Jana J. Monji

Dedicated Father Shows ‘How to Kill a Tiger’ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Oscar-nominated documentary “To Kill a Tiger” provides an intimate exposé on the problems all women face through the specific case of a young girl whose rape became the topic of controversy in her Indian village. Her father says, “I was once told, ‘You can’t kill a tiger by yourself, but I replied, ‘I’ll show you how to kill a tiger all by yourself.’ And so, I did.”

Tigers are, by nature, solitary animals and this father walks a solitary path to fight the deeply ingrained misogyny within their village. In some ways, he is very much the tiger parent in this situation.

The film begins with a warning:

This film deals with highly sensitive subject matter and contains descriptions of sexual violence which may be disturbing for some viewers.

Please exercise care and compassion for yourself and your fellow audience members.

The survivor in this documentary is now over the age of 20. She chose to come forward in this film in the hope her story will help others in similar situations. At her request, we have changed her name. Out of respect for her and her family’s privacy, we ask that any identifying images of her not be shared outside the viewing of this film.

This documentary also features children and the makers have taken great care to provide a safe environment for children during the filming.

With that warning out of the way, we see a luminous sunrise over a body of water. Then we see villagers: a woman with a goat, two school girls, a man working in the fields. This is a village without sidewalks. The roads are dirt. The yards are dirt. Inside one building a girl combs her dark wavy hair and makes two braids that are decorated with bright orange ribbon. The daughter, here called Kiran, was the first-born. Her father is clearly devoted to her.

Their lives changed one day, as a result of a family gathering for a wedding. The mother Jaganti and Ranjit both attended the wedding (in 2017), but returned home at 10 p.m., leaving the girl behind . They believed she was safe with relatives and acquaintances.  The 13-year-old girl was brutally gang-raped, returning home at about 2 a.m. She knew the names of her rapists: Kapil, Langur and Ishwar.

“As her father, I really regret that I was unable to protect her. You can say that I was a little careless and that’s why it happened,” the father, Ranjit acknowledges.

These are tender and understandable feelings of guilt, but these sentiments will eventually be contrasted by the intense victim blaming and victim shaming of the village men and women. Director/writer Nisha Pahuja captures their unfiltered comments. In those comments, you can hear echoes of the same things women in the United States are told.

Some villagers insist that the community should resolve the issue, usually suggesting that the victim be forced to marry one of her assailants. One woman angrily claims that two of the men are innocent and the girl should marry the one guilty man. When someone points out that attitude only encourages men to rape the women they want to marry, there’s still resistance.

When the father, Ranjit refuses to marry off his daughter to one of her rapists and takes the matter to criminal court, the community turns hostile.

On Ranjit’s side are people like Amit Singh, a gender rights activist with the Srijan Foundation. The foundation is a Jharkhand-based non-profit that works directly with the community on issues pertaining to women empowerment and gender justice as well as child rights and protection, women and child health and sustainable agriculture.

People who have watched any of the CSI TV series or “Law & Order: SVU” will cringe when details of the investigation spill out. There’s a lot to be learned in India about crime scene investigation and sensitivity toward rape survivors, but remember, the US has its own problems as illustrated in 2019 Peabody Award-winning true crime TV miniseries, “Unbelievable” or the 2024 true crime documentary TV series “American Nightmare.”  In both, the rape survivors were not initially believed by the investigating police officers. The former is about serial rape cases in Washington and Colorado between 2008-2011. The latter is about a 2015 kidnapping and rape of Denise Huskins. Even though her boyfriend at the time and now husband Aaron Quinn was a witness to the kidnapping, the police did not believe them.

It is important to note that while parental, especially paternal support is important, there were women in India who did take matters into their own hands with murderous results. While Ranjit and his family fought against their community and its prejudices, another community of women banded together to kill a “tiger” in another another Netflix documentary: “Murder in the Courtroom: Indian Predator.”

What’s unusual about the case of Bharat Kalicharan Yadav or Akku Yadav is that he was accused of rape, murder and extortion, but on 13 August 2004, 200 women rushing into a courtroom, using chili powder and knives, killed him before a judiciary judgement was made. Directed by Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni, this documentary focuses on the women of the slum of a predominately Dalit area Kasturba Nagar (Nagpur, Maharashtra), who were allegedly terrorized and raped by Akku. Vilas Bhande and Resha Raut, both accused of Akko’s murder, narrate.

If one wants to blame the 13-year-old girl for being alone, remember that women traveling in India with a male companion also were victims of gang rapes.  The rape incident in “To Kill a Tiger” occurred after the notorious Nirbhaya case also known as the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder. In that case,  22-year-old physiotherapy intern, Jyoti Singh. Singh and her male friend Avnindra Pratap Pandey, had gone to see a movie together (“Life of Pi”) but then boarded a private bus. The driver and five others raped Singh and beat Pandey.

The 2015 BBC documentary, “India’s Daughter,” is about that incident. Of the accused, one died before he was brought to trial. The four defendants were sentenced to death and hung in March 2020. The juvenile defendant was convicted   and given a maximum sentence in a reform facility.  In addition to this documentary, the first season (2019)  of the Netflix original TV series, Delhi Crime, is about the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang rape. “Delhi Crime” became the first Indian series to received a Best Drama Series award at the International Emmy Awards.

More recently, a Spanish tourist traveling with her husband was gang raped:

While rape happens to men and boys, in India as well as the US and elsewhere, the victims of rape are predominately women. Rape is an issue throughout history and it is part of the history of women. During Women’s History Month, documentaries and fictionalized depictions of how the justice system works in rape cases are important though dark aspects of the history of women in the world. Rape and the injustice of the legal system toward rape survivors or victims seem to be universal problems that need to resolve for women to thrive in all cultures.

“To Kill a Tiger” is not perfect. The advocates that Ranjit works with sometimes seem to cross the line between advisor and activist. Like “Murder in the Courtroom: Indian Predator,” the documentary lacks distance that would allow critical analysis and questions. Still both are different aspects of the same problem with “To Kill a Tiger,” the better of the two.

The Hindi-language (with English subtitles) Canadian documentary “To Kill a Tiger” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September 2022. Nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards, it lost to “20 Days in Mariupol,” a documentary about the beginning of the war in Ukraine. At TIFF, it won Best Canadian Film and at the Canadian Screen Awards, it won Best Feature Length Documentary, Best Editing in a Documentary and Best Original Music in a Documentary. “To Kill a Tiger” is currently streaming on Netflix.

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