The futility of myth making

We coined names for the 23-year-old who was brutally raped in December – and who eventually died – bestowed awards on her posthumously, and created around her personality a veritable halo, perhaps hoping and believing the myths around her would help stamp out the menace of rape in our society. The futility of myth-making was revealed to us, rather tragically, within days of a TV news channel honouring the 23-year-old with the ‘Daughter of India’ award: a five-year-old was sexually assaulted, and Delhi smouldered all over again. (Since then, a rash of rape cases in which the children are victims have broken out.)

Yet what distinguished the protests in April from the ones in December was the relative absence of middle class citizens from the streets of Delhi, other than those who belong to political outfits. The silence of the middle class this time round can be understood by examining the process through which we, particularly those in media, created myths around the 23-year-old.  Revealed to us will then be our fears and anxieties, perhaps hypocrisy too, even though the December protests yielded some concrete gains, not least the tightening of anti-rape laws.

In fact, inherent to myths are falsehoods which deter us from comprehending, and tackling, grim social reality. For instance, Daughter of India is an extremely problematic coinage. No doubt, it symbolically speaks of the TV channel’s and, through it, Mother India’s acceptance of the 23-year-old, in sharp contrast to the dominant social trait of blaming and shunning a rape victim. But what makes the title problematic is her death, for it robs the award of its intended meaning and message.

In feting her posthumously, we wish to relive those days during which an ordinarily insensitive, indifferent Delhi was galvanized into action. We need to keep this memory alive as the city slipped into its old ways, impassively reading in papers or watching on TV channels stories of gruesome rape in the months following the winter of discontent. For some of us, the memory of protests silences the murmur of reproach, that there was indeed a time we had acted against a reprehensible act. For many, it is a promise that collective action could goad the state to counter the phenomenon of rape. Irrespective of the reasons, in order to keep our memory alive – and therefore, of the 23-year-old as well – we took to spinning myths around her.

The myth-making began as soon as it was reported she was fighting for her life in hospital. The middle class was outraged, at least partially, because she had been assaulted in the urban space it dominates. She was on an evening out, having seen a film in a multiplex in a mall, and hopped on a bus to return home. We found it frightening because our children often frequent this urban space and indulge in activities similar to what the 23-year-old undertook on that December evening. Our fear, and the anxiety it spawned, triggered emotions in us which the media – itself dominated by the middle class - expressed but, at the same time, also exploited for their circulation wars and higher TRP ratings.

To achieve this, she needed to be personalized, a gargantuan task considering that media norms debar the naming of a rape victim. A veritable competition among media houses ensued over giving a fictional name to her, even as she lay fighting for her life in the hospital: Delhi Braveheart, Nirbhaya (Fearless), Damini (Lightining), Amanat (Treasure)… the list simply ballooned. A fictional name, as in exceptional novels, connotes a meaning, which needed to be further justified through myths based on a gross exaggeration of measures the 23-year-old took in fighting off the assailants.

No doubt, she put on a fight, and brave she did appear to us. Often, though, such a courageous response is instinctive to most humans encountering a frightening, dreadful situation. We tend to flee away from assailants who outnumber or outmuscle us. But the 23-year-old didn’t have that option, trapped as she was in a moving bus. Perhaps reflexively then, she resisted, an action which ought to seem reasonable to anyone who has had the misfortune of being caught in a scuffle involving more powerful opponent or opponents. In her case, however, we in the media unambiguously interpreted it as a conscious decision arising from her courage.

Overblown were stories about her fortitude in the hospital as life flickered out of her. In bated breath, it was reported she was displaying a seemingly insuperable will to live, as if the top medical attention accorded her, in fear of the angry mob amassed outside the hospital, didn’t have a role in it. Our recovery from illnesses and injuries rarely involves a conscious exercise of will. The myth-making was further garnished with stories about how she overcame her frailties to record her statement with the police, and expressed her desire to have the culprits punished. Really, considering what she had undergone, could she have said anything else?

It is so much easier to imagine in the dying virtues of courage. Not only are they not there to contest our readings of their death, propriety compels us to accept silently what are gross exaggerations. The 23-year-old physiotherapist wasn’t Nirbhaya or fearless. She was victim of the vagaries of chance, having got on to a wrong bus on which her assailants had waited for their prey. But we needed to imagine her fearless, for we wished to tell ourselves that we were protesting to demand justice for an extraordinary person. 

Yet we don’t take note of undeniable proof of fearlessness around us. In fact, fearless are those girls and boys in small towns and villages who defy caste and religious codes to marry outside their communities, their passions still aflame in spite of the severe punishment handed out to others callously declared guilty of such transgressions by panchayats and their family members. Fearless were those in Manipur who stripped naked in protest against the raping of a woman by soldiers of the Indian army. Undoubtedly, courageous are those who were and are sexually assaulted, as they continue to be in Delhi and elsewhere, but who turn up at police stations to file complaints and doggedly pursue their tormentors through the labyrinth of courts, unsung, unassisted, having not the benefit of people thronging the streets to demand justice for them.

They are our Amanat (treasure), whom we forget to felicitate. We don’t honour the bravehearts still alive because it could, we subconsciously fear, undermine societal codes and imperil community identities and gender relations. Worse, we in the middle class ignore the torment of the living, as seen, again, in its indifference to the plight of the five-year-old and her family. Perhaps our indifference could also be because we know too well that neither stringent laws nor diligent policing can deter those who look upon a five-year-old with a covetous, sexual intent.

But then, it is perhaps also true that Delhi’s middle class citizens did not bristle   because the rape of the five-year-old occurred outside their urban space: in a slum, bereft of symbols – multiplex, for instance – they could identify with. In our imagining of their plight of the five-year-old and her family, we did not detect a threat to our lifestyle, as we did not in the gang-rape of a Nepali woman, a domestic maid, around the same time or in other cases involving infants. Indeed, our empathy has a limited sweep, as we selfishly refrain from using the disproportionate clout we enjoy despite our relatively small numbers to create a better society.

The author is a Delhi-based journalist. Email: ashrafajaz3@gmail.com