Nearly 300,000 people watched India’s Daughter, the controversial documentary on the gang-rape of a young woman in Delhi, after its broadcast was brought forward by the BBC.
The film, which had been due to air on International Women’s Day on Sunday, had an audience of 286,000 viewers, a 1.9% share of the audience, between 10pm and 11pm on Wednesday.
Delhi authorities banned the broadcast of the film in India, prompting its British director Leslee Udwin call on Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to “deal with the unceremonious silencing of the film”.
The BBC said it brought forward the broadcast “given the intense level of interest in the Storyville film”, enabling viewers to “see this incredibly powerful documentary at the earliest opportunity”.
It said on Thursday that it had received 32 complaints about the film, while four viewers it contacted in support of the film.
Based on the brutal rape in December 2012 of 23-year-old physiotherapy student Jyoti Singh, Udwin’s documentary includes interviews with one of the men convicted for the crime, who is now in prison and waiting for the supreme court to hear his appeal against the death sentence.
It was the highest rating documentary in BBC4’s Storyville series so far this year, with a five-minute peak of 352,000 viewers. It was broadly in line with the ratings average for the slot.
The BBC said the film, which seeks to explore the crime and the cultural context in which it was committed, provided a “revealing insight into a horrific crime that sent shock waves around the world and led to protests across India demanding changes in attitudes towards women”.
