<i>Chhapaak:</i> Narrating Stories of India’s Acid Attack Victims

If anything, mainstream cinema – be it Bollywood or Hollywood – has taught us that the “good” is beautiful. Heroes and heroines on film are usually attractive, and they wake up clean and well-groomed. This may be often done unconsciously or only for aesthetic reasons, but remains an impression imprinted in our minds.

What can you do, then, when you want to tell the story of a hero that is ugly? Or one that is dirty? Or, indeed, visually imperfect in any possible way? 

Some movies are meant to remind us of our reality while others help us to escape from it, at least for some time – and both forms serve a purpose. And yet too often, even the films that at least pretend to tell true stories are manned by heroes wearing perfect clothes and perfect faces. On the intellectual level, most can agree that physical appearance has nothing to do with being morally right. And yet, emotionally and sometimes uncontrollably, we turn away from ugliness and want beautiful words to be spoken through beautiful lips.

But not all stories can be told like that.

The new Indian movie Chhapaak, directed by Meghna Gulzar, tells the real-life stories of India’s acid victims. Challenging the biases of show business I mentioned above, film roped in Deepika Padukone, one of India’s most popular actresses, to play the role of an acid victim. There is no room for evasion here – instead of riding on Padukone’s beauty to market the movie, the filmmakers made her character’s face look disfigured throughout the story.

While Padukone’s character is named Malti, the role is based on Laxmi Agarwal, an acid attack victim who survived the horrendous act and started a national campaign to ban the sale of acid in India. The bold activism of Agarwal and other acid attack survivors, as well as Indian NGOs, has led to such crimes being categorized as more severe than previously under Indian law. This chain of events – from being subjected to an attack and losing the will to live to becoming an activist championing the causes of other victims – is the arc of Malti’s story in the film. But while there has been progress on the legal level, recent statistics show that hundreds of such attacks continue to happen in the country every year.

The statistics are equally merciless in revealing that the majority of victims in India are women. In the case of Agarwal – and of Malti in the movie – the reason behind the crime was the envy of a man. As Agarwal/Malti did not reciprocate his feelings, the rejected male – Naeem Khan in real life, Basheer in the movie – responded by throwing acid on her, leaving her face severely altered.

Everything about acid attacks is horrible. It is terrifying that the tools of this crime are so easily available (and this is why the initiatives to ban the sale of acid were born). It is terrifying that the act is equally simple in execution – all it takes is one throw (and this is reflected in the title of the movie – Chhapaak means “splash” in Hindi). But what is equally tragic is that many of these attacks are acts of vengeance of men on women: for refusing to pay a dowry, for refusing to marry or enter another type of relationship (though there have been other causes as well). There are many Maltis living in India and many such stories. The film makes it clear: an acid attack is a malicious act that is often meant to pull a woman down – not to allow her to be with somebody else, not to allow her to have a successful career – by taking away her beauty, handicapping her, and sometimes even murdering her through the act.

I don’t suggest that the beauty obsession innate in modern cinema is responsible for such twisted thinking. But blockbuster fashion makes it more difficult for us to watch such stories. Chhapaak is a story of resilience. The protagonist, at first dejected, shows us that a destroyed face is not a destroyed life. The ugly truth of Chhapaak is something we need to see, not only to know of such crimes, not only to be aware of legal and social reforms that should be supported, but – simply and equally importantly – to know that the victims of acid attacks are people like us, despite their outward appearance. Exclusion of victims from society is the triumph of the perpetrators. By not allowing this exclusion to happen we will not let the criminals win.