The World Before Her , now running in cinemas, is an important documentary film for our times. By contrasting the world of the Durga Vahini camps against the grooming sessions of Miss India, it brings out the tyrannies of both. Durga Vahini is the female counterpart of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. At these training camps, girls from 10 to 18 are taught “physical and spiritual uplift”. They are trained in karate and self-defence and indoctrinated that to be a woman is to be forever inferior, and instructed that to work and to marry after the age of 25 is wrong. Because, by then, a woman cannot be “tamed”.

At the 30-day Miss India grooming sessions, we listen to women who come seeking independence, an identity and fame, but are often reduced to faces that must be bleached and botoxed, shapely legs that must strut and bodies that must be displayed. One contestant admits that she hates wearing bikinis, but she knows she has to.

While the movie has won plaudits, it has also been criticised for focusing only on two extremes at the expense of the many Indias that exist in the middle.

Of late, however, all of public discourse has been reduced to these two extremes. It is “tradition” versus “modernity”. Tradition sees the Miss India contestants as brazen, uncouth and westernised. For the other side, anyone hailing from small towns and selling tea will forever be small-towners hustling chai . Neither side admits its faults.

This clash also overlooks the fact that life is not lived merely through ideologies, and that these two worlds do not exist in vacuums. Indeed they slip in and out of each other. Prachi, a Durga Vahini recruit, might be warned of the perils of foreign products like Lux, but she expresses herself effortlessly in English in the film. Her father — a patriarch if there ever was one — insists that she will marry, will have children. But Prachi has no interest in such “female” pursuits. However, a 19-year-old Miss India contestant wants to win the crown and live her dreams because she feels that by 25, she will marry and have a family.

The debates that rage today from drawing rooms to Parliament, fail to recognise this — that lives are lived in the middle, in the nitty-gritty of the everyday.

Assistant Editor

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