Kartik Aaryan and Mudassar Aziz have finally spoken out about the controversial dialogue in Pati, Patni Aur Woh. The actor said that the heavily-criticized dialogue on marital rape has been modified keeping the people’s sentiments in mind, while the director did not take too kindly to the outrage.
After the trailer was released some time back, social media came down heavily on the film for a particular sequence wherein Kartik tells his friend that if a man requests for sex from his wife he is labelled a bhikari (beggar), if he does not have sex with her, he is an atyachari (cruel man) and if somehow he manages to convince her through “jugaad”, he is branded a balatkari (rapist).
When asked about the same, the actor replied by saying that they shouldn’t have used the word “balatkar” at all.
“We didn’t want to hurt anyone’s sentiments. The dialogue was highlighted and we didn’t realise it while we were shooting for Pati, Patni Aur Woh. However, when the trailer came out we realised we shouldn’t have used the word at all. We took responsibility and removed the word immediatelyKartik Aaryan, Actor
However, Mudassar Aziz slammed the outrage, saying that people reacted without understanding the context. “Many people said that the dialogue insinuated that marital rape is ok. But what’s the line? A man seems to be saying ‘If I do this I’m called this, if I do that I’m called this also.’ Ninety nine percent of men in the country do not even know when they are committing marital rape. Coming back home after work and waking up a sleeping wife, even if you indulge in foreplay, that’s not consent. A filmmaker presents that line in a film, everyone starts to tell him to remove that word from the film. We have reached a stage where a 12-year-old needs to know what rape is. If you are not going to say ‘balatkar’, no one’s going to understand what it is,” the director said at a press conference.
He also added that it is unfortunate that the word had to be removed and that if people don’t talk about it a whole generation will be unaware.
When said that the tonality of the dialogue is problematic, Aziz retorted that this generation is “finger happy.” “Centuries back, people who had easy access to guns and went about firing them were referred to as ‘trigger happy.’ Now, we are in a ‘finger happy’ generation which doesn’t waste a single second in putting out an opinion on something that one hasn’t entirely seen or don’t know the context. I make films for people and I want them to react after watching them. Also, what sort of double standard is it that in one film a person reads ‘balatkaar’ 36 times from a letter and everyone was laughing. (in a reference to 3 idiots),” Mudassar said.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)