The arrest of Shweta Basu Prasad for her alleged involvement in a sex racket has proved troublesome for mass media because it has obscured the identity of the businessman who was arrested along with her. Soumabrata Chatterjee explores the media politics of ‘naming’ and ‘shaming’ the victim…..
Let us create a spectacle, shall we? A grand spectacle ! What are the ingredients required for such a spectacle? There will be a heroine, however not to dance around trees but to be a part of what we can call ‘victim shaming’. There will be an anti-hero but whose identity will be hidden because we do not want to participate in identity politics. But the woman’s name can be flaunted. Why? It is simply because she fits into the frame of the ‘fallen woman’. She is the damsel in utter distress. There will be heroes, yes in the plural. But we just need their gaze and moralistic viewpoints. Names are not required. Just a fuzzy mass of reviewers and a phallic symbol (the anti-hero) surrounding the woman who shall be ‘named’. Let us begin ….
The woman shall be named here as well. She is Shweta Basu Prasad. Just a normal 23-year old girl? No, let us give her some credentials. She is the famed child artist in films like ‘Makdee’ and ‘Iqbal’ and won a national award for the former. Yes, now her fall to ruins seems quite perfect. She was recently arrested (read ‘named’) in Hyderabad for being involved in a sex racket. Let us start the drama…
Since then what have we known about this fiasco? That her name is ‘Shweta Basu Prasad’, that her name is ‘Shweta Basu Prasad’ and that her name is ‘Shweta Basu Prasad’…. Leaving out other ‘insignificant’ details, it is her name that shines through mass media coverage.
Let us grab some headliners, shall we?
- The Times of India: ‘Makdee’ actor Shweta Basu Prasad caught in a prostitution racket. The “cute girl”(their words) who “charmed one and all” in her films is “in trouble”.
- Deccan Chronicle: Some “people” encouraged me to get into prostitution: Shweta.
- India Today: Shweta Basu Prasad: A talent gone awry.
- India TV: Shweta Basu Prasad: An uncensored story of diminishing courage.
- Hindustan Times: ‘Makdee, ‘Iqbal’ actor arrested for prostitution says she was short on money.
I could go on but that’s unnecessary. In Poetics, Aristotle terms ‘spectacle’ as the least important in his elements of drama. Yet, in our society where we thrive on images, the spectacle rules our minds. We remember the final test of Sachin, Dhoni’s six to win the World Cup, our tele-serials, melodrama, and the Sarada case. Our memory is sustained through the repetition of such spectacles. We are obsessed with visual culture and that is the reason why her face and her name has to repeated over and over again till it leaves an indelible impression on our minds.
Why is the businessman not named? Why are the people who ‘encouraged her’ and pimped her not named? She was showcased over and over again at the altar of journalistic objectivity.
We create narratives. We always do. That’s how we communicate. Journalism has to admit that the ‘truth-value’ it always boasts of is a mere sham. But it does not stop there… Journalism and mass media in general are interested in the art of bathos – it is how the exalted can be brought down to the commonplace to create an effect of shock. It is this shock-value that dictates journalism and not the objective search for an elusive truth. This is the reason why her name is so important because it sustains that meta-narrative of a ‘fallen woman’ whose talents are somehow wasted. We need to mark the woman so that we can identify her, caress her feelings, sympathise and ultimately come up with an elaborate truism which defines life through her experience. Whether it is because she is a woman can be debated. And, if we seem to lose that debate, then we inhabit a world not worth living for.
Note the last sentence I wrote. It is just that effect. Perusing her experience I come up with a narrative of melodrama, of humanity and survival which sums up the cultural anguish that is on sale these days. Yes, sensationalising is a part of journalism because it has to preserve itself. If it is equated with cinema as in both tell stories then it would lose that element of respect in the society. However, it is that insistent ‘victim shaming’ which proves that we need scapegoats in order to survive. Journalistic knowledge, like any other form of ‘knowledge’ has its limits and an ambivalent reference point. That I disregard the split between the person that I am and the journalist that I am is an oft-used trope to prove my objectivity. But the lens I use to interpret a certain incident, the words I choose, my educational background – everything smacks of a deep-rooted bias. It is imperative that we understand that personal can never be separated from the political. The political (in this case it is the Shweta Basu Prasad incident) is never a rarefied realm. It is intimately created and nurtured through our ideological stances. That she is named and the Mumbai businessman is not, points to a crisis of representation at the heart of journalistic practice. If there exists a term such as ‘journalistic ethics’ then it has to encounter its own fallacy and be auto-critical.
Moving on, it is interesting to interrogate the politics behind such a move. Leaving out the usual money-grubbing tactics, we need to move into the realm of the psychological. Laura Mulvey in her celebrated essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ argues that the woman is often presented as the object ‘to be looked at’ rather than the bearer of the gaze (the art of looking at, ‘perceiving’) which is usually masculine. Putting forward the idea of scopophilia which is basically the act of deriving pleasure from looking, she elucidates that the masculine gaze often objectifies the woman and her various movements creating a private theater of fantasies. However she lists another instance where the image of the anti-hero (here the ‘un-publicised’ journalists or the businessman) is identified with. In the first case, the ‘active’ male (who is not only the anti-hero but also the viewer) and the ‘passive’ female are locked in a never-ending spectacle. In the second case, which is a bit more complicated, the viewer identifies with the male figure on screen and demands the ‘demystification’ or ‘fetishisation’ of the female figure. In this case, the ‘demystification’ part is where she is named and included in tales of how the once- glamorous Bollywood star is in a shambles. The ‘fetishisation’ bit is curiously ‘before the event’ or the beginning of the story. It was when she won the national award or when she acted in hit films and thus became that unattainable ‘star’ whom everyone looked up to. The fetishisation led to her ultimate demsytification.
After studying Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, where the protagonist names the cannibal (‘Friday’) in order to domesticate him and make him a servant, my professor told us that naming is having a form of control over who is thus named. This is not to say that Shweta Basu Prasad cannot speak for herself or that she has to depend on the mass media to propagate her message. It is just that we haven’t developed the tools of listening intently. We represent and re-represent, and speak instead of her.
Shweta Basu Prasad. Is it just her name and her shame which is left of her ‘being’? Or, is there something else?
