Nearly a week after the Hema Committee report unleashed what can only be called the second coming of the MeToo movement in the Malayalam film industry, many debates are still pitting ‘formal complaints’ as a binary opposite to women’s ‘informal’ narratives of their experiences of sexual harassment. “Let the women come forward and file complaints, let them name their harassers, let them provide details like when, how, and where so that proper investigation can be carried out” – this has been the stand taken by the Kerala government as well as organisations like the Association of Malayalam Movie Artistes (AMMA) and several social and political commentators who appear, sometimes simultaneously, on TV channels. But what does this mean for the mountain of discursive evidence that the report and several women film workers have revealed?
Discursive evidence is a term that I borrow from academics Tarishi Verma and Radhika Gajjala from their article ‘The Evidence of Rape: Legitimacy of Legitimate Processes’ from the book Contemporary Gender Formations in India, edited by Nandini Dhar. Discursive evidence, in simple terms, refers to the kind of evidence that gets collected when multiple people make allegations of similar nature against an individual or group of perpetrators. And it is the revelation of this kind of evidence that often leads women to speak up even though years may have passed since the experience of harassment.
