The latest controversy centers on speech. Advance publicity for the film highlighted Mr. Singh’s interview, in which he blamed the victim for the attack, saying, “A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night.”

An Indian court swiftly issued an order blocking the film’s broadcast, stating that his statements were offensive to women and could set off civil unrest. The authorities then approached YouTube, which blocked many channels of users who had uploaded the film onto the Internet. The ban has come under criticism, including from the Editor’s Guild of India, which called it “wholly unwarranted, based as it is on a misunderstanding of the power and the message behind it.”

The news channel NDTV left its screen blank in protest for an hour on Sunday evening, at the time it had planned to broadcast the film.

One place the ban has support is Ravidas Colony, a collection of around 250 boxlike houses with no indoor plumbing or running water. Mukesh Singh and his elder brother, Ram, had arrived here as most of their neighbors did: from a remote village, the sons of landless laborers. The brothers worked as drivers, and were known as drinkers and brawlers, but not criminals. Neighbor after neighbor recalled them as “regular guys.”

“I have known them since my childhood, but I did not imagine they could do anything like this,” said Ram Kishore Anuragi, 17, who grew up two doors away. “They were always together, always drinking. They sometimes got into fights, but they didn’t misbehave with any of the women here.”

In the film, Mukesh Singh tells this story tonelessly: It was after an afternoon of heavy drinking that six of them “went out to party” in the bus his brother usually drove. They found the young woman at a bus stop — she had been to see a movie with a male friend — and when the couple climbed on, they knocked the man unconscious and raped the woman repeatedly, including with an iron rod. Mr. Singh, who claimed he drove the bus but did not take part in the attack, said he looked back and saw one of the men pull something from her body.