Last Saturday, I was invited by Radha Gungaloo of SOS Femmes to the projection of ‘Mathrubhoomi – A nation without women’, a film by Manish Jha. I was also part of a discussion panel chaired by Daniella Police after the projection.
The film is a must-see that grips your attention from beginning to end. It tells the story of a village in India where systematic female infanticide leads to an utter scarcity of women. The village becomes plagued with bachelors who are all in despair of ever getting a wife so that they are even prepared to pay a hefty sum to secure one, be it an old hag. This is an ironical twist in the Indian tradition where girls’ parents have to pay the dowry to compensate the bridegroom’s family for taking over the ‘burden’.
The film focuses on a family of six men (a father and his five sons) who lay their hands on a beautiful lass named Kalki who was living in hiding. Kalki gets married off to the five who, together with the father, literally take turns to rape her and use her body to satisfy their long-restrained sexual impulses. She only finds solace in the youngest husband and is also befriended by the boy-servant. But her hopes of happiness will not last long…
It is a harsh film which shows the dark side of man, his cruelty towards the female sex, from the newborn to the full-grown. There are denunciations of the caste divisions, religious people and the ‘nouveaux riches’. There are also many allusions to the ‘perversions’ that are present in a supposedly puritan society (a porn video viewing, a priest having homosexual relations, a transvestite, another who f***s with the cow).
Technically speaking, it is very nicely made. No song-and-dance rituals, no crap dialogue, no romantic heroic figure. The very opposite of mainstream Bollywood…
