By now, even the Grey Lady knows about Provoked, the new Jag Mundhra biopic starring TMBWITW as Kiranjit Ahluwalia and Naveen Andrews as her abusive husband. The actual story behind the movie is a horrific one:

Ahluwalia arrived in Britain in 1979 from India, aged 24, following an arranged marriage… Deepak immediately began to abuse her. ” … He would push me about, yank my hair, hit me and drop heavy pans on my feet…” Deepak also raped her frequently, telling her that this was his right.

[After 10 years, in 1989] One night, when she had gone to sleep after cooking Deepak’s dinner, he woke her up and demanded money. When she refused, he tried to break her ankles by twisting them. He then picked up a hot iron and held it to her face. Eventually Deepak fell asleep and Ahluwalia was consumed with the rage she had suppressed for 10 years. Approaching him with a can of petrol, she poured it over Deepak’s feet and set them alight… [Link]

Originally convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, her case was taken up by the Asian advocacy group Southall Black Sisters (SBS) who found her new counsel and sought a retrial.

Following a campaign, led by SBS, Ahluwalia’s conviction was quashed on appeal in 1992. The court accepted some new evidence … [and] Ahluwalia admitted manslaughter at the retrial…

Ahluwalia’s successful appeal against her murder conviction set a historic precedent - that women who kill as a result of severe domestic violence should not be treated as cold-blooded murderers. As Ahluwalia says, “I never intended to kill him, I just wanted him to stop hurting me…” [Link]

Ahluwalia became a cause celebre, a household name who was later honored in an unusual ceremony that included both Cherie Blair and Spice Girl Mel B.

As usual with biopics, there is some controversy over the liberties taken in the process of making the movie. The director is entirely unapologetic:

The director ‘Jag’ Jagmohan Mundhra in his defence said “Even if you tell a true story, a true story is never really a true story. How do you define the truth? None of us were really there and obviously the recollections of people who were there have changed now. Ultimately I do have to tell an engaging story. If I can’t tell an engaging story no matter what cause is at stake, nobody will see it…” [Link]

Some of these changes, such as merging two activists into a single character, seem minor to me. Others, like creating an important white lawyer character (played by Robbie Coltrane) for the appeal stage, while removing Rohit Sanghvi who was the lawyer who helped SBS create the grounds for the appeal, are unfortunate but pretty conventional changes. Movies about minorities often replace a minority character with a white one so that the largely white audience has somebody to identify with. It’s even better if this is the character who swoops in from the outside to save the day.

Two changes, however, go to the heart of the story and really bother me. The first is the change of Kiranjit Ahluwalia from a woman with a factory job into a housewife. The accusation levelled in cases like Ahluwalia’s is always that the battered woman could have left instead of fighting back. The change in Ahluwalia’s status dodges the accusation, and in doing so, implicitly lends it support. That bothers me. It’s as if the director felt that she wouldn’t be sympathetic enough, and so he had to make her more helpless. It’s as if he felt he couldn’t defend the complexity of her situation to the audience, and therefore removed it altogether.

Similarly, the movie depicts Deepak Ahluwalia as an alcoholic (the Wikipedia page implies that he was not). Again, in simplifying the story this way, I think it does a disservice to real women in real situations with abusers. Real life abused women aren’t always confined to their houses. Real abusers aren’t all drug addicts or alcoholics.

What baffles me is why Mundhra felt these changes were necessary. Ahluwalia’s actual story was sympathetic enough to make her a celebrity in the UK. This real life story is very similar to that of Francine Hughes, and the TV movie based on that story was quite successful. The recent success of Ray and Walk the Line shows that audiences like stories about ambiguous characters, and the true story is sensational enough that it would have gone over quite well with Bollywood audiences. I wish he had trusted the audience a bit more.

The fictional and real life Kiranjeet Ahluwalias