Skip bombast, build solidarities

As a woman, as a writer and as a feminist, I felt like I spent the next whole year inside the feelings of a country roiled by that particular murder. I heard lots of utterly ridiculous bombast about hanging, chemical castration and of course, karate. I spent at least one hypnotic afternoon interviewing a self-defence person who nearly convinced me that that’s all us ladies needed—high-protein diets and some fast moves. I heard older women who were not part of political organisations but definitely inside the politics of savarna joint families, say in despair, “Will this never end?" I heard young women talk about their careful piecing together of fragile solidarity networks. And then the intensity of that grief passed. And with it, any introspection.

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The decade since has been packed wall to wall with extreme public violence of an infinite variety that only some incidents stick out of the brain fog. Against my will, I watched the touchy, tantrum-throwing masculinity of the households I grew up in being extended further to the public space. Papa was always in a useless gussa (anger) and everyone better keep quiet. “What was she wearing?" “Why was she there at night?" Those favourite questions of the public now has dozens of analogues when someone is the victim of an obvious crime. Young Dalit men with moustaches. Any Muslim with a house. Poor Christians without fancy churches. Women who made the mistake of being born in a Karnataka politician’s village. Anyone raped, anyone beaten, anyone crushed to death while forced to sing the national anthem, should gain the public sympathy. But the public’s sympathy is like prasad. It comes in small quantities, you gotta work for it and you don’t always get entry to the temple. The public often concludes that if the bulldozer came to your house, you must deserve it.

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In this situation of sympathy shortage, certainly a live victim (unlike the Kolkata doctor who was assaulted and murdered on 9 August) better be insane with optimism. The American writer James Baldwin once wrote that “the victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat". This is what happened in February 2017 when a Malayalam movie star was assaulted by a group of men when she was travelling from Thrissur to Kochi. Rapidly, a big star Dileep was accused of engineering a gross criminal conspiracy—organising this sexual assault and its taping with the intent of shaming her. It must have been shocking then that the woman instead filed a police complaint and refused to be silent.

Every single thing that the organised Malayalam industry, particularly AMMA (the hilariously named Association of Malayalam Movie Artists) did in the months that followed the complaint was repulsive. When a handful of the complainant’s women colleagues formed the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), they too faced tremendous backlash. In the way that these things worked, what stayed with me was the sight of the stars I had grown up watching, do a skit in 2018 at the televised annual AMMA event. The entire show that year was intended to humiliate the complainant and the WCC. A particular skit called Oru Feminist Veeragatha involved a lot of really bad writing, bad acting, men dressed as uppity women and actor Mohanlal watching and giggling in the front row.

It didn’t need any political determination on my part to never watch a Mohanlal movie again. It did require steely willpower for WCC to push for a probe into the structure of the industry that made Dileep who he was. A three-member panel, headed by Justice K. Hema, a retired Kerala high court judge, conducted the probe and produced a 290-page report. And then the Kerala government sat on it.

The years have rolled on. We had the brief shockwave of MeToo and more revelations about how complaints work. Now finally the Hema Committee report is out, at a time when once more the country is dealing with violent aftershocks. The report, packed with interviews and evidence, condemns the Malayalam film industry for being run like a mafia—greedy, sexist, extractive and exploitative.

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“For years, we have been saying that there is a systemic problem in the industry. Sexual harassment is just one of them," Beena Paul, one of the WCC founding members , told the BBC this week. Siddique, a veteran actor (and in a rare instance of narrative justice, director of that gross old AMMA skit), has resigned from his post as AMMA general secretary after actor Revathy Sampath accused him of sexual assault. Other accused gents such as Maniyanpilla Raju and (actor and MLA) Mukesh are trying on those old lines like “ladies are doing this for financial gain".

As I write this, more women in the industry are going public with their allegations and 17 members of AMMA’s leadership, including president Mohanlal, have resigned. Rather than, you know, be accountable for anything. They have learnt from MeToo that if they sit tight eventually the public will want business as per usual and shift its irritation to the complainant.

As the years pass, my admiration has only increased for people willing to organise, build solidarities, work rather than stupidly say castration-castration. My admiration has grown but my inner minion just wants to burn everything down. Instead, I turn to the always poetic Sara Ahmed who wrote, among other things, the book Complaint! (2021). Ahmed says in one of her koan-like sentences, “That we find each other through complaint is a finding."

Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot To Invent Facebook And Other Stories. She posts @chasingiamb.

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