In India, 90% of rapes go unreported. That is one of the startling statistics included in To Kill A Tiger, Nisha Pahuja’s Oscar contender.
Pahuja’s film focuses on one case that was reported. A 13-year-old girl in Jharkhand, in rural India, suffered a horrific sexual assault. Her father Ranjit, a poor farmer, demanded justice on her behalf. In doing so, he pitted himself against an unsympathetic justice system. His family was ostracised. He was threatened and intimidated. His local ward member gave him scant support. Nonetheless, inspired by his daughter’s courage, he refused to give up the fight.
This was not the story Pahuja originally set out to tell. The Toronto-based director spent several years working on what was at first intended as a much broader film about toxic masculinity in India. She had been following the work of an NGO that was running gender sensitisation projects in Jharkhand. Ranjit was one of the men in the programme. When his daughter was attacked, the NGO offered him support. At that stage, the director expected the rape to be just one strand of the documentary.
“I didn’t actually realise until the edit. It was two years into the editing process that we pivoted, switched gears and decided that we were just going to focus on this story.”
It clicked with the director that Ranjit and his daughter warranted a movie of their own.
“What happens is that you start off with an idea and you get very attached to that idea, especially when you spend years pursuing it,” she reflects on why it was such a wrench to re-think the project. “Part of it was a resistance to letting something old go that you had become very attached to.”
One of the paradoxes about the documentary is that it started as a study of toxic masculinity and yet its main protagonist, the farmer Ranjit, is a sensitive and courageous figure, a long way removed from stereotypes of the bullying, chauvinistic patriarch.
Early on, Pahuja worried that Ranjit wouldn’t be a sufficiently dynamic figure to carry the documentary. He’s a quiet and self-effacing man who speaks very slowly. However, he has an endlessly expressive face. He can’t hide his emotions. “When I started to look at the material over a few months, I realised he is extraordinarily compelling because everything is playing out on his face…he has a terrible poker face because he just reveals everything,” she reflects of her protagonist. “He is very honest. He doesn’t hide.”
The documentary was shot by Mrinal Desai, the director’s partner and frequent collaborator. Pahuja also pays tribute to her editor Mike Munn (whose other credits include Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell). “He [Munn] has a real sense of when to use close-ups…you follow the person and the rhythm of that person.”
A few months ago, the director went back to India to show the film (which is being given an extensive impact campaign) to some of the people involved. The ward member has now seen it. “What he said after watching the film was that he was ashamed of himself. He felt that the community needed to see the film so they could see what they had put the family through.”
Pahuja moved to Canada when she was a child but has spent many years making films in India and believes she has “a pretty good read” of the place. “I have a certain kind of cultural understanding and, I think, a relatively nuanced understanding.” She also has a strong team of collaborators based in India. They try not to be judgemental.
“Our approach is always to try to understand how people think and to give them the space to express their opinions.”
Ask if she feels that the country is changing as far as attitudes toward sexual violence are concerned and she gives a measured but equivocal response.
“The aspect of society I feel comfortable talking about is gender because that is my focus. The reason this film does resonate for people around the world, and women particularly, is that women realise wherever you are, your body is a contested space. You’re not safe. We really all feel that – every single woman who watches this film. It’s really important not to see this as an Indian problem [but] in terms of gender and things improving for women, without a doubt they are!”
She doesn’t believe that simply increasing prison sentences will deal with the underlying attitudes that cause the sexual violence. “You just continue to put a band aid on a gaping wound.”
To Kill A Tiger doesn’t deal directly with India’s caste system but Pahuja believes that audiences, especially those in India, will immediately pick up on “the caste dynamics that are in play.”
“I felt that we were doing it visually. When you go to the court and look at the people that are waiting for justice in those hallways, they’re all impoverished. Every single person you see in that courtroom, everyone is poor. The lawyers are obviously middle class or upper middle class and they are well educated. That divide is just there.”
Pahuja believes that one reason Ranjit wanted the film crew to accompany him was that “he understood because of his caste, because of his class, we gave him a certain kind of legitimacy. The lawyers were going to have to take this poor farmer seriously who they would have probably dismissed outright had we not been filming.”
It’s now seven years since the assault on Ranjit’s daughter (referred to by a pseudonym in the film) took place. She is in college. Pahuja remains fiercely protective of her and won’t share many details of her life but she appears to be doing well.
To Kill A Tiger, made through Pahuja’s company Notice Pictures, has already won multiple awards at festivals from Toronto to Palm Springs. Now, the director already has another project nearing completion.
“We are actually making the film on masculinity that I started all those years ago,” Pahuja says of the very long gestating doc, called Send Us Your Brother, which is now in post-production. The title comes from a song women would sing when a new born girl was about to be killed. Many families want sons, not daughters – hence the continuing problem of female infanticide.
“That really, really struck with me. This is the heart of the gender problem in India, this sense of male preference, the need for sons and the idea that a boy is worth more than a girl…”
