. The show neither represents the majority of Indian women nor their dominant set of concerns, but what it does is present a painstakingly nuanced view of the worlds of its participants. And that’s why it’s important: in revealing how wildly complicated the lives of six randomly chosen women in one city are, it hints at how ignorant we are about the lives of those left out.

Later in June came “Raanjhanaa,” the film that has taken the debate about the links between popular culture and social norms back to its very basic: should the entertainment media really care? The movie is the story, set in Benares, of a man’s obsessive one-sided love for a woman, which wrecks the lives of everyone who gets sucked into it, including both of them. Although an instant hit, it has been criticized for making a hero of a man who, among other objectionable things, stalks the woman through most of the storyline.

Strdel/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Bollywood actor Dhanush at the success party of the film “Raanjhanaa” in Mumbai, Maharashtra, on Wednesday.

“A man who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer ought to be an unlikely hero in this era of anti-rape protests,” wrote Lakshmi Chaudhry in one such assessment on Firstpost. In March, stalking was recognized as a crime at the recommendation of the Justice Verma Committee, set up a week after the gang rape to strengthen laws concerning sexual crimes against women.

Those associated with the film see it very differently. The director, Aanand L. Rai, claimed that in small towns stalking was not considered offensive, but seen as a sign of true love. In an elaborate defense of the film in The Hindu newspaper, Swara Bhaskar, a supporting actor, backed Mr. Rai’s view, insisting that the characters in “Raanjhanaa” behave just as people from its milieu (“largely socially conservative, patriarchal world of small-town India”) are wont to. Ms. Bhaskar also stressed that, contrary to the reading of a section of critics, the lead character’s actions weren’t glorified but shown as flawed, like that of a tragic male protagonist who hurts the very woman he loves. His “naïve innocence” rendered him endearing in her view.

It is a smooth argument, and one could be tempted to believe in the idea of naïve obsession and imagine a large gap between that and actual threat - but the problem is that the movie itself presents no such distinction between the two. Having grown up in small towns and in a culture where love was often expressed through following around its target, it is hard even for me to see something like a man’s threat to slit the wrist of a woman if she dared love someone else as usual small-town business.

It is equally difficult to interpret the male protagonist as flawed after the movie changes course in the second half, and he is shown as having shaken the political establishment in the capital by taking over a party of student revolutionaries fighting for rights of the dispossessed, like the farmers of Bhatta-Parsaul. Before dying a heroic death that makes the viewer blame the girl’s rejection of his love for his fate (“Now who wants to get up again? Who wants to make an effort to love, and have his heart broken?” he thinks aloud after collapsing), he even leads a crowd of protesters at India Gate in the face of a lathi-wielding, water cannon-firing police.

Yes, things have a long way to go.

Snigdha Poonam is Arts Editor at The Caravan. She is on Twitter at@snigdhapoonam