By Sneha Rajaram
A friend told me she was hesitant about watching Titli because she had a premonition that it might be “too male”. When I heard that, I considered not watching the movie – I didn’t want to be caught up in a story of men, by men and for men – because in such stories, I can hardly ever identify with the characters or narratives. But then I thought again, à la Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book About Men (which extracts lessons from fairy tales for modern men), that men need stories just as much as women do. So I decided to be that awful, patronizing kind of anthropologist who wants to study ‘exotic’ things, and that’s how I came to watch Titli.
At first glance, it does seem to be all about the men. There are three brothers – Vikram (Ranvir Shorey), whose battered wife has left him; Pradeep (Amit Sial); and Titli (Shashank Arora) – who live with their father (Lalit Behl). They’re small-time freelance mercenaries in the world of Delhi’s organized crime – theft, murder etc. Titli, the youngest, is both physically and criminally the runt of the litter. He wants to get away from it all. But before he can get hold of some money for his ticket out, his brothers marry him off in order to have a woman on their team for con jobs.
That’s when the gender-based domestic violence starts. (Titli has already been beaten up by Vikram in a gruesome-ish scene.) Given how violent the house is in general, we’re not surprised to see that the new bahu Neelu (Shivani Raghuvanshi) gets manhandled by all three brothers pretty soon after her wedding, and sexually assaulted by Titli (whom she successfully fends off, one feels, because he lacks sufficient physique and willpower). We’re not surprised, either, that Titli assaults her consistently throughout the movie.
When Neelu first witnesses a murder committed by the brothers, she tries to run away from the house. Titli runs after her and, in an unprecedented move, stops dragging her when she says she doesn’t want to go back. Instead, he makes a deal with her: he’ll let her, nay, help her regularly visit her paramour if she’ll give him the Fixed Deposit her father made in her name as her dowry.
The twists and turns of the plot – Neelu finding a way to live with her boyfriend permanently; Titli trying to get the Fixed Deposit money to escape his brothers’ house – meander on, while Titli seems to be falling for Neelu (doesn’t stop him assaulting her now and then).
Meanwhile, the Bechdel test is passed when Vikram’s wife turns up at the house to file for divorce. She addresses Neelu and gives her some earrings that presumably belong to the brothers.
The domestic violence scenes between Titli and Neelu are raw but intriguing – firstly, because Titli is just as tall and probably thinner than her; and secondly, because she’s not deeply indignant or upset by the assaults the way she was upset by the murder she witnessed. At one point, when Titli is lying over her, choking her, she tells him, “Do whatever you want to me. I’m done. I won’t obey you any more.” Which is when he realizes he’s lost power over her, gets up, and says “Sorry” – probably a manipulative gesture.
These scenes beg the question: how should domestic violence be portrayed in cinema? Is a film allowed to show us domestic violence without also telling us that it’s bad? I mean, every time someone lights up a cigarette on screen, a line of text appears telling us not to smoke.
This question is further complicated by the characters themselves. Both Titli and Neelu are intended to be seen as grey characters. Titli, having assaulted his wife, should now be in our black books forever. But the movie doesn’t allow it. He still gets to be simpatico – to make sheep eyes at Neelu whenever she’s with her boyfriend.
As for Neelu, deciding for herself what suits her, wrestling silently with Titli, and accepting the trade-off when she loses and is assaulted – the audience has a few options. She could be blamed for being ‘complicit’ in her own abuse by feminists like Germaine Greer, who wrote like this about domestic violence in 1970, in The Female Eunuch:
It is actually a game of nerves, and can be turned aside fairly easily. At various stages in my life I have lived with men of known violence, two of whom had convictions for Grievous Bodily Harm, and in no case was I ever offered any physical aggression, because it was abundantly clear from my attitude that I was not impressed by it.
(Greer’s credibility is at an all-time low now anyway, with her recent display of TERFism (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism), in which she declared that a transwoman is not a woman.)
Or Neelu could be seen by some as a victim of domestic violence, plain and simple, who suffers from learned helplessness.
Instead, Neelu’s motive for staying in this abusive marriage is clear as crystal – back home, she’d never get the chance to hang out with her boyfriend the way Titli helps her to.
So domestic violence, here, is one part of the tug-of-war between these two individuals, each of whom has a strange, concrete power over the other. Domestic abuse is, in effect, a plot device, or rather a device to develop Titli and Neelu’s characters for the audience.
On the other hand, Vikram’s battered wife brings a feminist lawyer with her to file the divorce papers, and clearly has a very straightforward narrative in her mind – “I got beaten by my husband, it was not okay, he is a bastard, I divorced him, I’m glad I divorced him.” So every time Titli attacks Neelu in the same house that his brother once attacked his wife, we’re not completely adrift without the anchor of precedent. We have the badi bahu, the feminist lawyer, the women’s rights rhetoric, domestic violence being named for what it is – right there in the movie. We can choose to view Titli’s marriage the same way we’re taught to view Vikram’s marriage – or we can choose to jump down the rabbit hole of their world, where our feminist compass doesn’t work quite the way it used to. Are we ready for that? Should we ever be ready for that? Is it okay to take a step back when looking at issues like domestic violence? Is it okay to use domestic violence as a literary device? These are some of the questions that may be either extremely easy or extremely difficult to answer once you’ve watched Titli.
November 6, 2015 at 1:51 pm
Interesting points.
Domestic violence as a literary/storytelling/plot device, if you want to call it that, is not the problem here. After all, it is an everyday reality for many people and, presumably, the character arcs here require a certain level of violent interaction to move the story along. It should also not be necessary for a storyteller, whether in film or book, to have to tell us, explicitly or implicitly, whether it (or other like-veined portrayals of, say, rape or incest or murder) is good or bad. Fiction is not a platform for preaching.
What I believe is important when portraying violence is that it isn’t for the sole purpose of shock or titillation; that it does not glamorize; that it does not end up desensitizing the viewer/reader. A couple of years ago, the writer of a popular UK TV show, ‘The Fall’, wrote a defense of the violence against women that his show included (http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/jun/07/the-fall-allan-cubitt-women-violence). He makes some good points (and some rather weak ones too if you read close enough) such as: that the violence portrayed must not be gratuitous or exploitative; that it must not dehumanize the victim(s) and so on. In the end, as many experts have pointed out, domestic violence, rape, etc., are never about sexual desire but about the need for power and control. To me, a good writer or director is one who can clearly show the reader this truism (and any others, as the story/characters require) through their portrayal of violence…. rather than some pithy morality.
There’s also the question of why a viewer/reader might want to watch or read about violence in fiction. For that, I haven’t come across a better explanation than literary critic, Harold Bloom’s theory (he was referring to zombie movies, but the principles apply here too): “It’s not that we enjoy zombie films because we need to prepare for the zombie uprising. We don’t have to plan for what to do if we accidentally kill our fathers or marry our mothers. But even these exotic cases serve as useful practice for bad times, exercising our psyches for when life goes to hell. From this perspective, it’s not the zombies that make film so compelling, it is that the theme of zombies is a clever way to frame stories about being attacked by strangers and betrayed by those we love. This is what attracts us; the brain eating is an optional extra.” The logic applies to any scenario of violence in fiction.
So, I suggest, kindly, that the question posed here is perhaps not the best one. It isn’t about whether a fictional portrayal of violence should be accompanied with some kind of warning or moral guide. Goodness knows that line of thinking goes straight to black-and-white opinions of what’s right or wrong and what should be censored or banned. The two-fold question, I offer to you, is whether the way that the violence is depicted is true to the story and its characters and whether it allows the viewers/readers to exercise their psyches and think deeper for themselves about what that might mean in their own world and lives.
Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the movie save for trailers/clips. So, I’m not justifying how the domestic violence is portrayed in it. I’m simply offering a viewpoint on the question raised in the title.
November 6, 2015 at 5:16 pm
What I took away from the movie, was how few choices Neelu had. Women choose to return to previously violent relationships very often; and what Titli offers is insight into the circumstances in which these choices are made. Neelu is trapped between a lying boyfriend, and a violent husband–neither option is ideal. But with Titli, she has been able to bargain, negotiate, however unfair the terms–and we are left with a lot to think about, and forced to confront the unsettling realities of violence. We are also given the example of Sangita; who has chosen to walk away from the violent marriage, and refuses to compromise on her legal rights (though, she does have another relationship to turn to). Which further complicates ideas of choice and power; and does set a precedent for Neelu; but one she ultimately doesn’t follow.
That said, what shocked me when I watched the movie, was that the scene in which Titli sexually assaults Neelu, had a large majority of the audience in the movie theatre laughing. Not just uncomfortable laughter, but audible giggles, from both men and women, that became loud laughter when Titli gives up and goes to sleep. And at the end of the movie (spoiler), when Neelu agrees to go back to Titli but mentions that her arm will need a rod so they should stop by the doctor: this to me was the film forcing us to remember the violence this relationship contains. Yet this too was met with uncritical loud laughter. This laughter left me with so much discomfort, and questions about how films should depict violence; and how depictions are received and interpreted.