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.