| Priya's Shakti | |
|---|---|
| Date | 2014 |
| Publisher | Rattapallax |
| Creative team | |
| Creators | |
| Original publication | |
| Date of publication | 2014 |
Priya's Shakti is a graphic novel by Ram Devineni and Dan Goldman, Illustrated by Sid Fini, Melanconnie and Faebian Ceruleo, whose heroine, Priya, is a "modern-day female superhero", a rape survivor. Who rides a flying tiger. Issued in 2014, it was followed by Priya's Mirror (2016) , Priya and the Lost Girls (2019), “Priya and the Wolves” (2020), “Priya and the Swarm” (2021), “Priya and the Twirling Wind” (2022), and “Priya and Sahas” (2023).
Indian American film maker Ram Devineni was inspired to create Priya's Shakti in response to the Delhi bus rape in 2012. He travelled around India and parts of southeast Asia for almost a year, consulting with activists against gender-based violence and also with sociologists, philosophers and poets, [1] before collaborating with American comic book designer Dan Goldman, whom he met in New York, to create a graphic novel. [2] [3] Produced in Hindi and English, the comic was available as a free download and was launched at Mumbai Comicon in December 2014, two years after that case. [2] [4] [5] The project's social impact director was Lina Srivastava; in partnership with Aapne Aap Worldwide, an NGO helping women in India and the US, a #standwithpriya selfie campaign was organised [4] and copies were distributed in schools. [1] An exhibition appeared in locations around the world including New York, Torino, Barcelona, London, Sheffield, Rome and Dubai. [6]
Priya's Shakti was India's first augmented reality comic book; [7] scanning pages with Blippar brought up animations and true stories, [1] and the Artivive app is now used. [8] Associated murals in Mumbai and other cities could also be scanned with a smart phone to play video. [1]
Priya's Shakti tells the story of Priya, a villager from India who is gang raped by men in her village. When she tells her family of her ordeal. They shun her saying she has brought shame on them. The village elders also blame her for "provoking" the men. Ashamed and scared, she flees to the forest to end her life. But the goddess Parvati, queen to the god Shiva, sees her plight and seeks to help her. She enters Priya's body and confronts the men who raped her. The men do not realize Parvati is inside Priya and try to rape her again. Angered. The goddess takes her true form. Meanwhile, Shiva is awakened from his slumber and sees how mortal men are treating his wife. Furious, he curses all mankind to impotency. But Parvati's idea prevails: Priya becomes a superpowered champion of women's rights, who will work to end violence against women by changing society. [2] [7] [8] In the title of the comic, Shakti means "strength". [1] Her tiger nature manifests as a flying tiger on which she rides, called Sahas, "courage" in Hindi. [5]
In Priya's Mirror, the second comic in the series, released in October 2016 at the New York Film Festival in English, Hindi, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, Priya and acid attack survivors combat the demon king Ahankar, himself an abuse victim. [8] In a partnership with the Last Mask Campaign, readers could use Snapchat-style filters to share images of their faces as they would be after an acid attack, as a show of solidarity. [3] [9] The comic was written by Devineni with Indian film maker and writer Paromita Vohra, again with art by Goldman. [9] An augmented reality exhibit and interview at Lincoln Center were part of the release. [10]
Priya and the Lost Girls appeared in December 2019 and was scripted by Indian American actress and playwright Dipti Mehta, who researched sex trafficking for her one-woman show, Honour; Ruchira Gupta, the founder of Apne Aap, also collaborated on it. [8] Priya finds all the girls have vanished from her village, including her sister, Lakshmi; she rescues them from an underground brothel city run by the demon Rahu, who turns any women who resist to stone, but the rescued girls must then also stand up for their rights against the villagers who refuse to take them back, scorning them as "lepers". [5] Devineni chose this theme for the third comic in the series after visiting the red light district of Sonagachi in Kolkata and talking to women who were in the sex trade after being tricked, or believing they had no other way to earn a living. [5] [8]
Priya's Shakti received a grant from the 2014 Tribeca Film Institute New Media Fund, supported by the Ford Foundation. [1] UN Women named the heroine a 2014 Gender Equality Champion. [6]
Priya's Mirror was funded by the World Bank WEvolve programme and received the Special Jury Prize at the 2017 FilmGate Interactive Media Festival in Miami. [11]
Diana E. H. Russell was a feminist writer and activist. Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, she moved to England in 1957, and then to the United States in 1961. For the past 45 years she was engaged in research on sexual violence against women and girls. She wrote numerous books and articles on rape, including marital rape, femicide, incest, misogynist murders of women, and pornography. For The Secret Trauma, she was co-recipient of the 1986 C. Wright Mills Award. She was also the recipient of the 2001 Humanist Heroine Award from the American Humanist Association. She was also an organizer of the First International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, in Brussels in March 1976.
Violence against women (VAW), also known as gender-based violence (GBV) and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), is violent acts primarily committed by men or boys against women or girls. Such violence is often considered a form of hate crime, committed against persons specifically because they are of the female gender, and can take many forms.
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Daniel Aaron Goldman is an American writer and artist living in Los Angeles. He is the creator of webcomics such as Shooting War, Red Light Properties and the Priya's Shakti series. He is the founder and narrative lead of the Los Angeles–based Kinjin Story Lab.
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Temsüla Ao was an Indian poet, fiction writer, and ethnographer. She was a professor of English at North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) from where she retired in 2010. She served as the director of the North East Zone Cultural Centre between 1992 and 1997 on deputation from NEHU. She was awarded the Padma Shri award for her contribution to literature and education. Her book Laburnum For My Head received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in the short story category. Her works have been translated into Assamese, Bengali, French, German, Hindi, and Kannada.
Rape is the fourth most common crime against women in India. According to the 2021 annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 31,677 rape cases were registered across the country, or an average of 86 cases daily, a rise from 2020 with 28,046 cases, while in 2019, 32,033 cases were registered. Of the total 31,677 rape cases, 28,147 of the rapes were committed by persons known to the victim. The share of victims who were minors or below 18 – the legal age of consent – stood at 10%.
The 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder, commonly known as the Nirbhaya case, involved a rape and fatal assault that occurred on 16 December 2012 in Munirka, a neighbourhood in South Delhi. The incident took place when Jyoti Singh, a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern, was beaten, gang-raped, and tortured in a private bus in which she was travelling with her male friend, Avnindra Pratap Pandey. There were six others in the bus, including the driver, all of whom raped the woman and beat her friend. She was rushed to Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi for treatment and, as the public outrage mounted, the government had her transferred to Mount Elizabeth Hospital, Singapore eleven days after the assault, where she succumbed to her injuries two days later. The incident generated widespread national and international coverage and was widely condemned, both in India and abroad. Subsequently, public protests against the state and central governments for failing to provide adequate security for women took place in New Delhi, where thousands of protesters clashed with security forces. Similar protests took place in major cities throughout the country. Since Indian law does not allow the press to publish a rape victim's name, the victim was widely known as Nirbhaya, meaning "fearless", and her struggle and death became a symbol of women's resistance to rape around the world.
Paromita Vohra is an Indian filmmaker and writer. She is known for her documentaries on subjects such as urban life, desire, pop culture and gender. She has also written the screenplay of the award-winning feature film Khamosh Pani. Her film production company Parodevi Pictures is based in Mumbai. She writes a column Paro-normal Activity for the Sunday Mid-day and also wrote a weekly column for Mumbai Mirror.
The 2013 Mumbai gang rape, also known as the Shakti Mills gang rape, refers to the incident in which a 22-year-old photojournalist, who was interning with an English-language magazine in Mumbai, was gang-raped by five people including a juvenile. The incident occurred on 22 August 2013, when she had gone to the deserted Shakti Mills compound, near Mahalaxmi in South Mumbai, with a male colleague on an assignment. The accused had tied up the victim's colleague with belts and raped her. The accused took photos of the victim during the sexual assault, and threatened to release them to social networks if she reported the rape. Later, an eighteen-year-old call centre employee reported that she too had been gang-raped, on 31 July 2013 inside the mills complex.
Violence against women in India refers to physical or sexual violence committed against a woman, typically by a man.
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