The World Before Her (Nisha Pahuja, India, 2012)

 

In one of the scenes in Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her, Prachi, an activist of the Hindu fundamentalist group Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s women’s wing Durga Vahini, tells us that if need be, she won’t hesitate to kill. This moment comes much later in the film when the viewer is already privy to her as a person, thanks to the fact that we get to spend quite some time listening to her and her family talk about things other than her ideology. She works for a fundamentalist organization infamous of various atrocities in the country such as beating up couples seen in public or women who drink. She says that the “Parishad” is the only goal of her life. We see little girls in the camps led by her being taught to use weapons and zestfully shout slogans about slaying the enemies’ throats. And yet what strikes you the most about Prachi is that she seems just like us. Her father brags about the permanent wound mark he gave her on her leg – she was hit with an iron rod as a punishment for lying – and yet, he seems like a normal person, someone who’s one of us.

If you allow me the digression, one of my pet peeves with movies about social issues is the stressed antagonization of characters harboring a particular belief. In docudramas such as Schindler’s List and 12 Years A Slave, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) or Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) aren’t only a Nazi and slaver, but they’re also cruel megalomaniacs who are despicable even outside of their fundamental beliefs. In documentary films such as those by Anand Patwardhan, this aspect is easier to accept in spite of the one-sidedness of perspective because of the verite nature of his films. Two notable exceptions to this are Alain Resnais’ poetic holocaust documentary Night & Fog and Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram, where temporal variants of the same person form the two sides of the equation. The dialectic approach Pahuja takes with The World Before Her helps erase the demarcation between “us” and “them”: the perspective of the film is never that of “we, the free-thinking progressive liberals, versus those regressive narrow-minded fascists” (or the other way round). The world that unfolds before us examines both sides of the equation with equal objectivity, exposing some biting ironies existing on both ends.

The film intercuts between two conflicting microcosms. In the Durga Vahini camps, young women are physically trained to make them able to defend themselves from assaults. In the same camps, fervent speakers criticize the idea of women choosing their careers over household chores, stressing on the fact that they are the weaker gender by nature. A contestant of a famous beauty pageant contest asserts that it’s a platform which presents women with an opportunity to achieve an equal status as men. And yet, the essentials of the business include women to undergo treatments to change the shape of their face and walking the ramp in an outfit that covers everything except their legs, for the male director wants to find out who in the bunch of Miss India aspirants has the hottest legs. One model wearing the outfit, her face completely covered, jokes that the outfit makes her look like a Taliban member. When the girls complete the Durga Vahini course, they are given saffron-coloured sashes and one of them jokes that they look like the Miss India sashes. As we go through the course of the film, we see both the groups have a lot in common.

It helps that the tone of the film is neutral – it doesn’t seem to be lamenting these aspects of the worlds of beauty pageant contests but foregrounding the ironies about the same. In one scene, we see Prachi mocking the girls in the camp asking them whether they want to go back to their homes to perform kitchen chores, to “cut potatoes and onions” and in a scene that comes a short while later, we see her doing the same. Her father opines that it’s a woman’s duty to get married and serve the man, and she doesn’t become a “complete woman” unless she experiences motherhood. All this talk happens casually in a light vein over tea and snacks; the tone doesn’t have a shred of intensity. Through this nonchalance, we see the extent to which the thought percolates our mentality. Is physical empowerment all that’s there to it? If a profession that is seemingly a progressive platform for women requires them to surgically change their appearance and submit to some squarely patriarchal established practices of the trade, is it really all that progressive? The film doesn’t provide many answers, but raises a lot of questions. In a scene towards the end of the film, a young girl who has just passed her first Durga Vahini camp and has probably learnt the basics of combating a physical attack proudly declares that she doesn’t have a single Muslim friend. She did have two of them once, but not anymore. The most alarming aspect of it, however, is that she appears to be one of us.

 

Cross-posted from here.