I watched Assi, directed by Anubhav Sinha, with two colleagues from university, expecting a courtroom drama packed with powerful performances revolving around sexual assault in contemporary India.
The film has its strengths and weaknesses, and while the cinema lover in me would like to dwell on the technical aspects of the craft, I will reserve that for another time. What I write here emerges from an intellectual and ethical encounter with a deeply unsettling question that the film raises.
Released on February 20, 2026, Assi derives its title from a chilling statistic of eighty rape cases reported every twenty minutes in India. The film, however, does not remain confined to numbers.
It humanises the statistic through Parima, played with remarkable depth by Kani Kusruti, who first appears as a dynamic, cheerful individual and then becomes a survivor of sexual violence, navigating trauma within a legal system and societal structure that claims neutrality but often operates through uneven power relations.
The courtroom exchanges are sharp, particularly when Raavi, the prosecuting lawyer portrayed by Taapsee Pannu, interrupts a harsh cross-examination and asks the defence lawyer whether he has experienced rape himself. When told she is becoming “personal”, she responds that someone has to be personal.
Raavi’s insistence on being “personal” challenges the claim of legal neutrality. Her question goes beyond confrontation, flagging the limits of detached reasoning in the context of embodied trauma and sexual violence.
Drawing from feminist and critical perspectives, the scene reveals how knowledge divorced from lived experience risks reproducing injustice.
What is dismissed as emotion emerges instead as an ethical intervention, reconnecting institutional procedure with the human realities it seeks to judge. The film also gestures towards networks of influence that shape legal outcomes that appear routine and impartial.
Although the film ends with an uneasy mix of justice and ambiguity, what lingers most disturbingly in my mind is a scene from Parima’s workplace, a school.
Parima is left socially isolated, with only her immediate family, comprising her spouse Vinay and their young son, trying to support her while struggling to make sense of a fractured reality.
When she approaches the school principal, hoping to return to teaching, the principal, who is also a woman, shows her a screenshot from a Class IX WhatsApp group. A student has typed, “Why did no one invite me to the car that day?”, casually referring to the gang rape of their teacher.
That single line is deeply unsettling. It reveals not just the individual insensitivity of a young mind, but a wider cultural condition.
As a society, we often take pride in technological and educational advancement, yet here is a young student trivialising the rape of their teacher. The question that emerges is not only about law or policy, but about the moral and cultural fabric within which such attitudes become possible and acceptable.
Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (2022) reports 4,45,256 cases of crimes against women in India, amounting to an average of nearly 51 complaints every hour. Evidence from the National Family Health Survey (2019–21) suggests that 32% of ever-married women in India have experienced physical, sexual or emotional violence by their spouses, with 6.1% reporting sexual violence specifically.
Within this, Assam has consistently recorded among the highest rates of crimes against women in India in recent years, at times more than double the national average, even as recent data indicates a decline in absolute numbers.
The decline in numbers does not necessarily signal a decline in violence; it often reflects the shifting visibility of it, reminding us of the extent to which such crimes may go underreported within formal institutions. This regional reality reiterates the concerns raised by Assi, deeply embedded in lived contexts closer to home.
At the same time, global reports on the proliferation of misogynistic online communities and digital cultures that trivialise sexual violence point to a disturbing reality whereby the normalisation of gendered harm is no longer confined to isolated spaces but circulates across networks, shaping the attitudes and behaviour of seemingly ordinary people in insidious ways.
To me, as a sociologist, this moment resonates with the normalisation of sexist humour across digital and public platforms in India today. How do we make sense of a community of people for whom sexism and sexual violence are meme material?
The issue extends into domains of culture, media, education and everyday socialisation. It asks us to examine how values are formed, transmitted and eroded across institutions such as family, school, peer networks and digital environments.
The character Nikka from the film, an accomplice rather than the primary offender, embodies this troubling ordinariness. He is neither monstrous nor exceptional. He is just disturbingly familiar.
His actions reflect how individuals can participate in harm not always out of calculated intent but through conformity, indifference or even moral disengagement.
This reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of the “banality of evil”, the unsettling normalcy with which wrongdoing can be enacted by seemingly ordinary individuals.
The presence of compromised law enforcement reinforces how institutional settings can enable, rather than prevent, such participation. The film also gestures towards tensions within modern justice systems, between repressive and restitutive mechanisms, and the possibility of ethical repair through the character of Kartik, who grapples with conflicting responsibilities and constraints.
All these portrayals in this film raise enduring questions across the social sciences. How do individuals act within structures that both enable and limit them? How do institutions balance neutrality with moral accountability?
What, then, is the role of the social sciences in such times of human history when sexual violence not only persists but is trivialised in everyday discourse?
If we inhabit a patriarchal world where violence can become a punchline, can the task before the social sciences remain primarily analytical, or must it also be applied and interventionist?
It requires asking how cultures of indifference are produced, how empathy erodes, and how processes of socialisation normalise what should otherwise unsettle us.
In this sense, what Nivedita Menon calls “seeing like a feminist” becomes crucial, an approach that urges us to question what appears natural, to interrogate everyday practices and to recognise how power operates in multidimensional ways.
The trivialisation of sexual violence in digital culture then stops appearing to be incidental; it reflects deeper structures of normalisation that feminist inquiry compels us to confront.
At a time when debates around the implementation of the Women’s Reservation Act, 2023, controversially linked to delimitation, and discussions on the Transgender Persons (Amendment) Bill, 2026, continue to reveal discomfort with gender justice in the public sphere, the need to reorient our ways of seeing becomes even more urgent.
In a democracy, governance can only be effective when it is actively shaped and engaged with by multiple stakeholders—citizens, civil society, the state and other institutions—working in dialogue and with accountability.
The challenge, then, is not only to critique institutions but to reimagine how knowledge, education and public discourse can be mobilised to cultivate more empathetic and accountable social worlds, thereby renewing the institutions that shape them.
While Assi portrays one woman’s trauma, it reminds us that when the personal becomes political, the question runs deeper: what kind of society is patriarchy producing, and what would it take to dismantle and rebuild the institutions that perpetuate it?
The film thus leaves behind an unsettling realisation: that the real trial is not only on screen, but in the society that watches it.
For now, perhaps the most meaningful response lies in continuing to ask difficult questions, as the social sciences, particularly Sociology, strive to do, and in refusing to let sexism and sexual violence slip into normalisation.
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue. The author is Head of Department and Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Cotton University, Guwahati.
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