In March, Israeli-born filmmaker Leslee Udwin was in Delhi attending a screening of her controversial new documentary, “India’s Daughter,” when a journalist ran up to her and warned that the Indian government had just banned her movie. There was, as well, a warrant out for the director’s arrest, the reporter said — “She told me I should get the hell out of the country,” Udwin said in an interview from London, where she has lived for almost four decades.
“India’s Daughter” tells the story of the 2012 infamous rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, a 23-year-old medical student who worked nights at a call center to fund her education. She hoped eventually to open a hospital in her ancestral village.
Pandey’s life was cut short on Dec. 16, 2012, when, having just completed her medical exams, she went to see the film “Life of Pi” with a male friend and thereafter boarded a charter bus with him to return home.
“India’s Daughter” recounts how five men and a 17-year-old boy brutally raped Pandey on the moving bus, while beating her and ripping out her intestines. They finally threw her out of the vehicle, and Pandey died of her injuries about two weeks later, prompting weeks of unprecedented demonstrations by citizens across India, as well as global scrutiny of the country’s treatment of women.
The film includes a shocking interview with one of Pandey’s rapists, Mukesh, who is now appealing his death sentence and who was eager to appear on camera because he believes he did nothing wrong, that “a girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” and that decent girls don’t roam about at night with men who aren’t family members. One of Mukesh’s attorneys echoes these sentiments and goes so far as to say that, should he discover that his daughter had engaged in an illicit affair, he would douse her in petrol and burn her alive.
And so Indian officials banned the film, stating that the movie would cause public disorder, among other allegations. “They said the film would incite violence,” Udwin said. “But I think it’s literally that they don’t want to look in the mirror. I watched with dropped jaw the proceedings in Parliament the morning after the ban, and one of the things they kept saying was that I would decimate their tourist industry. It was all about image and is such a selfish, self-serving, misguided way of looking at the film.”
Udwin did not immediately flee India when she learned of her impending arrest. Nor did she take the advice of attorneys who advised her to drive to Nepal or take the next flight out of the Delhi airport, and to leave her belongings behind. Instead, she left the country 26 hours later on a flight she had previously scheduled. “I did not want to be perceived as having deliberately avoided justice, and why should I flee when I had done nothing wrong?” she said.
Police did come to arrest Udwin a half-hour after she left for the airport, and, she said, she can never safely return to India.
The documentary has won awards on the festival circuit, as well as myriad laudatory reviews and support from celebrities such as Freida Pinto and Meryl Streep, who publicly called for the film to win an Academy Award.
Meanwhile, the filmmaker has been denounced in some Indian circles — including by some prominent feminists — for being a white woman who has dared make a movie about misogyny in India, among other charges.
Udwin grew up almost 3,000 miles away from that country, in Israel, where on her mother’s side of the family, she is a seventh-generation sabra. Her patriarchal forebears fled pogroms in Lithuania to South Africa at the turn of the last century, and her father arrived in Israel in 1948 to fight in the War of Independence.
Udwin, 58, grew up in the South African enclave of Savion and moved to Johannesburg at age 9, when her father accepted a job there as the legal adviser to a Jewish organization. Her family was Orthodox, she said, but she rebelled against Judaism when she was in her early teens.
“In religious instruction class, I discovered that there is a prayer men say every morning in which they thank God that they were not born a woman,” she said. “This so hurt my 13-year-old sensibilities; it confounded me and of course made me very angry. So at the first break, I ran to the rabbi who was the religious head of the school, and I confronted him with the blast of my rage. But before he could even respond, I shouted, ‘You can take your Jewish Torah and shove it up your a–.’ And then he called my father and expelled me.”
Udwin said that experience has helped prompt her to work on behalf of gender equality, as did her own rape when she was in her late teens and in her first year of drama school at Wits University in Johannesburg.
At the time, Udwin was working around the clock to pay for her tuition when, on a day off, she met a charming man in his mid-20s at a club. He invited her to a barbecue at his home the next day, but when she arrived, she discovered no one else was present. “Then, he just grabbed me, dragged me into his house and raped me,” she said. “He was so brutal and frightening; I was terrified he was going to kill me.” He eventually let Udwin go, but she did not tell anyone about the attack until 20 years later, when she finally divulged the details to her husband.
Yet, it was not just the brutal facts of Pandey’s vicious rape that inspired Udwin to make “India’s Daughter” in 2012. Rather, the filmmaker was primarily motivated by the protesters in the aftermath of the crime — “these beautiful people who were calling for change, saying, ‘Enough is enough, we will not have our women disrespected or unsafe.’
“That was when my psyche kicked in, which had been so hurt by that [Jewish] prayer and the pain and trauma of my own rape,” she said. “I was grateful to these demonstrators, because I took it personally that they were fighting for me. And the least I could do was to make a film that would amplify their voices.”
One imperative Udwin set for herself while making the movie was to interview the rapists “to find out how and why they do it,” she said.
Yet, while preparing for these interviews, “Of course it occurred to me that I might have all these personal demons, and that the years of suppressing my own [rape] might express itself in my physically attacking one of these men,” Udwin said.
“But one of my biggest surprises was that I felt absolutely no anger, not for one second of the 31 hours I sat with these rapists, because it was so utterly, blindingly clear that they had been programmed to see women as they do. If society teaches that a girl is of lesser or no value, she’s disposable and you can do whatever you like to her.”
Even so, Udwin said, the interviews left her feeling like her “soul had been dipped in tar,” especially her conversation with a 34-year-old man named Guarav, who was serving a 10-year sentence for having raped a 5-year-old girl. “He told me that he had taken her from both sides, and how her eyes were wide with fright,” Udwin recalled. “When I asked why he had done it, he looked at me as if I were insane. He said that she was a beggar girl and that her life had no value.”
The conversation prompted a panic attack for Udwin, and at another point, she found herself sitting with tears streaming down her face. “I felt the deep sense that I would never be able to overcome what I’d heard and learned about the human heart,” she said. “I felt the profoundest sadness for the culture that has propped these rapists up and taught them these sets of attitudes toward women.”
Udwin is now advising the United Nations Human Rights Commission on a worldwide education project, the Equality Studies Global Initiative.
“In this way, we can make a real, lasting difference,” she said.
“India’s Daughter” is now in theaters in Los Angeles.
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