An Exploration of To Kill a Tiger to Address India’s Rape Culture

The documentary To Kill a Tiger, directed by Nisha Pahuja, traverses around the life of a 13- 13-year-old gangrape survivor from Jharkhand, India, to showcase her and her family’s struggles to seek justice. Among many issues that the family faces in their fight for justice against the rapists, the documentary foregrounds the perspective of the villagers, NGO members, victim’s family members, policemen etc., to address the rigid rape culture prevalent in Indian villages.

This study analyses the various issues around rapes in India that the documentary questions, like the marry-the-rapist norm, secondary victimization, power politics, and the myth of the ‘lost honour’ of the victim, among others. It also pinpoints the changing narratives of stories of sexual violence by juxtaposing the documentary with two older popular films in India that show how rape victims compromise in life to marry the rapists and eventually live happily. The films Pudhea Paadhai, written and directed by R. Parthiban in Tamil, and Raja ki Aayegi Baarat, written and directed by Ashok Gaikwad in Hindi, will be discussed to identify this change. This research also attempts to discuss how the award-winning film To Kill a Tiger is influencing the collective memory of its viewers by foregrounding the dominant rape culture of the country by employing the concept of collective memory by Maurice Halbwachs.

Keywords: To Kill A Tiger, Collective Memory, Rape Culture, Memory Studies