“What is seen as rightful social and sexual behaviour has been cultivated over millennia — not just months and years — in a familiar social space. We could then ask why film-makers are not telling us that. Why are they so insistent on showing this act of gendered violence?” asks V. Geetha, feminist historian and activist. The recently released ‘Gargi’, directed by Gautham Ramachandran, was critically acclaimed for how it tackled the subject of sexual assault, as was its lead actor Sai Pallavi, who plays the daughter of one of the men accused in the gang rape of a minor. But the film also brought up familiar issues like the voyeuristic visualisation of sexual violence, conventional narratives around how gendered violence occurs, as well as imagining the case within the framework of our existing criminal justice system. During an in-depth conversation, V. Geetha spoke to us about the choices film-makers settle on to handle such systemic issues — especially when their own experiences are removed from them — the urgent need to engage with feminist scholarship on cinema, why the rape-revenge genre must be looked at with more nuance and the stereotypes that emerge in these portrayals. “You don't need to remind anyone that women have a bad deal in a generally patriarchal and misogynistic culture. But how we are socialised into gendered beings is seldom part of the way film is structured when it shows an act of sexual violence,” she says. Speaking of the pervasive trope of “stranger danger” in the filmography of rape in Indian cinema, she also expands on the casteist nature of such stereotyping and the inability of film-makers to reckon with how caste is “constitutive of the social”. “The larger issue is that there's a charge put on the upper-caste girl, that she’d better ‘stay with her own kind’. And if she doesn't, she must ask herself what she has done wrong, which makes it as if she's got to constantly guard herself.” Full conversation at the link in bio. (CW: contains descriptions of sexual and caste violence) Interview: @shrutijn6891 Illustration: @mallikachandra __ #VerveDialogues #IndianCinema #Gargi