ANGRY INDIAN GODDESSES 97
Derrida writes, “the origin of the legal subject, and notably of penal law, is
commercial law; it is the law of commerce, debt, the market, the exchange between
things, bodies and monetary signs, with their general equivalent and their surplus
value, their interest” (Derrida in Butler 2014). Butler notes that the Derridean
formulation points at “a principle of equivalence according to which a relation is set
up ‘between the crime and the punishment, between the injury and the price to be
paid’”. She further argues, “Punishment thus becomes a form of subjectivation: in
punishing the criminal for having inflicted an injury/incurred a debt, a subject is
formed who punishes her or himself for having failed to be calculable” (Butler 2014).
Butler further thinks through this relation formed between the creditor and debtor,
wherein the party incurring the damages assumes the role of the creditor, and the
creditor,
is granted a psychic reimbursement … Instead of a thing, instead of
something or someone, he will be given some pleasure, some enjoyment
[jouissance], a feeling of well-being or greater well-being (Wohlgefuehl),
he will be given a pleasure that consists in the voluptuous pleasure of
causing the other to suffer … ‘faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire,’ that
is, of doing harm for the pleasure of it … In place of some equivalent,
something or someone, one grants in return, as payment, the pleasure of
doing violence (Derrida in Butler 2014).
The film’s approval of retributive violence sets up an economic, creditor-debtor
pairing between the women and the men. The film openly shows an absolute lack of
faith in the legal penal procedures enacted by the Indian judicial system, because the
system ‘slut-shames’ and tacitly endorses a pandemic of rape culture in its treatment
of cases of sexual harassment against women, requiring the women to take up arms
themselves. The justice delivered by the women taking control validates their titular
description as angry Indian goddesses – the tragedy, riddled with human caprices,
transforms them into excessive figures who shoulder the mighty mission of bringing
the wrongdoers to task. As Mad explains in one instance in the film, the difference
between the goddess Durga and goddess Kali is that Durga is the calm, beatific one,