Writing with Fire Review

12.03.2022

Often, we retreat from the very great but empty noise that the Oscars make. However, on this occasion I decided to watch one of the films that was up for the nominations, ‘Writing with Fire’. Famously, if one is from an Indian ethnic background, the documentary is the first Academy Awards nomination which has been directed by an Indian director (Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh). It is also one of the only films, Indian or otherwise, which has ‘untouchable’ women as heroines. Luckily for me, the film is on BBC IPlayer and is available to stream online as part of their ‘Storyville’ series.

‘Writing with Fire’ is about the perils and adventures of three lower caste (‘Dalit’ which translates as ‘oppressed’) women journalists, Meera, Suneeta and Shyamkali. They work for the only entirely woman run newspaper in India, Khabar Lahariya or ‘Waves of News’. In the opening credits, the film makers write that when these Dalit women set up a newspaper in 2002, they ‘started a revolution’. The film follows the newspaper story from 2016 when the publication went digital. The attempt is to show a sea-change. Meera says, “In our region, a journalist meant you are an upper-caste man. A Dalit woman journalist was unthinkable. Over the last 14 years we’ve changed this perception.” Meera asks us to consider what it would be like if Dalit women had power and what they would do with it.

What follows in the film is a traditional and thoroughly conventional hero narrative which has been built up over thousands of years. The difference is that the hero is not a hero, but a heroine, and from the lower castes. What is the traditional hero narrative? The hero comes from humble origins, like the Greek demigods raised secretly by peasants as children. However, such humble origins disguise the greatness, nobility and royalty of the hero, which are revealed later. The hero faces adversity and mortal danger, as in a glorious battle. It is stated in the credits that India is one of the most precarious places in the world to be a journalist, with many murdered. The film shows the response to one murder of a female journalist by the workers of Khabar Lahariya. The hateful trolling of the women journalists is illustrated as well as their vulnerability to the Indian mafia. The hero is threatened by a return to quotidian life, like Hercules compelled to clean the stables. Thus, the women’s husbands attempt to stop them writing for the newspaper to work in the home instead as housewives. Finally, the hero must triumph. Khabar Lahariya is presented as an out and out success, measured by the amount of YouTube views it attracts, which number in the tens of millions.

This hero narrative unfolds amidst a glorification and justification of journalism, the pursuit that the women have dedicated their lives to. Towards the end of the documentary, Meera recites that the journalists are fighting to transform society. That they are holding the powerful to account. That they have made their journalism the voice of democracy. That they didn’t let the fourth pillar fall. And that they continue to hold a mirror to society. Thus, the film seems to be about everything that lip service holds dear: truth, balance, democracy.

Not only this, but the journalists are presented as law-givers. The screen first jumps into motion with Meera asking a woman in person about being raped multiple times in her home by four men. The opening credits mention how many Dalit women are subjected to violence across India and the film shows how Meera and others are trying to challenge the justice system which doesn’t respond to these atrocities. The unnamed rape victim says that the police refuse to lodge her complaint and intimidate her when she attempts to do so. The woman is going to newspaper because they are the only ones that listen to her story. As the husband of the victim says, “We don’t trust anyone else. Khabar Lahariya is our last hope”. Meera confronts the police about the multiple rapes and she proclaims that she is “fighting for justice in a democracy”.

My impression of the film as a whole was that it was a story told well. Certainly, Dalit women deserve to be seen as heroes too. The focus on the stories of the three women journalists gave that personal touch which made the abstract ideals the film supports into something concrete and something that the viewer could really relate to. The cinematography by Sushmit Ghosh and Karan Thapliyal was very beautiful. However, I am more pessimistic about the role of journalism in society. The documentary aims to present the journalist as objective, neutral, impartial, a server of truth, justice and democracy. These are claims that are a stretch of the imagination much too far for me. Again, I am troubled by why the Western media has nominated the film for an Academy Award. Khabar Lahariya is the voice of the poor, oppressed women in India. Naturally, they are pessimistic about power and the government in India. That is, they criticise the society they find themselves in because they hope to transform it and make a better position for themselves. This is fine. This is acceptable. Indeed, I support these women in their mission. However, what is unacceptable, is that the Western media and its public discourse always criticise India when they know nothing about it, in a supreme act of Orientalism and racism. The Academy seems to have selected a film which presents India as a colossal sewer because this is what they think about the country. This is not fine. This is what is unacceptable. And in this, they are trying to use that objectivity associated with journalism to try and present their racist notion of a whole country as the unqualified truth. Final verdict? A good, revolutionary film spoiled by an Oscar nomination and Western practices of racism.

Becoming a Woman: Revenge, Ethics, Law and The Wounded in a Hindi Film

13.10.16

Is it wrong to desire revenge? Some people suggest that it is. My own research into the Victorian period has shown that not only is the desire for revenge seen as irrational, being emotional, and unreasonable, but that it is also feminised. The desire for revenge is a transgressive desire which attacks the very foundations of Western rationality, the rationality and reasonableness of (white, middle-class) men. Perhaps the most famous example of this feminisation is Miss Haversham in Great Expectations which I read as a schoolboy, but it is also in other famous novels like Vanity Fair, where Miss Sharp favours revenge too.

It is with some surprise that I noted that revenge was also feminised in my favourite Hindi film, starring my favourite actor, Sunny Deol. The name of the film is Ghayal, which means, literally, “wounded”, although I believe the correct translation into English should be “The Wounded”, which would make a significant difference to the overall meaning of the film. Ghayal is not just a film, it is an entire philosophy, some of which I will try to make clear in this little piece. I return to the film when I begin to forget who I am and where I come from. The film is a revenge story. The villain kills the hero’s brother. He is framed for the murder and then an accusation that he killed his brother because he was having an affair with his sister-in-law leads her to suicide. The hero triumphs and has his revenge outside of the law. The film is divided into a number of sections, but the obvious structuring is to contrast everything that follows with a first happy period.

Female revenge is present even in the first happy period, which is full of comedy. One day, the heroine of the film travels to see the boxer hero at his training camp. Because he is scared that he might get sent home, he says to her that he doesn’t know her and tells her to go away. The hero is the only person in the world that the heroine loves and who loves her back. She has no family as her mother and father are dead. When the hero tells her to go away and pretends that he doesn’t recognise her, he is refuting his love for her and treating her as a non-person with no identity. He is excluding her and returning hate and apathy for her love. He hurts her badly, he wounds her absolute trust in him and herself, in other and self.

The heroine does go away. But then, the hero has to apologise. He finds her in a restaurant and tries to speak the words of love to her. But now, the heroine’s mind is concentrated on revenge. She tries to provoke the other customers in the restaurant by turning all of the hero’s words against him to insult them, saying that he has called people bald or fat, etc. She wants the hero to be beaten by the mob, she opportunistically manipulates them to give the hurt and the satisfaction that she will feel. The customers are equated with India – this is an explicit comparison that is made. But Mahabharat (Great India, or ancient India) is also invoked when the hero actually touches the heroine.

As soon as the woman is touched, she opportunistically uses the status of victim to further manipulate the mob. She pretends that she is a damsel in distress, she mimics completely passivity and helplessness. She calls out that the hero, who she pretends is a stranger, mirroring his refutation of her identity, has touched her and rhetorically questions the crowd: Is there no man among you (to protect me, to have the courage to protect me, to protect not only me but all women, the women that are your sisters and mothers)? Here is when the Mahabharat comes to the rescue in the form of Bhima. Bhima is perhaps most famous in the epic saga because of his relationship to women, law and revenge. Draupadi, the wife of five men, was dishonoured by Dushasana who vowed to keep her hair unkempt and unmanaged until they were washed with the blood of her oppressor. Bhima was one of her husbands and he vows not only to bring his wife the blood, but also to drink it. Their vows and laws are based on their revenge. The beginning of legality is based on revenge, the revenge of a woman.

The heroine only forgives the hero when he falls from an elephant in trying to win her over. It is only when the hero is hurt that the heroine is able to forgive him. He has now shared her hurt. He has felt what it has been like to have been in pain. He has hurt himself for her. This is love.

The main revenge story is also marked by its relationship to the law and feminisation. First of all, the hero is clearly “the wounded”. I was discussing wounds and their relationship to femininity with one of my supervisors – someone had questioned my tying together of the wound with femininity in a poem by Robert Browning at a postgraduate reading session – and she told me that the wound has indeed been historically been associated with women, which a number of commentators have noted. He has been hurt badly. The hurt is that his loved ones have been taken from him. But the hurt is not just the loss of his brother, who is murdered, but also his sister-in-law who is like his mother that commits suicide. She is murdered just as much as his brother because she is dishonoured and shamed by what the world has been led to believe about her and her brother-in-law. However, the main hurt has been from the law. The law rejects the hero’ hunt for his missing brother and then he is subjected to brutal torture when he is framed for his brother’s murder. It is in the courtroom that the accusation of the incestuous relationship with his sister-in-law is made that leads to her suicide and extinction, her non-identity. The entire legal system fails him. What he should have been able to trust does not help him, it takes away his love, what he loved most. It takes away that which gives him his identity – his family, the brother and sister-in-law that are like his father and his mother.

Thus, the hero’s quest for revenge is a quest for revenge against the law. It is explicitly stated that his campaign of revenge is a campaign against the law since it is a direct challenge to law and the rule of the law. Of course, this law is only there to protect the villain, the rich man who plays Western music on his piano. Yet every time the hero pulls the gun against the villain, he is impotent. The crisis of impotence reaches its head towards the end of the film. Yet, in the most beautiful scene of the film, when the hero’s campaign of revenge is about to fail and he is pounded by a group of policemen and the law which forms a tight circle around him, the heroine sees him as the victim. She remembers what it is like to be the victim. She knows its reality. She knows what it is to be the wounded. And it is woman and the wounded that help the wounded. They see the place of woman in the wounded. She gives him the loaded gun and he is no longer impotent. He shoots and he does not miss. He hands himself over to the police with a smile on his face and a child that he rescued from the villain, the child that was separated from his mother by the villain and snatched from her, separated from the one he loves the most, applauds. The crowd of the people applaud too. The hero walks beside the heroine who gave him back his potency, both towards the law.

On ethics and law. There is a structuring of five. Draupadi had five husbands. There are five in the family: the hero, his brother, his sister-in-law, the heroine and the evil uncle who is a lawyer, the one that makes the suggestion of the incestuous affair. The brother, before he dies, says that five fingers of the hand are not all the same. The hero has four associates in his desire for revenge (five in total), each of which fall, leaving only him. This is because in revenge, the only one concerned and interested and self-serving can carry out their revenge for themselves. The hero kills the evil uncle, the lawyer: the identity of lawyer, liar, must be eliminated. Law itself is a prostitute: it is said to sleep on the bed of those such as the villain, the rich man. It is not the sacred prostitute, it is the one that only serves the rich. Law is there to be hated. It destroys love and unity. It is the insertion of law and the lawyer into the family which leads to the dishonour of woman and her extinction. It is law that stops a woman becoming a woman and which threatens her integrity and existence.

There is a lot to learn from “The Wounded”. Hurt is only appeased by hurt. Because when the oppressor is hurt, it is then and only then that they learn what it means to be hurt. It is only then that they learn the disintegration of self and integrity. It is only then that they learn what it is to be a victim, to be woman. And all of the negative stereotypes associated with an angry and revengeful women are the very things that we need to be: touchy, sensitive. When we want to hurt the law, we have to attack the places that hurt most. We must take everything from the law and give nothing. We must be merciless and relentless. For it is only the execution of revenge that teaches empathy. It is there to eliminate the ego. The oppressor must be humiliated in a contest, in a duel. In the film, the hero kills the villain, but the real defeat of the villain is in knowing that the law which protected his vicious self cannot save him because he has hurt others. Either no-one must be hurt or all must hurt. This is the lesson of empathy. Hurt only desires further hurt. Hurt can only be satisfied by further hurt, by being placed in the exact same place and position that you place another through hurt. Revenge is the teaching of empathy and the production of emphatic persons, learning empathy with woman. This is what is law.

Music and Patriarchy: The Gendered Opposition of Bodily Performance and Bodily Abstraction

11.05.2018 –

Abstract: Women are seen as bodies, not minds. As such, they are seen as suitable for bodily performance in a patriarchal society rather than for composing music which is perceived as a non-bodily and abstract form of representation. This division between body and mind underpins the division between the private and the public sphere.
Keywords: Music, Feminism, Patriarchy, Body, Mind, Secret Superstar, Public, Private

Knowledge of the history of women’s musical practices is aided by a concept which I call ‘musical patriarchy’. The division of musical work into a largely male public sphere and a largely female private sphere is a trait of Western music history and also of many musical cultures from all around the world.
Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15.

I was listening to some songs by Vidya Vox, the famous YouTuber recently. I had downloaded them for free off of her website. Vidya sings in a combination of Hindi and English, as well as other languages. She does cover versions of songs and mash-ups. I grew curious about the singer and her music, so I put her name into a search engine. It turned out that the music behind Vidya’s songs comes from her white husband. Here was yet another female singer that didn’t produce her own music and that traded on her Indian ethnicity and sex to entice audiences while relying on a masculine, Western sound and mind.

Racial dimensions aside for the time being, the question was, why were there so few famous female music producers both in India and the West? Personal experience, as usual, prompted the question. One of my amateur pursuits is singing and song-writing. I also compose the music for my songs and make the music myself. Although my musical education in England was peculiarly lamentable, I went ahead and learned how to do everything myself. Is my music perfect? Of course not. It doesn’t have a professional sound and even my singing is just recorded on the computer using the free and in-built software. However, the point is, that I can sit down and compose my own music and, if I had enough free time and money, I could produce my own tracks to a good standard. I could even lay down tracks for the melodies and sounds that I can invent in my head but am currently unable to represent in concrete musical form due to my lack of ability and skill in playing music. Why can’t more women do the same thing successfully?

One could gather various ideas to answer the question. I have put the quote at the top of this piece to show one possible interpretation. The argument is that women’s music is regarded as private, rather than public. It is men’s music that is regarded as public. However, what I want to argue in this short piece is that women are not admitted to the masculine sphere of music because it is a form of representation that is regarded as abstract, invisible and bodiless, qualities associated with men and not women. It is my contention that in a patriarchal society, women are regarded as incapable of mastering the abstract discipline of music and of transcending their bodily form to enter into the realms of thought and meaning. This is why there are so few famous female musical composers and why the ones that do exist are not rewarded and recognized for their efforts. https://www.billboard.com/…/female-music-producers-industry…

I want to start, as I often do, with a Hindi film which I watched. I am talking about the huge international success which was recently released, Secret Superstar (2017). I will not go into the story too much, nor criticise the type of feminism which was portrayed in the film. Instead, I will concentrate on the relationship between femininity, the body and music in the film. There is a young girl in the film that becomes famous on YouTube for singing in burqa which covers her whole body, including her face. The burqa makes her “bodiless” and as invisible as it is possible to be without advanced technology. At this stage of her career, the girl is capable of composing her own music and songs. She doesn’t need any man to guide her voice. She is both singer and songwriter, player and composer. However, the girl doesn’t want to be bodiless and invisible, because that would mean that she remains anonymous. She wants to be known. This desire to be recognised as a person, as a singer, to enter the public stage and leave behind the private sphere of the domestic, leads the girl to a famous male composer. It also leads her to abandon the role of music composer, a being that is invisible and bodiless because he, and it is usually a he, usually stays behind the scenes. She then becomes the voice for the male music composer’s music and finds success. The girl is therefore led into the patriarchal music establishment and away from composing her own music because of her desire to become a body with a recognisable face, to be seen as a woman with a woman’s body. She leaves the realm of abstraction, invisibility and thought to become a performing body, the face of music rather than its “soul”. Such is the brand of “feminism” in Secret Superstar: a female’s desire can only be to perform as a body, to become a voice. She cannot become one with abstract thought, invisibility and the abstract and non-bodily representation of music.

In fact, if you watch Secret Superstar closely enough, you will find that the girl rebels against all forms of abstract thought. Her rebellion is chiefly conducted against her father, who is an engineer and relies on the abstract disciplines of maths. She also rebels against her education in maths and science. The young girl supports her uneducated mother over her educated father and leaves education to do so, running away from school secretly. She even effects a separation between her uneducated mother and her educated father (in the film’s defence, he is depicted as an abusive father and husband). Clearly, the girl does not wish to remain within the realm of thought. She wants blissful ignorance and to be seen as nothing more than a body, to be accepted in the realm of the body.

My speculation is that Secret Superstar reflects the existing reality of music in a patriarchal society; that there is a gendered play between the bodily performance of voice and the abstract and non-bodily performance of music. To enter onto the public stage in musical performance, the rules dictate that women have to be seen as bodies, not as minds. It is men that are celebrated as being of the mind and having rational “souls”. It is men that can give birth to music, which is, of course, related to maths (look up Pythagoras and his ideas about maths and music if you don’t believe me). Thus we have an explanation of why there are so few successful music composers in both India and the West. I have argued at length about the relationship between the body and non-bodily abstraction and their relationship to the private and public spheres throughout my writing and I believe it informs most aspects of the society that we live in. The body is therefore supremely important as a site from which to make the resistance against the forms that constrain us and the female body is, I think, the supreme form which can fight against the forces of concealment, invisibility, pretended abstraction and universality. There is a further speculation: that the music that we all listen to and enjoy is founded in a masculine mind set and worldview. The very nature of our listening and auditory enjoyment is founded in patriarchy and its conditions. Films like Secret Superstar can reveal exactly what the nature of that patriarchal sound is and how it operates, if only we watch carefully and learn. One thing is clear: such a sound hates synaesthesia since it separates listening and sight, music and the body.