If you ask an Indian to name a national epidemic, there are a few answers that’ll probably come one after another. Political corruption, depression, obsession with filmdom, and gender-based violence. The latter gets dissected and discussed a lot, but one form of violence that often gets swept under the rug is acid attacks. I recently watched a feature film about this, titled Ayena. Siddhant Sarin’s first film was made over the course of five whole years. It focuses on the daily lives of two acid attack survivors, Ritu and Faraha. After we finished watching it, Siddhanth hopped on a zoom call with us to talk about his experience making the film and to answer our questions.
Ritu is a happy-go-lucky woman who embraces opportunities to put herself out there. She’s either modelling, hanging out with her family and friends or talking on TV. Faraha is more reserved. She seems to take a while to open up and prefers spending the majority of her time working, waitressing. Inherently, they are nothing alike but the permanent scars on their faces bond them. In 2021, there were around 170 acid attacks reported in India, and the actual number of acid attacks that took place is probably much higher. It’s clear that it’s an extremely prevalent problem, which is why it’s so puzzling that we spend little time talking about it and even lesser time in trying to bring justice to the survivors. In one of the scenes in the film, Faraha browses through pieces displayed in a jewellery store, while nonchalantly telling the shopowner about how her husband had only been in jail for a few months after the attack and got remarried as soon as he got out. Another scene that stuck with me is of Ritu sitting in a room, fidgeting and talking to no one in particular. She says something along the lines of, “I can’t believe he changed my life so quickly; if only he’d thought for a second about what he was doing,” referring to her cousin brother who attacked her. To begin to even think about bringing justice to survivors like Ritu and Faraha, there are issues that run through several layers that need to be addressed. One of them is the easy access to acid. Now, because of its common use as a cleaning agent and in manufacturing, it’s available everywhere. Shaheen Malik, an acid attack survivor and founder of the Brave Souls Foundation, once set up a team of people to go to different districts and try to purchase acid. No shopowner asked them for an identity proof or anything. After these visits, Shaheen’s team prepared a report and filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Delhi High Court that has remained there since. Another issue is the lack of adequate compensation for survivors. After being shunned by society, a paltry sum of Rs. 3 lakhs (according to the Victim Compensation Scheme 2015) that’s granted by the government is not enough to rebuild their life from scratch. The biggest issue of them all is ofcourse, the burgeoning male ego that enables this kind of behaviour in the first place, the kind of ego that blindly justifies such retaliation and violence towards a woman. There’s really no direct solution to this, but a good place to start would be the formal education curriculum we feed to our children. Ideally, from an impressionable age onwards, everyone needs to be taught about respect, tolerance, consideration and accountability. Siddhanth’s film touches upon these issues very subtly, never by preaching and only through the struggles of Ritu and Faraha who remain optimistic about their lives. Faraha wants to get married again, and Ritu is on the lookout for her next modelling gig. In the zoom call with us, Siddhanth talked about how warm and welcoming they were towards him, how they all continue to remain good friends. The film had many takeaways, the most stark one (for me) being that while justice can come in different ways, what’s being doled out by the government is pathetic. There’s still a glimmer of hope through the organizations that are actively providing accomodation, jobs and a community to acid attack survivors across the country, so here’s a few of them that you could support in any way you’d like.
