Art and Propoganda

Last evening I saw a play on an issue I feel rather passionately about - violence against women. When asked after the play what I thought about it I sort of lost my voice. Such an important issue - so how could I say I didn't think much of the play?

This post is hard to write. It's very hard to criticise any effort to give a voice to these issues of domestic violence and the silence around them. It's hard to criticise artists who are working towards the goal of empowering women to speak their stories. But the feelings of disappointment - and 'gulp' distaste linger on and so I try to sort them out by writing.

The story is about a young Indian woman married three years who comes to her mother's home in the middle of the night after her husband beats her. The mother, a widow lives with her elder sister a single woman. The mother insists the girl should return to her husband and the aunt insists she should make a police complaint. The other two characters in the plot are the husbands sister who comes to take the battered woman back home and the friend who stands up for the rights of women. The two other ghosts in the story - men who are only talked about but don't appear on stage - are the battering abusive husband and the father who turns out to be a rapist.

I had issues with so many things about the play but I will only focus on a few:

- The biggest issue I had with the characters was that the only woman who really championed women's rights, the friend, was a white woman. She was written in almost as a saviour and I wondered are we in India still so internally colonised that we need our saviour to be white? 

- The aunt  began as a strong character who did not think much of marriage or men. But this attitude was explained by her being raped by her sister's husband. Are women only independent and single because they have had an adverse encounter like this? 

- The dialogue showed Indian women and society in a rather bad light - with dialogue like 'return to your husband because divorced women don't get invited to parties.' I am unsure what lines like that convey beyond a shallowness of the writer in approaching the complex cultural conditioning and inner conflicts of individuals in the story. The play stayed at the surface level, telling events but never exploring the depths.

- The two men mentioned in the play are a battering husband who flirts with his wifes best friend and the rapist man who gets away with it. Don't men come in shades that are more positive?

I know that art can be used as a tool to shed light on societal wrongs and correct them.  I know artists play an important role in changing the problems in cultures. Yet with art that is so heavy handed and simplistic I wonder what message finally remains with the audience. I guess that is the question that is most important to me as I grapple with my own characters. I tend to lecture on about issues I feel deeply about too, some of my dialogues when I write them feel more like an academic thesis - but that's in my first and second drafts. I do hope that by the third draft I can bring in depth and subtlety and the finished product will be more than just propaganda.

It's been a long gap between posts. I've been a bit busy and a bit lost. Perhaps emerging from the neurotic chaos that this combination creates?