ANGRY INDIAN GODDESSES 99
harassment and violence are conveniently erased in the light of a narrative of
veneration.
Bose, responding to a controversial 2013 advert campaign8 to create awareness about
domestic violence which used pictures of Hindu goddesses (albeit bruised to indicate
violence), wrote of the misguided messages that the deification of women sent to both
men and women. Women receive signals that they ought to behave only within the
acceptable parameters of dignified, desexualised patriarchal social mores; men learn
that women are to be respected only within the purview of these stifling roles. “So if
we send men”, Bose (2013) writes, “the signal that we should worship women as
(docile, happy Hindu) goddesses, and/or should not hit them or kick them, we are
telling them to consign and condemn their women to safe oblivion. And we are also
telling them that any time their women fall short of their assigned roles as domestic
goddesses, they can be abused for that original sin.”
Unabashed loftiness – an extraordinary idealism that erases difference and practicality
– is the film’s undoing. Its failure is largely a function of its insistence on depicting
solidarity as a transcendent, abstractly uplifting phenomenon that triggers the
incarnation of the characters into goddesses rather than real people. The film forgets
that solidarity is also rife with human problems. It needs continuous negotiation and
accommodation of differences of context and personas to be ultimately rewarding.
The one redeeming moment that acknowledges this notion, allowing its goddesses the
pertinence of human doubt, is Lakshmi’s final tribute to Joanna. She removes the
length of black thread she has tied around her big toe to serve as a reminder never to
rest till she has avenged her brother, and swears to alter the nature of her battle. It is
not a promise to cease raging against the machine, but a promise not to stop living
whilst the battle continues.
8
The depiction of the bruised goddesses raised concerns from Indian feminists. One way of reading
the campaign was to understand it as a critique of the deification of women, but the other (all too
plausible) reading was that it appeared to be implying that the deification of women in the portrayal
was absolutely necessary in order to legitimise the fight for justice against battery and brutality. In a
sense, in order to be considered legitimate recipients of justice, women necessarily had to perform
assigned patriarchal roles stripped of sexuality and agency.