Source: BREAKTHROUGH
In a week dominated by chatter around Netflix’s new release, Darlings, comes the sombre news of yet another woman dying by suicide on August 3 after eight years of marriage and unceasing domestic violence.
“I kept thinking he’ll reform,” Mandeep Kaur says of her husband Ranjodhbeer Singh Sandhu in a video that has gone viral ever since she recorded it in Queens, New York just before dying of suicide. “He keeps getting drunk… has extra-marital affairs… and hits me,” the 30-year-old says in Punjabi.
According to Jaspal Singh, Mandeep’s father, demands for dowry from Ranjodhbeer, a truck driver, and his family began soon after the marriage in 2014. The abuse escalated after the birth of their first daughter. When the violence became intolerable, Mandeep’s family filed a complaint with the New York police. A chastened Sandhu then apologised to his wife and promised to end the abuse.
According to Jaspal Singh, Mandeep’s father, demands for dowry from Ranjodhbeer, a truck driver, and his family began soon after the marriage in 2014. The abuse escalated after the birth of their first daughter. When the violence became intolerable, Mandeep’s family filed a complaint with the New York police. A chastened Sandhu then apologised to his wife and promised to end the abuse.
It only got worse. “My in-laws didn’t do anything to help me…you all ganged up and left me helpless,” says a weeping Mandeep in the video.
The Indian embassy tweeted that it is in touch with the US authorities and the Uttar Pradesh police has registered criminal cases against Ranjodhbeer Singh Sandhu and his parents. According to the Kaur Movement, that helps sexual and domestic abuse victims, the Americans are treating the death as a homicide and not suicide and social services has taken charge of Mandeep’s little girls, aged 4 and 6.
But in a post on Friday, the Kaur Movement said as Mandeep’s next-of-kin Ranjodhbeer had been handed over her body and had conducted her funeral in secret.
Real life v reel life
Source: BBC News and Netflix
Cinematic treatment of domestic abuse does not always have to be grim. Maid, a 10-part series also on Netflix, is the real life story of a young mother who walks out of an abusive relationship. It is affirmative and, at times, funny. When it was released in October 2021, it was the top five most-watched show for weeks.
Darlings too opened to mostly positive reviews and, according to BBC’s Geeta Pandey quoting a statement from Netflix has had “the highest global opening ever for a non-English Indian film”.
But to find the comedy, dark or of any other hue, in Darlings is hard. The first half of the film that shows a volatile husband take umbrage against a multitude of minor faults, from the stone in his rice to the discovery of his wife’s shopping spree, is triggering and traumatic precisely because it is so graphic in its telling.
“Would I hit you if I didn’t love you?” the faux contrite husband asks. Convinced that her husband will change, the wife, Badru rejects the legitimate escape routes that come her way. These include the local police who urges her to register a case so that it can arrest the husband. The alternatives also include the independent life lived by her mother, Shamshu. Shamshu has brought up her daughter single-handed and is now venturing into a home catering business.
Yet, it is the mother who rejects the simple option of a divorce on the grounds that it will stigmatize her daughter.
The second half doesn’t get better with Badru extracting her vengeance. If the first half cuts close to reality, the second (and presumably comedic half) is fantasy. A husband as dominant and vicious as this one tied up and tortured for days in a crowded chawl? I don’t think so.
More to the point, violence for violence instead of taking a legal route sounds like a cop-out. In the end, if justice is served it is not by Badru’s actions but by a twist of fate.
So, what is the message? That women caught in an abusive marriage should remain optimistic and that in the end, everything will be magically resolved on its own? It is offensive and disrespectful to every woman who suffers domestic abuse.
Domestic violence tropes
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Darlings is set in a Mumbai chawl and feeds into several tropes about domestic violence – that it happens within a certain lower middle class economic strata (not true), that it is triggered by alcoholism (that’s not the only reason and nor is every man who drinks an abuser).
Worst of all, with its unrelenting focus on Badru, the film seems to endorse the notion that women are to blame for the violence inflicted on them by their spouses – a meal that’s not up to scratch, disobeying an order, suspicion of an affair. The husband is never to blame, especially if he’s acting under the influence.
“Darlings is an important film because films on real issues are few and far between,” said Sohini Bhattacharya, CEO of Breakthrough, a non-profit that works towards making violence against women and girls unacceptable. “But the onus of leaving an abusive relationship cannot lie only with the survivor.”
The willingness of the police to help Badru flies against the reality of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) findings that just 3% of domestic abuse victims seek help from the police.
In seven states, more than a quarter of the women surveyed by NFHS-5 said they faced violence by a spouse. In Bihar, a ‘dry’ state, 40% of women are victims, and that’s a decline from 43.7% in 2015-16.
In Karnataka, the numbers of married women who reported facing physical or sexual violence from a spouse more than doubled, from 20.6% five years ago to 44.4% in 2019-20.
Nothing funny about domestic violence
Domestic abuse and the patriarchal systems that support it is not funny. Darlings is out of its depth when it veers into ‘dark comedy’ terrain.
This in fact ties in with NFHS findings that a majority of people—more women than men—justify spousal abuse. In Telangana, 83.8% of women surveyed (70.4% of men) said violence from a husband was justified on grounds including disrespecting in-laws, neglecting the house and children and on suspicion of marital fidelity.
In the end, the joke in Darlings is on us – and on the one in three victims of spousal abuse.
India has strict laws against domestic violence. If you are a victim of physical, emotional or sexual abuse from your spouse, you can call:
All India Women’s Helpline: 1091
Emergency Response Support System: 112
Women’s Helpline: 181
NO WORDS
“Indian women are blessed; scriptures like Manusmriti give a very respectable position to women.”
Justice Pratibha M Singh of the Delhi high court set off a storm for praising the laws of Manu that prohibit pigs, dogs, roosters, menstruating women and eunuchs from looking at Brahmins while they eat and insist on women being under the control of her father, husband and son as she progresses in life.
GENDER TRACKER
Indian women athletes brought home nine of the 22 gold medals, including one for Lawn Bowls Women’s Four and one for the mixed team table tennis won at the Commonwealth Games. Women athletes also accounted for seven of India’s 16 silver and 10 out of 23 bronze medals.
BOOKSHELF
Credit : Nikita Gill
With more than a million fans online, Britain’s most followed poet Nikita Gill has a new book out this month. These are the words, says the blurb, is an ‘empowering, feminist and beautifully illustrated poetry collection’ that covers a range of issues from fat shaming to heartbreak—all the things that 35-year-old Gill wishes someone had told her when she was younger.
The book is out on August 18, but you can pre-order it for Rs 667.
REST IN POWER
CREDIT: The Hindu Archives
Once hailed as Asia’s fastest woman, a fierce rival of P.T. Usha in the 1980s and one of the Philippines’ most decorated athletes, Lydia de Vega died of breast cancer on Wednesday. Usha told Sportstar that Lydia was ‘a good friend and a great rival’ against whom she had lost the 100m twice, once in New Delhi in 1982 and once in Seoul in 1986. But after being beaten in New Delhi, Usha beat her in the 200m.
In 2005, well after her retirement, Lydia opted for a life coaching children and people with disabilities in Singapore, The Straits Times said in an obituary
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED
A student hacked into his professor’s private Instagram account. She got sacked
Kolkata’s St Xavier’s university reportedly forced an assistant professor to quit in October 2021 after a parent complained that he had caught his son, her student, going through ‘objectionable’ photographs posted by her on her private instagram account.
The professor who plans to move the Calcutta high court has demanded an apology and monetary compensation from St Xaviers. She said the photographs, including two in which she is wearing a bikini, were uploaded by her in June 2021, two months before she joined the university.
No action has been taken against the student but the father complained that it is “obscene, vulgar and improper… to see his professor dressed in scanty clothes.”
Man who abused, assaulted woman in a viral video, arrested, denied bail
After being on the run for over 48 hours, self-styled politician Shrikant Tyagi was finally arrested on Tuesday after a video showing him abusing and assaulting a woman at a high-rise in Noida went viral. The BJP has distanced itself from Tyagi whose bail application has been denied by a UP court. Prior to his arrest, Tyagi’s supporters had stormed the housing society in a bid to ascertain the woman’s address. Illegal portions of his property were demolished by the state authorities.
Breaking through
Students in government schools in Odisha will now study a gender equity curriculum that has been integrated into their regular social studies syllabus from grades six to 10. The partnership between the state department of school and mass education, non-profit Breakthrough and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South Asia will use interactive classroom discussions to encourage adolescent boys and girls to reflect on culturally embedded gender norms and practices in order to transform gender attitudes and behaviours.
AROUND THE WORLD
In Toronto, a day after announcing her retirement from tennis, 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams lost her first match to Belinda Bencic. Williams who turns 41 next month said in an article in Vogue she wants to ‘evolve’ from the sport to focus attention on her venture capital firm and having a second baby. “If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labour of expanding our family,” she wrote.
In Afghanistan, one year after the Taliban swept back to power on August 15, women continue to be absent from senior government positions, girls remain shut out of high school education and women need to a male relative to chaperone them if they undertake a journey that is more than 78 km from home. Reuters reports on a grim anniversary.
In Singapore, a man found guilty of raping his daughter while his wife was undergoing treatment for cancer has been sentenced to 24 years in jail – and 24 strokes of the cane, reports The Straits Times.
BEFORE I GO
Do listen to this 2019 acapella rendering of the national anthem without any instruments that melds eight harmonious voices.
That’s it for this week. If you have a tip or information on gender-related developments that you would like to share write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com.
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| That’s it for this week. If you have a tip or information on gender-related developments that you would like to share write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com. |