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Behind the picture
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Author Anuradha Marwah discusses the facts behind her book on the Ajmer scandal
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Penning truth Author Anuradha Marwah
Dirty Picture”, by Anuradha Marwah, published by India Log, deals earnestly with difficult realities. Set around the Ajmer sex scandal of the early nineties, it goes beyond the news to discover reasons and processes. Having grown up in Ajmer, this professor of English literature, at Delhi University, uses her immediate knowledge to write a moving and sensitive tale.
Having already authored two books, she says this one has been the most difficult. “It’s the first time that I’m dealing with such a dark subject. I see the exploitation and I notice how innocence is crushed,” she says. While the subject itself was painful, Marwah had to tread softly to save the book from simple sensationalism. She says she had to steer clear of “prurience” as that would reduce a sensitive tale to another sexual potboiler. To “de-sensationalise” it, she journeyed into the minds of the victims and the perpetrators. While the book is set around two sisters it expertly explores a larger milieu as well. She explains that while the media saw the incident as one of sexual perversion and suggested a communal angle, she however reveals the larger gender and class inequities.
To obtain a complete picture, Marwah researched extensively. She met the journalist of Dainik Navjyoti who was the first to break the story. She studied court statements and interviewed lawyers and policemen of the case. One of her toughest interviews was with her mother who was the Vice Principal of Savitri Girls College, Ajmer at the time of the scandal. She recounts how her mother had an appointment with a girl in the morning. She reached college but found the girl was not there. She later learnt that the girl had committed suicide that morning. “I had to literally drag out the story from her,” she recounts. Such circumstances made it increasingly hard to flesh out the story.
But hailing from Ajmer the incident hit home hard. She says, “I had shifted to Delhi by then. But I knew exactly what those women would have gone through. Their stories would have begun with filmy romance and ended with exploitation.” Coming to terms with this darkness has been a “maturing process”. She asserts, “I am now a different person.”
She is currently working on a novel on a single girl in Delhi and on an academic project on how women’s writing is constructed.
NANDINI NAIR
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