A Failure in Shaming From Abroad

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/world/asia/indias-daughter-leslee-udwin.html

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NEW DELHI — For a few days in March, it appeared that Indian women had kind things to say about Indian men. They said, in effect, that Indian men were not so bad. But the objective of this unprecedented defense of the average Indian male was in reality not about him at all. Something else was going on. It was only one strand in the widespread urban outrage directed against a documentary — made by a Western filmmaker, which is a crucial detail.

There could be many reasons a person would make a documentary film, but the way of the world is that the filmmaker is expected to give only exalted reasons. Leslee Udwin, who made “India’s Daughter,” about a rape and killing in Delhi, told The Guardian, “I made a film on rape in India. Men’s brutal attitudes truly shocked me.”

This is not a view Indian women would normally reject, but Ms. Udwin is a foreigner. Also, she had not paid enough obeisance to the Indian feminists who had converted the Delhi rape into a mass movement that shook the political class. She was stepping on their turf and walking away with a powerful film. All this contributed to an outrage that erupted days before anybody in India had even seen the film.

An Indian filmmaker, Paromita Vohra, addressed a letter to “My dear white feminist sisters,” in which she wrote, “What is the reason you are still making such primitive documentaries?

“Are you being forced by the backward-thinking men in your families and society into making essentialist explanations about other societies?”

The notion that shaming India is a privilege of Indian citizens alone is not a view normally held by Indian feminists, including Ms. Vohra. Even so, their contempt for “India’s Daughter” tapped into the general discomfort of Indians and of the government with foreign artistic or journalistic works that are critical of India. India is like a nudist colony that does not deny it is nude, but does not want the fully clad to see it so bare.

The government exploited public opinion to ban the film. Several politicians claimed that the film harmed India’s “image.” Since then, the government has been trying to put in place systems that would make life difficult for foreign documentary makers, though it is not very clear what those systems might be.

Trauma is central to art and journalism, and compassion and exploitation are often entwined in these spheres. Artists and journalists from regions that are deficient in human misery have long been tempted to visit miserable places. Some indulge in a bit of taxi-driver journalism, where interviews with the taxi drivers are passed off as anthropology. Some confuse wonderment for observation. But there are also the gifted and the hard-working, who look deep and often see what is invisible to the locals.

It is not the business of a mature democracy, which India is, to control the news that goes out of the great republic. But the government wants to.

In January, the government prevented a Greenpeace activist, an Indian citizen, from boarding a plane in Delhi. She was on her way to Britain to give a testimony before a parliamentary committee on a mining project in India. The government claimed her deposition would have adversely affected “India’s image abroad.”

When that news cycle reached its peak, a television news anchor, Arnab Goswami, hosted a show that included a few activists who criticized the government’s action. Mr. Goswami accused them of being “anti-national.”

On the show, a politician accused one of the activists, the feminist Kavita Krishnan, of “selling this country” to the West. It is not clear how affected Ms. Krishnan was by the accusations.

In any case, a few days after the show, in an essay that contributed to the outrage over “India’s Daughter,” she conveyed her suspicion that Ms. Udwin, the maker of the film, was on a “civilizing mission.”

This is curious, because a stated objective of the Indian feminist movement is to civilize half of India.

Follow Manu Joseph, author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People,” on Twitter at @manujosephsan.