In her third Hindi film, The Rapist, veteran filmmaker-actress Aparna Sen shines a much-needed light on the horrifying prevalence of sexual violence in India.
Konkona Sen Sharma, actress and daughter of Aparna Sen, stars as Naina Mishra, a New Delhi university professor teaching criminal psychology. When the film opens, we see the Hindu character very much in love with her Muslim husband, Aftab (Arjun Rampal), also a university professor, and we follow their challenges to conceive. We barely see the rapist, Prasad Singh (Tanmay Dhanania) before the crime in a clever misdirection, only meeting him in passing as the cowardly sidekick of the slum gang leader Latif (Chetan Sharma).
Naina and her colleague Malini (Anindita Bose) visit the slum to help in the case of a woman who has committed infanticide following her shaming for giving birth to four daughters. While we’re still processing the trauma of this scene, the pair are themselves viciously sexually assaulted at a bus stop where Malini is murdered and Naina is left with shocking physical and emotional injuries on top of the humiliation that starts with the first question police ask her: “Are you a hooker?”
Then Naina discovers she is pregnant, and the film sensitively deals with the threat this poses to her marriage and the cultural factors at work in a country that has looked the other way for too long. Previously both avowed opponents of the death penalty, Aftab suddenly just wants to watch the decided death sentence carried out on his wife’s rapist while Naina is burning with questions to justify what happened to her and decides to interview Prasad as part of a professional study into the mindset and motivations of men who rape. She learns about the perpetrator’s own horrific upbringing and gets more than she bargained for after asking the question, ‘why?’
The celebrated filmmaker has described the film in one interview as a “hard-hitting drama that examines how much of society is responsible for producing rapists.” But Sen also admits in the same interview to not giving up on change in India as strong laws are beginning to be introduced “so women are more willing to stand up to their rapists today.”