For countless women across the country, Holi isn’t a festival associated with colours; ditto for countless men across the country; to be sure, for a large population of India, Holi is the great molestation festival where men have their way with women from their family or their neighbourhood or complete strangers. To them, colours offer the perfect camouflage. There is an outpouring of unwanted physical affection, which, in ordinary terms, is understood as molestation or sexual assault.
Most women don’t report the matter to the police perhaps because the entire episode is shrouded in a special kind of ambiguity where transgression of one’s personal and sexual space is more often than not explained away or justified by phrases such as: bura na mano holi hai.
Growing up in Delhi, I lost count of the number of times I saw women, young and old, being molested on Holi, often by their family members, often by their neighbours, often by their friends or relatives. For a long time I thought this was the done thing on Holi. Many of the older men I spoke to tried to convince me that what I misconstrued as molestation was actually a man’s way of getting a girl or a woman to overcome her shyness and play Holi.
“They want us to do it but are too shy to say it,” was how someone I knew, I can’t recall who, put it. I think I was six or seven years old. It was only in my teenage years that I was able to comprehend what was going on and the idea completely disgusted me.
Holi came back to haunt me when I heard that the government had decided to ban the documentary called India’s Daughter about the Nirbhaya rape case. Ironically, the decision came two days before Holi. The government did not take the decision unilaterally. There were many voices against the release of the documentary on Indian television, many of them important female voices, which argued that showing the interview of the rapist might encourage men to repeat the offence with someone else.
There were many voices against the ban as well. A number of MPs, including the outspoken Javed Akhtar, argued that there was nothing to fear in the documentary and that often members of Parliament make statements far more virulent that the ones made by the rapist in the documentary. In the end, the government decided to ban the documentary. For me the situation was tinged with dark humour.
The government that was banning a documentary for a variety of reasons, including the harm it might do to India’s image as a tourist destination, had again been a mute spectator to the great Indian molestation carnival because bura na mano holi hai. Both the documentary and the festival of Holi reveal an aspect of the Indian male psyche that makes us uncomfortable. I think someone should make a documentary about the Holi molestations by simply shooting women recounting their Holi experiences and shooting men playing Holi. I wonder what excuse the government will employ to ban that documentary.
