Can marital rape be addressed through humour? Can observations on the crime that is still not recognised as one in India be delivered against a canned laughter track? A new episode of Girliyapa, one of the many online series produced by The Viral Fever digital channel, boldly ventures into treacherous territory under the title How I Raped Your Mother. If the name of the short film, written by actor and writer Ratnabali Bhatacharjee, won’t encourage a click or two, nothing else will.
The sketch is aimed at a middle-class viewership in deep denial. How I Raped Your Mother opens in a drawing room where a young bride is explaining her decision to leave her husband to her extended family, including three aunts called “Masi, Masi and Masi.” Her family members (both genders) fall off the sofas when she explains her agony. This is not rape but “intense lovemaking”, and the “17th shade of 50 Shades of Grey”, a female relative tells her. Stop protesting so much, you are a “kanya, not Kanhaiya”, a male relative advises. Claps resound when he complains that the internet has corrupted the mind of women, and Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi’s assertion that marital rape cannot be applied to the Indian context is brought up in the conversation. Then the husband walks in, cocksure about his place in this family and in Indian society in general.
Girliyapa has had its hits and misses. This sketch misses the chance to explore the issue of consent deeply enough, but the caustic humour about willful denial hits home. The inevitable conclusion, played to canned laughter yet again, is actually a tragedy that is played across countless homes in India night after night.
