To Kill a Tiger
Late at night in the rural Indian village of Bero a young woman known as Kiran (not her real name) and her father Ranjit separately and together experienced one of the worst events that can befall a family when Kiran is accosted by several village locals and violently raped. It’s a reality which, as director Nisha Pahuja states at the beginning of To Kill a Tiger, is committed 10,000 times per year in India; an epidemic of sexual assault the country’s national and regional governments have been at a singular loss to affect in the face of local and systemic apathy.
It’s one thing to see that calmly and directly written on a screen; it’s something else to see it play out in grueling reality over the course of years as justice is sought. Rather than try to move on and forget the assault Ranjit and his wife go directly to the authorities seeking justice, and quickly learning how great the obstacles to that are. Though the three perpetrators are easily discovered and arrested, no one in authority or even in the community is interested in what justice would require. Instead, Ranjit is pushed to marry his daughter to one of her assailants in order to reconfigure the attack as a marital dispute. Worse than Ranjit’s very logical cry “why would she want to marry someone who has assaulted her?” is the deafening silence which follows as the local government ministers clearly have no idea how to approach the problem beyond ‘get rid of it.’
Refusing to take the easy way out Ranjit pushes forward in a quest for justice. What he finds is incompetence and apathy in a staggering degree with a local government which falls back into byzantine rules (Ranjit can’t bring a case himself, a specific magistrate must do it and do it in specific hours on specific days, etc.) to insulate itself from what it and the populace around it see as an uncomfortable nuisance. The perpetrators themselves recognize the reality they are in, feeling emboldened enough to threaten those watching, as if their acquittal were a foregone conclusion.
In the face of this Ranjit and Kiran’s only choices are to quit and continue forward. As much as Tiger is focused on the systemic rot that makes such actions possible it is also a low key portrait in courage particularly of Ranjit as he presses forward with his case despite the stress, the wish that it wasn’t happening and a growing drinking problem. It is real courage, not the performed version of drama because it is without heroism recognizing it is not needed. All that is needed the will to continue on even as his long time friends and neighbors, and the government itself, try to just make everything go away.
As the village increasingly turns against Ranjit and his quest, demanding that he think of the villages reputation first and how people are talking about them because of the trial, unfortunate commonality with the worst of humanity raises its head. Similar to Ophul’s Hotel Terminus and its discovery of how many local French were perfectly happy to let Nazi collaborators return to their lives because “it was so long ago” and “why dredge up old memories,” the main goal of the everyday people is to put everything behind them and forget about it, not realizing that in their zeal to do that they are committing a sin almost as vile as the initial crime.
Similar to Ophuls, the filmmakers find themselves sucked into their own film as the populace also turns on them for daring to shine a light on Kiran’s plight, blaming those making noise (rather than the rapists themselves) for causing so much trouble to the point that filmmakers themselves must decide whether to go on and even offer cover to Ranjit before his final confrontation with the judge.
To Kill a Tiger is an intense, damning portrait of both society which supports violence and the gentile realistic bravery needed to combat it. A must see.
9 out of 10.
Directed by Nisha Pahuja.