Abstract
I examine how recent historic incidents surrounding sexual violence that registered emotional shockwaves across India have been portrayed in Indian web series through a focus on police brutality and consequent experiences of pain. I study Delhi Crime (Directed by Richie Mehta, performance by Shefali Shah, Rasika Dugal, and Adil Hussain. Netflix, 2019), a Netflix Original on the 2012 Nirbhaya Rape Case, and Made in Heaven (Directed by Prashant Nair; written by Alankrita Shrivastava, Zoya Akhtar, and Reema Kagti, performance by Arjun Mathur, Sobhita Dhulipala, and Vinay Pathak. Amazon Prime, 2019), a Prime Video Original about horrific systemic injustices against the queer community that culminated through turbulent protests into the long-awaited 2018 Supreme Court verdict. I study the way police torture inflicts pain on the human body, referring to the complex analyses of pain in Wittgenstein, Rachel Ablow, Elaine Scarry, Veena Das, and David Morris, veering between understanding pain as something intensely bodily that obliterates the social, and seeing pain as something that indubitably acquires meaning only in the social context within which it is inflicted and received. Drawing on both approaches, I will explore the political meaning of violent pain, arguing that these bodily experiences occupy a space between emotionality (in which the individual is reduced to nothing more than the reality of the pain) and morality (in which political forces and social hierarchies filter into its meaning), and together they confuse the very possibility of democratic surveillance and guardianship. Drawing on Ablow, I will study how socio-cultural meanings of pain derive historically from assumptions of shared sympathy. I will then unpack how the contemporary democratic state in these web series renders communitarian sympathy redundant, problematizing the very idea of pain as a shared emotion that can trigger moral responses.
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Notes
- 1.
Delhi Crime and Made in Heaven mix Hindi and English, and Judgement Day is a Bengali-language show. The English translations used in the essay are my own and have some overlaps with the production subtitles.
- 2.
Sharma, “Kolkata Rape Victims Find a Police Officer Who’s on Their Side.”
- 3.
Sharma, “Kolkata Rape Victims Find a Police Officer Who’s on Their Side”; Jha, “Why an India Rape Victim Disclosed Her Identity”; Gupta, “4 Years After Park Street Rape Case, Main Accused Arrested Near Delhi”; “TMC’s Candidate Nusrat Jahan, Mamata Banerjee and Their Connection with the Infamous Park Street Rape Case.”
- 4.
Khanna, “Kolkata Park Street Rape Case: Kader Khan Shows No Remorse in Court.”
- 5.
Bourke notes that, according to Dr. Peter Mere Latham, “pain is an ‘it’, an identifiable thing or concept,” “an independent entity within … [the] body” (Bourke 3; Referring to Latham, “General Remarks on the Practice of Medicine”). Joanna Bourke discusses at length both figures—Latham in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and Elaine Scarry in the twentieth century—as examples of the camp which held the view that pain is personal and marked by certitude for the one undergoing it (1–5).
- 6.
The doctor elaborates on the condition later to Vimla Bharadwaj, the Investigating Officer, in the presence of the parents: “We have started the treatment. There is internal injury, several organs have been damaged. The bite marks on her face have caused swelling. And there’s internal haemorrhaging.” [Episode 1].
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Bhattacharjee, S. (2021). Shockwaves of Rape and Shattering of Power in the Contemporary Indian Web Series: The Case of Delhi Crime, Made in Heaven, and Judgement Day. In: Falcato, A., Graça da Silva, S. (eds) The Politics of Emotional Shockwaves . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56021-8_6
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