98 C. S. BHAGYA
whereas Kali is her enraged Other, the wreaker of violence and harbinger of bloody justice. The difference between the women before the tragedy and after is the difference, the film alleges, between mortality and self-righteously angered divinity.
The difference is also between justice and law. The fallibility of the law is not a forgivable vulnerability. Justice invariably exceeds the very human and structural limitations of law and lawgivers, the film appears to ponderously declare. To arrive at justice, something greater needs to prevail: the resilience of the women and their tenacity in persisting in their thankless combat for better lives, and the occasional radical, violent, systemic rupture— such as the murders portrayed. These supposedly denote the concentration of the diffuse, ever-present, rage of womankind for the crimes committed against them historically by patriarchy; a rage sublimated in the form of the killings.
The title and its consequent thematic treatment in the film are already riddled with problems. The film simply takes for granted the process of apotheosization 7 of women in mainstream Indian culture without attempting to demystify the implications of such processes. The idea that women ought to be revered and respected is uninhibitedly touted as a response to accusations of the socio-cultural ethos of the country as one that endorses rape culture. A common riposte to the accusation involves flaunting the rich pantheon of( problematically, solely Hindu) goddesses – like Durga, Saraswati and Lakshmi – as indisputable evidence for the fabrication of the existence of a rape culture that tacitly enables the patriarchal victimisation of women in all spheres of social life. Such an argument, by deploying the feeble buffer of veneration and deification of women, deflects a serious confrontation of the problem. It denies the women in question their identities and politics, turning them into mute cultural figures to be reckoned with from a distance. Consequently, women are stripped of agency, desire and sexuality. They are denied the voice to express experiences contrary to this culture; experiences of abuse,
7
While, generally, the process of apotheosization would be understood as a process of raising someone to the status of a deity / to idolize, more specifically, within the referred context, apotheosization refers to the process of casual deification of women in society in the form of symbolic veneration. Interesting but too distracting from the main text.