The silence over abusive marriages in reel and real life

The veteran actor sat alone with a woman friend in the last row of a nearly empty multiplex for Hamari Adhuri Kahani (HAK). Her smoker’s hoarse cackle could be heard loudly across the hall. “Who writes these lines?” she kept asking. Yet, after the movie, she was all praise for Vidya Balan for portraying the pain of a woman trapped in a loveless, abusive marriage. “That was the only saving grace of the film. Being trapped like that can make you feel so stifled and life itself can seem meaningless,” she says. “Though hamstrung by the poorly written film, I think Vidya captured that very well.”

But wasn’t the actor herself once married to a celebrated, ‘sensitive’ poet? “That’s the public persona. People can often be diabolically different in their private lives. Marriage for me was more a bed of thorns than roses,” she says, recounting how her husband felt embarrassed by her. “I struggled with my Hindi and couldn’t speak or understand Urdu.

He’d be petrified of me opening my mouth at public gatherings or even when people came visiting. He had married me for my looks and expected me to be the dumb doll. When I raised my voice against this, he would slap and abuse me often,” she remembers bitterly. “More than physical violence, the mental harassment and the feeling of having lost my independence left me feeling hollow. He purposely cast my rival in his pet project to put me down. When I defied him by accepting a big banner film without consulting him, he got violent. I knew I had to leave. Even though he tried to use my one-year-old as blackmail, I knew I had to leave even if it meant leaving without her.” A four-decade-old wound seems to have opened up. Fighting tears, she bites her lower lip and looks away.
 

Manisha Koirala in Agni Sakshi

The real and reel

It’s a story that finds repeated echo in an India where domestic violence is accepted and sometimes even condoned by a gender polarised society, where marriage is the institutional framework that legitimises the status of a wife as the lesser, unequal partner. Statistics bear this out. According to the third National Family Health Survey (2005-06), 40% of married women between the ages of 15 to 49 years have suffered spousal physical, sexual or emotional violence. Add to this, the fact that most cases of domestic violence don’t even get reported and the picture that emerges is truly horrific.

The plight of Vasudha (Vidya Balan) in HAK or even Neelam Mehra (Shefali Shah) and her daughter Ayesha (played by Priyanka Chopra) in Dil Dhadakne Do (DDD), who don’t suffer outright physical abuse but are consigned to the margins of marital relationships where they are viewed as inconsequential, may have led to very different outcomes for both films at the box office. But one thing is certain. The two films have brought the focus sharply on to the suffering of women who endure both physical and mental abuse and continue to hold on to a marriage due to societal pressures and prejudices.

Addressing a gathering soon after special screening for women at a South Mumbai multiplex, Balan said, “I don’t know anybody facing domestic violence personally. Yet it’s true that it is something many women from all walks of life face. Just because it isn’t spoken of, you think this may not be happening.” “When I read the script I kept wondering why Vasudha (her character) puts up with abuse. My character in HAK is of a traditional woman who believes that she is her husband’s property. She never asks why he controls her life and how he treats her.”

In the rarefied, upper class world that the characters of DDD inhabit, mother and daughter finally verbalise their angst at the marriages they have been tied to – though with different results. While Neelam Mehra makes peace with her husband, her daughter decides to finally take her life into her own hands. When her husband tries to physically force her to get off the ship and continue with the loveless marriage, even her patriarchal father (Anil Kapoor) is forced to react.

Duniya Na Mane

The time warp
“Despite all our talk of advancement and progress, on the ground little has changed for women,” says Flavia Agnes, a fierce advocate of gender equality and a source of support for many fighting abuse, violence or worse. “Even when the woman is all bloodied with violence, everyone from her parents to relatives, neighbours, religious priests and even the courts want her to reconcile. Except for the victim, everybody and his monkey seem to have an opinion on what she should do with her life.”

She should know. She put up with daily abuse for several years and went through the same experience. “Where had you been? Who had you been with? Who had come home?,” she’d be constantly asked while being battered verbally, physically and mentally. She had two daughters and a son, who suffered immeasurably with what was going on at home. “He would kick me in the belly and push me around even when I was pregnant, never showing any mercy. It’s a miracle that my children and I survived.”

Like Agnes and the veteran actor who broke off with her poet husband, actor Shweta Tiwari lived for nearly a decade with her violent husband, Raja Chaudhary, before separating in 2007. “When I look back, I wonder at how I made it through what was the toughest and worst phase of my life. Through it all, I had to keep working to keep the home running and pay my lawyers to keep the legal battle going,” remembers Tiwari, who is currently making waves in the serial Begusarai. “I was shooting for Kasauti Zindagi Kay in those days and conditions were so bad that I would try to hide from the media and my ex-husband too. Though the call time for the shoot would be 6am, I’d often make it to the sets a whole 12 hours later. I wonder how Ekta Ma’am (Ekta Kapoor) dealt with this. Not only was I never shouted at, but both Ekta Ma’am and Shobha Ma’am went out of their way to support me through my ordeal. They had kept two people, lawyer Sandeep Singh Siddhu and a producer Saaketh, with me 24x7, just to take care of me.”

She remembers the excruciating guilt of feeling inadequate, that she wasn’t being able to hold the marriage together. “Like many violent husbands, Raja too would beat me mercilessly and then offer apologies and explanations, often blaming his drunkenness. I would be too embarrassed and confused about the domestic violence, fearing how this would impact my daughter.” 

“Even when I finally walked out on him in 2007, he would constantly harass and threaten me. Police had to extern him in 2011 when he barged into my house and attempted to harm me and our daughter,” she adds.

Preity Zinta in 'Heaven on Earth'

Calling it quits 

Today, she has put that all behind her, has remarried and is doing well both personally and professionally. But she admits candidly, “My mistake was accepting what was going on for far too long. While it’s not easy, women should assert themselves and take charge of their lives before the damage is irreversible.” 

Her namesake Shweta Singh should know what irreversible damage is. This qualified pilot and the daughter of a retired brigadier, who grew up in a protected, fairly conservative environment, had no idea what she was getting into when she got married to Rahul Mahajan in August 2006. 

Trouble came calling soon after the couple returned from their Seychelles honeymoon. “They had gone to Tirupati. In the hotel, a trivial argument saw Rahul flare up and give her the filthiest of gaalis. Accusing her of destroying his life, he kept banging and flinging things, leaving her traumatised,” remembers a family friend. “The marriage, which lasted only two-and-a-half months, has left her with nothing but harrowing, painful memories,” the friend recounts. Apparently, the last of the violent episodes led to the breaking point. “Rahul was in Delhi when Shweta and he were out with two of his friends. Tired, she wanted to go back home. Rahul wanted to be out longer with his friends and began first arguing, then hitting Shweta in the car. He grabbed her hair, slapped her and began banging her head on the car seat. Even when she huddled over to protect herself, he kept punching her on the back.”

A remorseful Rahul later tried to make amends, but this too was a scary experience for Shweta. “He kept telling her to chop off his head and kill him for what he’d done. Shweta then didn’t want anything to do with him.” Incidentally, Rahul’s violent outbursts and a similar pattern of domestic abuse saw his second marriage to Dimpy Ganguly after the TV reality show Rahul Ka Swayamvar, also end in less than a year.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in 'Provoked' 

Staying trapped

These are the celebrated cases of women who have walked out, but there are millions out there who don’t. So, why do women stay trapped in a cruel, abusive violent loveless marriage? “The answer to that lies with our society,” explains Agnes. “From early childhood the girl child is conditioned into believing that marriage, setting up home and having children is the ultimate goal of life. The collecting of a trousseau and dowry have been romanticised to an extent that they have become indelible parts of the larger conscience of women in this country. Any girl who tries to suggests otherwise has to face huge pressure and struggle.”

According to her, if the marriage doesn’t work out for whatever reason, society is quick to point fingers at the woman for not trying hard enough. “That pressure for it to all look neat, tidy, lovey-dovey can be intense and killing. Women from the lower strata are better off in a way since they have fewer such pressures. As equal, if not higher wage earners, they can choose to make a clean sweep easier. With the middle class and those above, parents are to blame as they often convince the girl to give up employment and career for marriage and kids. If things don’t work out, the same parents who clipped her wings don’t want to support her and she does not know where to go.”

It’s a scenario poignantly captured in DDD when the industrialist patriarch of the Mehra family, Kamal (Anil Kapoor), asks his wife Neelam why she didn’t walk out on him. “Because she has nowhere to go to,” their son Kabir (Ranveer Singh) interjects in response.

Early ‘80s star Rati Agnihotri, who was married to architect Anil Virwani and has filed a case against him for abuse, sheds more light on the ‘nowhere else to go syndrome’. “I would worry about how this would affect my son Tanuj and kept up with regular domestic abuse for three decades,” she says. “He would always hit me on my feet and back to ensure that no one noticed it. I too, in what seems foolish now, seemed to have been sucked into victimhood. I’d play the perfect wife, concealing bruises with make-up and trying to keep up the charade of a happy family.”

According to her, “I believed in marriage and love. I married Anil against my parents’ wishes and like most girls, dreamt of a picture-perfect life. For all these years I’d hoped and prayed, but things never changed.”
After suffering some reverses in business, her architect husband began losing his temper more often. “The violence got more and more vicious.” In March, she remembers how he began beating her up mercilessly. “I’m in my mid-50s. ‘At this age, do I deserve to be treated worse than an animal?’, I kept asking myself, and something in me snapped. I had had enough. I left that house and later filed a complaint of domestic abuse with the Worli police. It was difficult, but strangely quite empowering.”

Still sore with sections of the media, which raised questions about her motives, she asks: “Do these people know how tough it was for me to speak up after keeping quiet for 30 years?” The veteran actor we began with must be so proud of Rati’s courage. Perhaps she’s already lit up and cackling as she reads this...