The Infamous Slap Of Kabir Singh is totally justifiable and acceptable!
By: Akash Bhansali
Tags: Love, Empathy, Misogyny, Violence Against Women, Kabir Singh

Never in the history of Indian Cinema was a movie so severely criticized for its general portrayal of a man with clinical anger issues and a woman with understandable submissive traits, like Kabir Singh was. The film grossed around 300 crores leaving a big question mark on the critics who questioned its authentic portrayal of an angry alcoholic surgeon and a quite agreeable woman working their way up in a relationship. The issue that was highlighted by most of the critics and feminists was that the film encourages toxic masculinity, misogyny, and violence towards women. The director was even accused of promoting rape culture among a host of other bizarre accusations. Despite the humongous acceptance by the larger section of the audience it is important to see the film from a critical point of view as to justify how they’re rubbish. The film pivots around an infamous alpha male who is the topper of his institute, who eventually falls in love with a fresher quite opposite to his temperament. The film naturally portrays the highs and lows that come with being in a relationship where the male is perceived to be more dominant than the female and hovers over her life as a bee does over a flower. Kabir unconditionally loves Preeti and he becomes extremely protective and possessive about her whereabouts and steers the relationship as he wishes with her consent. The film shows certain aspects of masculinity where the man overpowers the woman not in a dominating, demeaning way but in a protective sense which was misunderstood critically. Most women want to be with men who are competitive and dominating in a relationship but dominance here by the critics was wrongly worded as toxic masculinity. There is nothing toxic in Kabir’s behaviour which doesn’t abolish the fact that he is a man with serious issues. The film astonishes the critics when Kabir slaps Preeti for not standing with Kabir when her father disapproves of Kabir in front of her. The slap made a horrendous noise in the minds of the critics and feminists of the country who jumped the bandwagon and decided that Kabir has violated the right to be in a relationship by hitting his love and that violence towards women will never be accepted.

We live in a society where suppression of the weak by the powerful is a common interaction between the two. Moreover, the minute prevalence of domestic violence prevalent in our society has enraged the people to react in such a manner towards the film. The media and press constantly blowing things out of proportion have given birth to pseudo feminists and female academics prescribing generally to the third wave of feminism claiming that men generally take out their anger on women and suppress them of their free will. This sort of bogus breeze about men gives birth to irrelevant terms like toxic men and toxic masculinity. It is because of this kind of ideological subscription that the slap in Kabir singh becomes a big issue and is skinned in its context. The slap needs a little more understanding than how it was perceived as feeble and fragile minds can’t operate at that level. Yes, the slap is justifiable but we all can agree that violence is not. The slap in the film is nowhere synonymous with violence as violence stems out of fear and not anger alone. Preeti didn’t live in fear of Kabir despite knowing him inside out because Kabir was not a violent partner more like an over-protective, obsessive and possessive boyfriend but by no metric was abusive or violent. One cannot simply substitute anger with violence as anger is an emotion whereas violence is a behaviour. It is not that simple to pin the two together under the same umbrella. That’s that.

There is a film which goes by the name ‘Blue is the warmest colour’, which tells the story of a woman, Adele, confused about her sexuality. As the story progresses she sleeps with a boy but finds that she isn’t attracted to men, but is to women and eventually falls for Emma’s character who too is a lesbian. As they explore their relationship Emma finds out that Adele cheated on her with a man and forces her to leave her house. In that moment of heat where Emma was furious with Adele over her act of dishonesty and infidelity, both begin yelling as Emma commands Adele to leave her for good while throwing her clothes out of the wardrobe and into a luggage bag wanting her out of her sight and Adele trying to convince her that she still loves her. In that moment of chaos, Emma slapped Adele! But that slap never became the center of attention of the film amongst the press or the media or feminists or female academics. Ever wondered why? Was it because it was a woman hitting another woman? It was that as that is how people perceived it to be. This idea paints a picture that there needs to exist a power imbalance for the act to be deemed violent which is why when a man hits a man it’s understandable similarly when a woman hits a woman. Surprisingly when a woman hits a man it almost always goes unnoticeable but if it’s a man performing the same act on a woman then it’s unacceptable, violent, and an act of misogyny. Is it because men are physically powerful than women or because women hitting a man is justifiable as they are physically weak or is it violence in question here irrespective of sex.

We understand what violence is as it comes with vengeance, wrath, bloodshed whereas anger is an emotional outburst often uncontrolled by our senses. A perfect example would be the film Secret Superstar which quite clearly shows Farookh, the man of the house beating Najma, his wife and emotionally tormenting Insia, his daughter, who are both fearful of him. The important thing to see here was that violence isn’t always physical but also mental and verbal. There is a heartbreaking scene in which Farookh finds out that Najma has sold her jewellery to buy Insia a Laptop and decides to beat her. The painful thing in the entire scene was that both Najma and Insia knew what would happen if Farookh found out what was cooking behind his back. The scene shows Najma accepting the beating from her monstrous husband and Insia crying in her room clinching to her little brother, Guddu. This is how violence stems from fear and not anger. There are numerous instances we see in our everyday lives that we can deem to be an outpour of anger but is rare that we act violently towards people because if that were true we would’ve all become inhumane and murderers.

Love is complicated, so are people and so are relationships. No one can understand how to act perfectly as different situations and circumstances pull out different emotions from people and sometimes the intensity of release of these emotions go out of hand. Let’s understand this from a different perspective, If my mother or father slaps me would that be an act of violence, should I file an FIR against it, is it a hate crime? According to the people who deem a slap to be violent this should be hateful and unacceptable too, right? I don’t think so. People will not act in that manner towards their parents because they love them. This is the thing about love, it makes us do things we think we might’ve not done otherwise. This is exactly what happened when Kabir slapped Preeti, he loved her so much that he couldn’t emote it any other way with the frustration that was looming over his head over Preeti’s father insulting and humiliating him. When we are emotionally involved with a person we might not know how we act emotionally as the person is completely aware of vulnerabilities and insecurities which is why Preeti wasn’t offended by the slap. It was a moment where nothing could be understood. I understand the point of view of the critics as we sympathize with women who face such situations but I think the hype and negativity around domestic abuse and violence, in general, bombarded the slap to be an infamous one. People don’t want to understand beyond a point after they’ve made up their minds. Such an act requires a deeper level of understanding and empathy rather than jumping to baseless conclusions.