Bawandar
(Jagmohan Mundhra, 2000)
Bawandar
is based on the true story of Rajasthani woman Bhanwari Devi, who
was gang-raped by five village elders because she took a government
job as a “saathin” - a village advocate for women's rights,
partly responsible for educating against and reporting the illegal,
but long-held tradition of child marriage. Told largely in flashback
form, the story kicks off when a foreign journalist (Laila Rouass)
accompanied by a local guide, Ravi (Rahul Khanna), come to a tiny
Rajasthani village seeking Sanwari Devi (Nandita Das), a woman all
the locals decry as being a prostitute and a whore. They find her
living in isolation, and she tells them how she came to be so reviled
by her village.
Depressing?
YES. This isn't a happy film. Be warned. If you only like Indian
films for glitter and songs and colour and happy endings, then steer
clear of Bawandar.
At
the time of its release, Bawandar did the film festival
circuit, and picked up a tonne of awards – Best Actress for Nandita
Das, a couple of Best Film accolades, an Audience Choice Award. It
caused a storm of controversy in India (and I am still not clear on
whether it ever ACTUALLY released there: some sources say it was
banned outright; some say it would be released pending VERY
significant cuts) with stories emerging that the woman Bawandar
was based on hadn't been consulted at all and that she was
unhappy with the film, “weary and bitter” with both the
government and the aid organisations she had been working with. I
don't really know how much of that is true – what IS interesting is
that Bawandar itself offers a seemingly biting
perspective at some of the aid organisations/workers and their
attitudes towards helping the less fortunate. Lillette Dubey plays a
middle class New Delhi-ite social worker who, along with her
colleagues, is more concerned with the shopping and image
opportunities afforded by helping a high profile case like Sanwari
Devi. Deepti Naval's character, on the other hand, as the woman who
recruited Sanwari Devi into the saathin programme and who thus feels
responsible for her resulting hardships, provides balance as a
character who is truly selfless and willing to undergo personal
hardship for the sake of what is right.
Regardless
of the background, this is an important film. It's not a perfect
film – the narrative dips into cartoony melodrama once too
often, especially in terms of the police, who are ALL depicted as
caricaturish villains (thankfully, not all the men in the film are
cardboard cutout cartoon evil characters – Gulshan Grover as a
committed, competent, thoughtful lawyer is AMAZINGLY refreshing;
Raghuvir Yadhav as Sanwari's enlightened, supportive husband who is
powerless to help his wife is HEARTBREAKING); it gets a little too
obviously preachy in spots where the filmmakers seem to want to
address/draw attention to as many possible social issues as they can
just by having characters complain about them (the opposite of show,
don't tell) – but it deals with rape, a notoriously thorny issue in
Indian films, in a way that puts the woman's entire experience,
physical AND emotional, at the centre of the film. This is not a
lurid rape-revenge tale, or rape in a film as yet another opportunity
for the male hero to show his manliness and save the woman. This film
explores sexual assault for what it is: an attempt to subjugate and
humiliate the victim, and Bawandar is notable in that
it shows the entire process and the effects on the victim (and the
victim's friends and family) following from the initial assault: from
telling a friend it happened, trying to report it to the police, the
medical examination, gathering evidence, being cross examined in
court, and facing the perpetrators in public.
This
is obviously in stark contrast to the scores of Indian movies where
rape is pretty flippantly treated as a 30 second plot device to show
who are the bad guys (the rapists) and who are the heroes (the ones
who rescue the rape victims), and the heroine/victim recovers and is
apparently unaffected by her ordeal. Have you seen Enthiran?
Aishwarya Rai's character is assaulted at least 3 times in the course
of that film, just so she can be saved by Rajnikanth, and emerges
each time apparently entirely unscathed.
Obviously,
given the subject matter, which also addresses caste discrimination
(Bhanwari, renamed Sanwari in the film for legal reasons, is of a
lower caste to her attackers, who are the village leaders and who
decree her entire family outcasts as soon as she starts stirring up
controversy as a saathin) Bawandar is not exactly what
you would describe as a pleasant or enjoyable watch. The last film
that made me as uncomfortable was Shakti: The Power –
though that was in a slightly different way, the violence and
ill-treatment of women seeming perhaps more lurid. Bawandar
never seemed exploitative – it's merely direct and if anything,
foregrounds how much inner strength and dignity the central character
has even in the face of unrelenting injustice, but I caution all of
you reading: there are few scenes in cinema more poignantly upsetting
than the aftermath of the traumatic rape scene in this film, when
Sanwari's badly beaten husband, who had been forced to helplessly
witness his wife's gang rape, rushes to be with her.
Nandita Das and
Raghuvir Yadhav are truly the soul of this film, each giving
heartwrenching, luminescent, utterly authentic performances.
