Romance and A Little Rape

By ANITA PRATAP NEW DELHI

A breathless silence falls on the packed New Delhi movie hall that is showing the Hindi film Hum Se Na Takrana (Don't Confront Me). As the predominantly male audience watches transfixed, a scene shows two lusty sons of a rich landlord cornering a pretty, well-endowed maid in their plush bedroom. "Let me go," she implores, but the men's hands move toward her writhing body. The camera heightens the suggestion of what is to come without allowing the scene to become graphic; there is no nudity, but there is plenty of screaming and leering. When the deed is done, the audience lets out a barely audible sigh of relief. Or is it pleasure? For Ashok Rawat, 28, a building contractor, it is the latter. Says he: "Rape is enjoyable because in men's fantasies force is the only way to get women who are otherwise out of reach."

Rawat is one of 15 million Indians who stream into movie theaters every day to enter the fantasy world of the Hindi cinema. The fare usually consists of song, dance, tragedy, comedy and love -- all wrapped up in one film -- and for several years a rape scene has been an all but requisite ingredient. The billboards outside movie houses almost always suggest a rape. Last year the posters for the English-language film Crime Time carried the promise SEE FIRST-TIME UNDERWATER RAPES ON INDIAN SCREEN.

The prevalence of onscreen sexual assault is all the more remarkable because censors in India are generally quite prudish. Lovemaking and even kissing scenes are banned. Yet the censors regard rape as permissible as long as the camera conceals as much as it reveals. Says Vimla Farooqui, a women's activist in New Delhi: "Rape scenes are used for an ugly kind of titillation."

Why is cinematic rape so acceptable and salable? Part of the answer is that during the past decade, middle-class theatergoers have been replaced by a rougher and more assertive audience whose tastes encourage Hindi filmmakers to resort to such exploitation. Another factor, observers believe, has its roots in the fabric of a society in which most marriages are still arranged and unmarried men even today have little access to women, let alone romance or sex. Ranjeet, 44, the popular Hindi movie villain who has enacted more than 350 rape scenes during a 19-year career, explains the phenomenon in terms of sexual deprivation. Says he: "Because people live in a repressive society, they are sex starved. Filmmakers cash in on this."

Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and author of the recently published Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, suggests that rape in movies is rooted in the Indian male's strong bond with his mother in childhood. Rape, Kakar argues, is a way of momentarily subjugating the all-powerful, suffocating mother figure; hence the male delight at seeing a woman in distress.

In the West there is generally greater sympathy for rape victims, at least in enlightened circles, whereas Indian society more automatically assumes that the victim is somehow responsible for what happens to her. The great Indian epics the Mahabharat and the Ramayana have heroines who are nearly raped but are protected from their assailants by the shield of their virtue. In Hindi films as well, traditionally demure heroines are invariably rescued at the last minute from male attackers. But the same is not so for female characters leading more independent lives, who are frequently portrayed as corrupt and immoral. The attitude -- and the social response -- came through clearly in Insaaf Ka Tarazu (Scales of Justice), a Hindi hit. In the film a young fashion model and rape victim is tormented at the trial of her rapist by lawyers and a snickering crowd; they blame her emancipated life-style rather than her assailant for the attack that she endured.

Still, particularly among women's groups, there is growing revulsion at the portrayal of rape in film, a reaction that may find at least faint resonance in official sanctions. Bharatendu Singhal, the recently appointed chairman of the Central Board of Film Certification, has declared that he will force producers to remove much of the titillation from the stylized assaults. Says Singhal: "We will permit the commencement of the assault, but the rest will be left to suggestion. There will be no more scenes of a girl being molested and partially denuded." Filmmakers are lobbying to remove Singhal from his post.

One frequently heard explanation is that cinematic art is merely imitating life. More than 8,000 cases of rape are reported in India every year, but social activists believe this figure represents only a small percentage of the real total. According to India's Ministry of Welfare, half the registered cases of rape involve tribal women and the untouchable, or Harijan, caste; their poverty and lowly status make them especially vulnerable to upper-caste men, such as rich landlords. Says Uma Chakravarti, an activist in New Delhi: "It is the landlord's way of reinforcing the humiliation of the Harijans, of telling them that neither their land nor their women are really theirs." When a 1980 strike in a textile mill in the northern state of Haryana was broken, workers were arrested and their female relatives molested by hoodlums.

Nor does the Indian justice system offer much redress to rape victims. In 1984 a mandatory 10-year sentence for two policemen who raped a minor in their custody was reduced by half because of the "conduct" of the victim: she waited five days before registering a complaint with the police -- a natural hesitation under the circumstances. Last year policemen accused of raping 18 Harijan women in Bihar state were acquitted; the judge felt that the women were so poor that they could have been bribed to file a false complaint.