CHENNAI: In May 2017, a group named the Women In Cinema Collective (WCC) was formed in Kerala, following the kidnapping and sexual assault of a well-known actor by a gang of men, which included another well-known actor. The survivor waived her right to anonymity in 2022 so that she could speak openly in the international press about her experience and about the need for systemic change.
Alongside the WCC, the Hema Committee headed by Justice K Hema (formerly of the Kerala High Court), was also formed. The Hema Committee conducted an investigation and submitted a 290-page report — a scanned, possibly leaked version is available for public viewing online — to the state government four-and-a-half years ago.
The report has finally been released, and with it, a landslide of allegations that implicate top actors, decry entrenched discrimination and misogyny in the Malayalam cinema industry and pose a serious and well-deserved threat to patriarchal society has come.
The report should not have been held back from release for as long as it was, but now that it has been published, its immediate effects are potent — and promising.
Something about the way that name after name — perpetrator after perpetrator — has come out calls to mind an incident from early 20th century Kerala, when a young woman named Kuriyedathu Thatri, who was married off as a child bride and later became a sex worker, was made to stand trial.
A caste law that forbade adultery by Namboodiri woman was used on her by her estranged husband, but Thatri turned it not just on him but on the social order itself — threatening even the King of Cochin. Over the course of seven months and two trials, Thatri recited the names of dozens of men who had assaulted her, used her services or with whom she had had consensual relationships.
She furnished graphic details which confirmed her familiarity with them, forcing them to be cross-examined. She was excommunicated, but not without taking down with her a long list of perpetrators. That was the last recorded use of the smarthavicharam trial.
I know: it all sounds familiar, and we don’t have to go back a century to know why. But to ask what the Hema Committee report will do that #MeToo couldn’t do enough may be a little myopic. Instead, we could perhaps see these flashpoints as being on a continuum.
Are things different today than they were at the time of the actor’s assault? Definitely: look at how many actors have come out against their (male) colleagues in the past few days, without precaution about their own privacy at times. Also, not so much: things may have changed in terms of people gaining the courage to speak up about what has happened to them, but those things are still happening.
Perhaps they won’t stop entirely; perhaps iniquity is a part of human nature, but we can hope to staunch its extent.
First, though, the extent of what-is needs to be revealed fully. It will be horrible to accept. It will also be necessary. We must remember too: industries reflect the societies they function within, and hyperfocus can also be deflection.