Indian cinema, by and large, tries to avoid films revolving around or even touching child sexual abuse and/or incestuous abuse of children by older relatives. One of the reasons why filmmakers shy away from the subject is because it is sensitive and may not draw the mass audience. Another reason is that the censors might not permit a film that deals with such a delicate issue. The third reason is that actors might shy away from taking part in a film dealing with child abuse. The fourth is the conspiracy of collective silence in the larger society about child abuse.

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Indian cinema has touched upon child abuse but has never linked it to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In most films such as Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001) it forms a small sub-plot coming across powerfully towards the end when the single girl in the family, Riya (Shefali Shah), reveals in front of her family that as a little girl, she was molested by her uncle Tej (Rajat Kapoor). Another uncle (Naseeruddin Shah) stands by her and takes action against the abuser asking him to leave.

I Am (2010) directed by Onir, comprised four short stories which was crowd-funded by more than 400 people. The film won accolades at festivals and bagged two National Awards for Best Hindi Film and Best Lyrics in 2012. One of the four stories, My Name Is Abhimanyu featuring Sanjay Suri is about the haunting memories of consistent sexual abuse of a boy by his stepfather.

That Girl in Yellow Boots (2011) directed by Anurag Kashyap with Kalki Koechlin portraying the protagonist, deals with incest in a dark film that offers neither relief nor a happy ending. Anurag Kashyap said, “I was determined to tell a story that grappled honestly and frankly with incest in India. It is a shockingly common occurrence, but one that is rarely ever talked about.”

In Imtiaz Ali’s Highway (2014) both the captive girl (Alia Bhatt) and her abductor (Randeep Hooda) strike a chord under strange circumstances. Despite coming from different socio-economic groups and gender, both have traumatic memories of being sexually exploited as children. The girl finally exposes her abuser as the stunned family fights hard to look the other way. When she returns to her family, she pours out the tragedy of her own mother keeping on at “choop, choop” when she vented out the secret of a family uncle abusing her sexually again and again when she was little. The anger, hurt, and bitterness of the young girl claims that wrongly, girls are forever warned of danger from “outside” while the villain might be right at home and the parents either turn a blind eye, or, do not believe their offspring because they do not want to ruffle the feathers of an affluent relative.

Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani 2 (2016) points out how a little girl is abused by her uncle with tacit support from her grandmother. The orphaned girl is subjected to continuous sexual abuse and is too young to understand that she is being sexually abused. The family is of aristocratic bearing, very affluent and extremely powerful all of which they use to suppress their evil doings. A young staff member from the girl’s school (Vidya Balan) runs away with the little one to save her.

Strapping young director Soukarya Ghosal has linked to what extremes a child suffering from OCD can go to punish men who she believes are perpetrators of child abuse for the first time in Indian cinema. Sweta is a little, motherless girl fond of her grandmother who drills her continuously with the idea that “cleanliness is Godliness.” The grandmother also underlines the significance of flowers and plants in life. Sweta (Jaya Ahsan) grows up to become a beautiful, motherless, friendless woman who never marries perhaps because with her extreme OCD, she cannot tolerate the thought of any man touching her. But she keeps watering the sapling her grandmother asked her to.

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a stigmatising neuropsychiatric disorder characterised by recurrent and intrusive distressing thoughts and repetitive behaviour or rituals imagined to reduce anxiety. It is frequently co-morbid with other psychiatric disorders like anxiety and depression. OCD is a highly heterogeneous condition; different persons diagnosed with OCD can have very different and non-overlapping symptom patterns, as well significant variations in intensity and cure.

Though OCD is a Bengali film, it has global implications because it shows what extremes a little girl can be driven to by her conviction that “cleanliness is Godliness” through her growing age till she becomes a qualified dermatologist with her eyes and ears open to anyone who is likely to “dirty” Life mainly by touching a female body ‘inappropriately’. Her solution is simple – with her expertise in medicine, she simply kills the man and goes scot-free because autopsies show no traces of poison. She can kill medically without leaving any proof.

Asked what motivated him to make such psychological thriller, Ghosal says, “Sukanta Bhattacharya’s poem Chharpatra always haunted me. The line in the poem, “Jotokkhon dehe achhe praan, praan pone e prithibir shorabo jonjal,” which means “As long as I live, I will use all my strength to clean the world,” planted the first unconscious seed for the film OCD. It gave me a sense of purpose around the idea of cleanliness and connected it to godliness, which, in essence, is about protecting children. From this emotional and philosophical connection, I linked the themes of OCD and pedophilia in the film.”

First, Sweta lost her mother (before the film begins) and grandmother when she was a child, but her father was still there. He was disgusted with her cruel manners as a child so sent her to boarding school. Recalling her grandmother’s death to Shayan (Shreya Bhattacharya), her friend, she elaborates on her life’s philosophy of “Cleanliess being Godliness”. Sweta, a qualified doctor, knows how certain life-saving medicines, when combined or misused, can become poisonous but cannot be detected. She had earlier attempted to kill Bhalo Kaku using a simple Botox injection, which is medically possible. So, when she was in the asylum and went to bring tea for the young man, she mixed some common blood pressure medicines, manipulated the dosage, and spiked the lawyer’s tea. The lawyer was not killed but he fell unconscious. Sweta picked up his recording instrument from his pocket and threw it inside the well in the garden.

OCD would not have become the brilliant film it has turned out to be without the outstanding performance of Jaya Ahsan. “After narrating the script to Jaya, I told her: “Feel for Sweta.” She read the script many times and tried to understand and justify everything Sweta did. I told Jaya that she had to realize the deep pain and inner conflict Sweta was going through, and she portrayed it flawlessly.”

The film is beautiful in terms of the script, opening in a lunatic asylum inside some wooded area covered with a veil of ominous silence because one of the inmates has died. A young lawyer, suspicious that Sweta was a killer pretending to be mad, walks in to open her to a recorded interview. The film moves into flashback in a large ancestral home where the girl Sweta lives with her widowed father and paternal grandmother and a middle-aged couple living as co-tenants on the upper floor. As a child, Sweta threw a heavy flower pot on Bhalo Kaku, the tenant upstairs as he often tried to touch her wrongly. He did not die but remained paralysed till a grown Sweta took her revenge by killing in him cold blood.

Says Jaya Ahsan, “There was no reference point for such a character. OCD may be the first Bengali film to bring these two difficult themes together in a single narrative,” adding, “Dr Sweta Majumdar is a deeply layered character who challenged the actress in me both emotionally and creatively.”

The narrative moves back and forth in time, showing us the cold-blooded unspooling of Sweta’s character who kills anyone she suspects is an abuser and therefore, is “dirtying society.” Her best friend Sweta gets killed when Sweta thinks she has learnt too much and accuses her of being a “beast.” The editing, the background music, the lighting and the change of scene from Sweta’s original rented home to the asylum to the streets with the adult Sweta walking with some mission, are beautifully handled.

OCD is topical in the light of a recent expose. A couple in Uttar Pradesh spent a decade abusing children and selling the recordings online. A court has now sentenced them to death. The case of Ram Bhawan and Durgawati, a former government engineer and his wife from Banda district in Uttar Pradesh is the scary exzmple. Over nearly a decade, this couple abused 33 young boys between 3 and 15, filmed the abuse, and sold these to buyers across 47 countries. On 20 February 2026, a special court sentenced both of them to death. It was the right decision and yet, this verdict alone is not enough.

Child sexual abuse in general and incest in particular are so fragile and ‘invisible’ realities in society that people are scared even to discuss it or deal with it. Cinema is no exception. The general tendency of the masses across class, geography, language, culture and community is to imagine that it does not exist, not realising that trying to avoid it will not make it go away. How many little girls have got completely negative and angry responses from their mothers when they reported that they were being abused by an uncle or a neighbour? How many little boys even understood that they were being sexually abused by some older boy in school or in the local club or within the neighbourhood?

© Mathrubhumi English