CINEMA
No woman, no bride
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What happens to society if women become extinct? This is the subject of "Matrubhoomi". GOWRI RAMNARAYAN talks to filmmaker Manish Jha.
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A NEWSPAPER reported that a village in Gujarat had no women left; it had to seek brides in neighbouring villages. It disturbed young Manish Jha so much that he had to come to terms with it by making a film on the subject. But as the ironically named "Matrubhoomi" took shape on mind, paper and screen, the location shifted to the northern belt and the time to the future. Meanwhile statistics continued to record alarming falls in the population of women in many Indian States, indicating that the future was imminent. Infanticide and abortion after sex determination tests during pregnancy were the cited as major causes. UNESCO reported that 50 million women were missing from the population of India due to gender discrimination. Not surprising in a society where getting a daughter married often spelt financial disaster for the family.
"Matrubhoomi" won the Fipresci Award from the Critics' Jury at the Venice film festival (2003), where it got a standing ovation from viewers. Since then it has been travelling to festivals across the world. This closing film at the festival of the Mumbai Academy of Moving Images (MAMI, 2003) impressed not only by its arresting theme, but also by taut structure and technical finish. Cinematographer Venu walks the tightrope between the macabre and the slapstick. The camera is unobtrusive but has a style and insistent pace of its own.
The futuristic parable is of a rural India where women being practically extinct, the men find release in pornographic films and homosexuality. Stomach disorders become a metaphor for diseased lust and violence, reducing humankind to savagery. A chilling scene is of a marriage where the suspicious priest tears off the bride's saree to reveal a boy.
Finally, when Kalki, a real girl is found, she is married to five brothers. The Mahabharata myth is subverted with the father wanting his turn first, and with husbands resembling the Kauravas rather than their noble cousins. Are the Pandavas any different is a disquieting implication. The girl's nightmares include mating with a cross dressing husband. All the tenderness has not been wiped out in the youngest brother, but her bonding with him comes to a brutal end. The eldest murders him. The girl's father is bribed to migrate to the city.
No Krishna comes to succour this Draupadi. The low caste servant boy does — only to be killed for it. The "Pandava" wife is chained in the byre and gang raped by the low caste community as well as her husbands. Menacing significances flicker as the holy cow becomes a dumb witness to the heinous outrages. The window shows the changing seasons, the cow gives birth to a calf. The woman's pregnancy has everyone claiming paternity. The village is aflame with a caste war. Kalki, with her symbolic name, gives birth to a girl child. "I wanted to end the film on a positive note, suggest a new beginning. Can we rectify our mistakes? Change ourselves? Make a better world?" Will Kalki's ordeal destroy; can it trigger the dawn of a better age?
Responses at foreign festivals brought their own lessons. A woman wept uncontrollably after the Venice screening, audiences in Poland voted it Best Film. The NRIs who expected patriotism and melodrama in a film called "Motherland" were shocked and offended. Once the film is censored and released in India, Jha would like to have screenings in the villages, "a test of its own kind."
There is some clowning in the film, mostly black, at times undergraduatish. But it works. "I had to have comic relief. Otherwise the grimness would have been soul numbing. Remember Chaplin?"
Innocent of film school, Jha was 23 when he made "Matrubhoomi" last year. "No, I didn't tell the producer my age," he laughs. The filmmaker is close to his mother. He describes her as "uncorrupted by education, with an intuitive, commonsensical understanding of things. I want to be natural, like that."
Jha has always wondered why Indian culture glorified women in story and song but degraded them in daily lives. Slum and civilised society colluded in this paradox. His first short "A Very, Very Silent Film" showed without the props of dialogue or music, the exploitation of women on the city lanes.
"I have spent many nights on the streets because I could not get into my hostel after 10 p.m. I saw people eating, drinking, starving, sleeping, having sex, getting raped and dying on the dark streets. I interacted with the street dwellers — a surrealistic experience," he shudders. "A Very, Very Silent Film" shared the Jury Prize for best short film in Cannes (2002). Martin Scorsese who headed the Jury said that the award was given for artistic, not political reasons. Abbas Kiarostami declared that Manish Jha was the most promising director he had seen at the festival.
Pushing his long pink and orange locks back, Manish Jha says in a matter-of-fact voice that cannot hide the boyish excitement, "I am working on two scripts now."
The first is about the way Mulsims feel and are seen after 9/11. The second is about the repercussions of sexual repression in India. "I don't want to be branded as a man who makes films on women. I am looking at these two subjects differently, without gender tilt, and challenging myself to come up with something strong."
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