Abstract

I examine how recent historic incidents surrounding sexual violence that registered emotional shockwaves across India have been portrayed in Indian web series through a focus on police brutality and consequent experiences of pain. I study Delhi Crime, a Netflix Original on the 2012 Nirbhaya Rape Case, and Made in Heaven, a Prime Video Original about horrific systemic injustices against the queer community that culminated through turbulent protests into the long-awaited 2018 Supreme Court verdict. I study the way police torture inflicts pain on the human body, referring to the complex analyses of pain in Wittgenstein, Rachel Ablow, Elaine Scarry, Veena Das, and David Morris, veering between understanding pain as something intensely bodily that obliterates the social, and seeing pain as something that indubitably acquires meaning only in the social context within which it is inflicted and received. Drawing on both approaches, I will explore the political meaning of violent pain, arguing that these bodily experiences occupy a space between emotionality and morality, and together they confuse the very possibility of democratic surveillance and guardianship. Drawing on Ablow, I will study how socio-cultural meanings of pain derive historically from assumptions of shared sympathy. I will then unpack how the contemporary democratic state in these web series renders communitarian sympathy redundant, problematizing the very idea of pain as a shared emotion that can trigger moral responses.