Skip bombast, build solidarities
Also read: Why does the accusing finger always turn towards the oppressed? 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
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