-Aparna Nandakumar

The recent tragic incident at JNU where  a young woman was violently attacked  by a young man who felt rejected in love, and who killed himself immediately after inflicting fatal injuries on her, was just one in several recent cases of violent attacks on women. However, it shocked the nation precisely because the violence occurred on a central university campus known for being a radically progressive space. The issue generated frantic debates, one instance being an episode of the NDTV talk show The Social Network1,  where the panelists included research scholars Shivani Nag, Mohan Dharavath and Sumathy Panicker, and therapist Reena Nath. Apart from the JNU tragedy, the show also discussed the lack of debate around suicides of students from marginalized social backgrounds, the case of Kashmiri student Mudassir Kamran’s suicide in EFLU Hyderabad and the attendant questions of administrative culpability, sexuality, and counseling. However, in this article, I will only focus on certain ideas within this debate that help us think through a few pertinent issues: (1) the notion of the “culpability” of popular culture in instigating everyday violence on women, (2) the contrasting notions of obsession and romance, and (3) the campus as a special kind of space where gendered social selves and gender relations are fashioned and played out in conjunction with other criteria of self-fashioning such as caste, class, region, etc.
Desire and Violence in Popular Culture
Popular culture seems to be the first casualty in the debate on gender violence. Immediately after the Delhi gang rape case in December 2012, there was an attempt among the outraged middle-class to ban the performances of the Punjabi rapper, Yo Yo Honey Singh, and to prosecute him for allegedly singing/composing pornographic and misogynous lyrics. After the recent tragedy at JNU, many fingers pointed to the Hindi feature film Raanjhanaa, which had released recently. This also happened in the episode of The Social Network mentioned above. Raanjhanaa (Beloved, dir. Anand L. Rai, 2013) is the story of Kundan (Dhanush), a streetsmart Benarasi boy who is also a Tamil Brahmin and the son of the temple priest, and his obsessive pursuit of Zoya (Sonam Kapoor), a middle-class Muslim girl, which ultimately ends in tragedy. Even before the JNU incident, many online reviewers had slammed Raanjhanaa for encouraging stalking and romanticizing obsessive, unrequited love. The reviews assume that popular culture in general, and film in particular, has the power to influence people’s actions and interactions in society. My attempt is not to exonerate popular culture of all accusations of misogyny and patriarchy. However, it is worrying that in the case of every real-life tragedy, our first response is to point fingers at a particular popular cultural text – usually a film text – and demand either a ban or a more positive representation. Many of us would be uncomfortable supporting a ban or censorship, but we tend to consider the demand for positive representation a just one. The impulse to create better representations is itself of interest, not for its effects on society, but rather as indicative of certain lacunae in the social sphere, something lacking or warped in the existing social structure, which the cultural realm is desperately seeking to fill by imposing cultural values from without.
Raanjhanaa draws upon a framework associated with Tamil films starring Dhanush, a framework that has a clear stand on the social relations between the hero and the heroine, and which locates desire and violence in the matrices of these social relations. The dark-skinned, lean, small-built Dhanush’s screen persona is built up mostly by portrayals of street-smart, underprivileged young men with a violent streak and intense, complex relationships with heroines who are a few rungs above him in the social hierarchy. From Kaadhal Konden (I Fell in Love, dir. Selvaraghavan, 2003), an early film which catapulted Dhanush into stardom in the role of a psychotic orphan obsessed with his upper-class classmate, to the lyrics of the single “Why this Kolaveri di” from the film 3 (dir. Aishwarya Dhanush, 2012) which went viral on YouTube and earned the actor nation-wide fame and the lead role in Raanjhana, we can see a clear pattern which posits Dhanush’s character in a relationship of intense obsession and violence with a fair-skinned, privileged caste/class heroine who is (at least initially or in part) unresponsive to his attentions. Raanjhanaa is unable to translate this complex framework of social relations on to the terrain of Hindi cinema. Here, it seems that violence and passion, desire and frustration, are all individuated and that the social position of the characters has nothing to do with the tragedy being enacted. This lack of complexity in Raanjhana leaves it vulnerable to accusations of encouraging misogyny and gender violence. But beneath its superficiality, the stories of the different, sometimes conflicting, desires and passions of young men and women encountering each other clamour to be told.
Obsessive versus Rational Romance
Sumathy Panicker, another participant in  The Social Network, went on to talk about how men should move on from stalking women, or assuming interest on the latter’s part, to creating spaces of interaction and getting to know each other. In theory, this sounds like an excellent proposition, but how easy or difficult is it to actually work this out? The term “stalking” is often used as a shortcut to talk about a vast spectrum of activities, from the awkward embarrassment of a boy furtively eyeing his first-time crush to the borderline psychopathic or the blatantly criminal, and this complicates our discussions on “stalking”. In an informal conversation, a friend of mine once complained about a boy who had followed her into the library on a central university campus and asked her to be his friend, a euphemism for expressing romantic interest. “How could he not understand how creepy and scary I found it?” She said later, “If he really wanted to be my friend, why didn’t he approach me in a more public place? Why did he have to corner me in that dark, isolated place?” Looking back on this incident now, years later, I feel that (a) many boys tend to genuinely not understand when and why their expressions of interest become discomfiting to girls and are even perceived as threatening, and (b) many girls find it difficult to conceive of the pressures on boys from their peer group in terms of how their manner of “proposing” to a girl and her manner of responding determines the boys’ worth in the eyes of their peers. In co-ed colleges, a familiar ritual in mild ragging was to ask a junior student (usually a boy) to “propose” to a person of the opposite sex under the gaze of a large, heckling audience. In such a context, does “rational” love, or a relationship which starts off based on mutual understanding and liking, become a luxury that only the most confident and privileged of young men and women can initiate? Added to this is the fact that centuries of sedimented meanings have accumulated in the figure of the woman, putting this figure at the centre of narratives of success, masculinity, social mobility, etc. into which young men are interpellated. “Possession” is too simplistic a term to cover the range of possibilities such a figure compels. A young man’s worth is judged by his peers, not merely by his possession of a young woman, but in his ability to draw her gaze, to make her laugh, to catch and hold her attention amidst a hundred other things vying for it. This, along with academic and career-related pressures, puts an enormous burden on young men who are first-generation entrants to this new space. (The pressure on homosexual men is even greater, and needs an entirely different discourse to pay justice to the issue.)
The Campus as a Gendered Space
Gendered violence provokes a variety of responses. An opinion which seems to circulate strongly is that cases of gender violence or fraught gender relations occur everywhere, and that there is nothing specific that the campus community – especially teachers and administrators – can do about it. Other debates position themselves around criticizing/defending a “campus culture” considered too free, progressive or promiscuous. There are also narratives of nostalgia for “the good old days” when such incidents simply did not happen2.    In The Social Network discussion, Shivani Nag voices the opinion that “nobody is suddenly going to become progressive as soon as they enter the gates of JNU”. This utterance evinces exasperation with such narratives of nostalgia, but holds the implication that the university campus is a progressive, democratic space into which individuals bring in the excesses of patriarchy and misogyny. Staging the conflict in terms of “progressive” versus “regressive” ideologies puts us at a disadvantage in our attempt to understand the complexities of everyday violence that layer the visible and tangible outbursts of violence. Commentators agree that the campus is located firmly in the social, but attempts to understand the dimensions of the social somehow fail to go beyond intersecting notions like patriarchy, male entitlement, possession and the romanticization of obsessive desire, which are too vague and over-used for productive discussion3.
The commonsense about incidents like the recent JNU tragedy seems to be that these are triggered either by a patriarchal sense of entitlement and control that men hold towards women, or by a pathological quirk of the individual mind. Both these frameworks seem to imply that individual men can and should enlighten themselves and come out of the patriarchal mindset. These arguments do not help us get to the root of the most important question such incidents pose: What are the factors that make a young student believe that being rejected in love renders his own life worthless, and that his humiliation can only be countered by drawing the blood of the woman who rejected him? When young men and women from different social locations, many of them rural or suburban, migrate to the spaces of urban universities, they are leaving behind the habitats in which they grew up with all the structures that held their world together. These structures might include patriarchy, feudalism, etc. and the social relations typical of each of these. The new urban campus spaces seem to promise the fulfillment of new desires and aspirations. Love can also be understood as an expression of desire, through which the individual subject tries to redefine him/herself and to imagine a new world to position him/herself in. However, the new spaces provide only incomplete social and ideological structures which are unable to support or give proper expression to these new desires.
Over the last few decades, feminist movements in India have worked hard in order to bring about a sense that women have the right to speak out regarding harassment they face – whether on the campus, in the workplace, in the family, or anywhere else. As a result, most campuses have created committees to address incidents of sexual harassment and gender violence. These committees are often not functional. Sexual harassment laws are sometimes insufficient to ensure justice, and frequently result in the punishment of men from socially marginalized locations while acquitting socially and culturally powerful men from similar charges. The situation is further complicated by the fact that allegations of sexual harassment have also become a tool to be used by male leaders from patriarchal student organizations to threaten each other, effectively rendering the question of actual violence faced by women invisible. However, the solution is neither to dismiss sexual harassment laws completely, nor to put the onus squarely on those subjected to harassment by asking them to “understand”, or to consider the perpetrator’s background, future career record, etc. Yes, it is necessary that individual women (and men) make sense of the matrices of power within which their everyday interactions are shaped. However, the policy of silencing and settling issues that is largely followed by institutions and the society at large does not ensure justice to anyone. “Settlement” or punishing both parties “equally” thus becomes a mere short-cut for resolving the immediate problem.
In such a context, why are university administrations being asked to take up responsibility for instances of gendered violence? What can they possibly do?4  “Efficient governance” seems to be the keyword of university administrators these days, according to which policies are implemented mechanically – including reservations, fellowships, welfare schemes for disabled students, setting up cells against ragging or sexual harassment, counseling centres, etc. – without any attempt to understand the rapidly changing student constituency or to bring about structural changes in pedagogy and policymaking. Thus, the campus – instead of being a space where individuals from different castes, classes, genders, regions, sexual orientations, etc. could interact with, discover and come to understand one another – becomes a space where these individuals are “frozen” into manageable administrative categories for easy governance. Governance anxieties on many college and university campuses are typically expressed through rules that attempt to restrict the movement of women on campus in the name of safety and to restrict interactions between men and women outside class hours on the common spaces of the campus. This reluctance of administrators to treat students as mature or maturing individuals who need to learn from interacting with each other, and their reliance instead on imposing social norms from above through rules and regulations, is one of the important disabling factors stunting our university spaces.
Aparna is a student at English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
Notes:
1. Aired on 1 August 2013 and titled “Equal Victims, Unequal Spaces: Gender Violence on Campuses”.
2. As an instance of a response from JNU which tries to engage with nostalgia and discussions of “campus culture” to some extent, see Parnal Chirmuley, “Gendered Violence and the Hall of Mirrors”, 4 August 2013, Kafila: www.kafila.org/2013/08/03/gendered-violence-and-the-hall-of-mirrors-parnal-chirmuley/. (Accessed on 9th November 2013, reproduced in this broadsheet).
3. See Shivani Nag, “Unrequited love or simply ‘self-love’? – Reflections in the Wake of a Campus Tragedy at JNU”, 3 August 2013, Kafila: www.kafila.org/2013/08/03/unrequited-love-or-simply-self-love-reflections-in-the-wake-of-a-campus-tragedy-at-jnu-shivani-nag/ ( Accessed on 9th November 2013)
4. Pratiksha Baxi, in the last paragraph of her article, “The Affective Claims of Violence – Reflections on the JNU Campus Tragedy”, details some steps that can be taken to counter and prevent gendered violence on a university campus. http://kafila.org/2013/08/04/the-affective-claims-of-violence-reflections-on-the-jnu-campus-tragedy-guest-post-by-pratiksha-baxi/ (Accessed on 9th November 2013).