Priya: India’s female comic superhero returns to rescue ‘stolen girls’

Comedian crusader Priya, a gang-rape survivor who earlier campaigned towards rape and acid assault, is again in a brand new avatar. This time she is combating the trafficking of women and girls for intercourse.

The “modern-day feminine superhero” was first launched in December 2014, precisely two years after the horrific gang rape of a younger lady on a bus in Delhi, to focus consideration on the issue of gender and sexual violence in India.

Within the first version, Priya Shakti, the tiger-riding heroine challenges the stigma surrounding rape whereas in Priya’s Mirror, the second version, she returns to fight acid attacks.

Within the newest version – Priya and the Misplaced Ladies – she takes on the highly effective sex-trafficker Rahu, the evil demon who runs an underworld brothel metropolis the place he has entrapped many ladies, together with Priya’s sister Lakshmi.

Indian-American actor and author Dipti Mehta, who wrote the script of the comedian, attracts on historic Indian mythology to create larger-than-life fantastical characters and delivers a robust feminist assertion.

The story of Misplaced Ladies begins when the protagonist returns house to seek out that there are not any women in her village.

She then mounts her flying tiger Sahas (Hindi for braveness) and arrives in Rahu’s den. It is a metropolis dominated by greed, jealousy and lust, the place girls exist solely to serve and please males – and those that resist are became stone.

Priya is threatened and attacked, a lady who works for Rahu tries to lure her into the intercourse commerce saying: “Should you work for us, you’d serve solely 5 to 6 males and never 20”, however in the long run, good wins over evil and she or he manages to conquer Rahu and liberate her sister and all the opposite trafficked women.

However victory nonetheless eludes her. The households of rescued women refuse to take them again. The survivors are handled like “lepers”, dealing with stigma, scorn and mock.

However Priya and the opposite women stand as much as confront patriarchy, says Ms Mehta, “simply as girls have damaged their silence to speak about MeToo”, the marketing campaign towards sexual harassment and abuse that began in Hollywood in October 2107 and later unfold to many different elements of the world.

“I used to be very clear from the beginning that Misplaced Ladies cannot be simply one other comedian e book the place good man wins and evil dies, it needed to be way more than that,” Ms Mehta says.

Ram Devineni, the Indian-American creator of the comedian collection, informed the BBC that he had determined to give attention to intercourse trafficking on this version after visiting Sonagachi, India’s largest red-light space within the japanese metropolis of Kolkata, the place he met a number of girls engaged in intercourse work.

“Half of them informed me they’d been tricked into coming there and, as soon as there, they had been pressured into the intercourse commerce. The opposite half mentioned they’d agreed to do that for a dwelling as a result of they had been dust poor and so they had no various.

“Typically there have been two to a few girls sharing a small dingy room, a lot of them had younger kids who lived with them, and a few of them mentioned their kids slept in the identical mattress the place they serviced shoppers.

“I discovered that basically disheartening.”

Mr Devineni says that from his conversations with them, he realised that lots of the girls there may go away, however selected to not.

“Most believed within the thought of sacrifice, for the sake of their households, their kids. The shackles that maintain them again are largely emotional and psychological coercion.”

A few of their tales, he says, have discovered their manner into the Misplaced Ladies, which can be launched digitally on Monday to coincide with the beginning of United Nation’s 16 Days of Activism Towards Gender-based Violence.

In keeping with the United Nations Workplace on Medication and Crime, human trafficking is the second largest organised legal enterprise on the planet after the arms commerce. It’s even forward of the medication commerce.

“It is a multi-billion-dollar trade,” anti-trafficking activist Ruchira Gupta informed the BBC on the cellphone from New York.

Ms Gupta, who helps trafficked women and girls in India by way of her charity Apne Aap Girls Worldwide, says there are 100 million individuals trapped in human trafficking globally, of which 27 million are in India alone, and a lot of the trafficking is in women and younger girls.

India, Bangladesh and Nepal, she says, make up “the epicentre” of world intercourse trafficking.

Ms Gupta, who collaborated on Priya and the Misplaced Ladies, says she plans to take the comedian to varsities and schools in India and the US to make use of it as a speaking instrument, “as a dialog starter on what’s a really troublesome matter”.

The one method to combat trafficking, she believes, is to “de-normalise” intercourse commerce – and cinema, artwork and popular culture are instruments that may assist try this.

The comedian is made to attraction to younger individuals. After its launch, it may be downloaded without cost anyplace on the planet; it additionally has “augmented actuality options”, which implies individuals can see particular animation and films by scanning the art work with their smartphones.

“Folks usually make flippant feedback to say that prostitution is the oldest occupation on the planet, however they do not realise that trafficking is just not some poor lady getting cash in alternate for having intercourse with a person. It’s the excessive exploitation of most susceptible women,” Ms Gupta says.

To cease this “commodification” of women, she provides, we have to create revulsion in males’s minds about intercourse commerce – and it is best to catch them younger.

“We should work with younger boys and youngsters, 13 to 14 12 months olds, by way of storytelling and popular culture. They study intercourse from porn websites which painting intercourse employees as completely happy hookers, and no-one sees the woman behind her.

“I need to demolish that fantasy of the completely happy hooker. I need to be sure that individuals see the woman behind her.”

Paintings by Syd Fini and Neda Kazemifar

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