The following
review of a 2001 film gives us a clear idea as to the underpinnings of
India's mistreatment of women and the origin of the widely prevalent
gang-rape of women that pervades Indian society today. It's a must-see
film, excellently made though deeply troubling: it reveals how
pre-historic Hindu religious practices continue to corrupt and contaminate
Indian society today.
MAYA,
a Film by Digvijay Singh, 2001
A pre-teen stands in front of a locked door,
from behind which blood-curdling screams emerge; he is pounding on the
door, shouting, “Let me in!”
A grown-up assures him that the one screaming
is not at all being hurt, and the concerned boy is physically punished for
the fuss he is making.
Thus begins Maya, a superlative Hindi
film in which this initial scene is either the boy’s nightmarish
premonition or a real event to which the film will return in due course.
What is happening behind the door?
Officially it is forbidden, but in remote
spots of rural India a certain practice still exists. When a girl has
started to menstruate, there is a “prayer ceremony” for her, officiated by
a pujari, a Hindu priest, at which she is ritually raped by a
series of elders. The ceremony commemorates her passage into womanhood.
This is what happens to 12-year-old Maya.
From India and the U.S., Maya was
written by the film’s director, 28-year-old Digvijay Singh and Emmanuel
Pappas.
Perhaps the U.S. participation has in this
instance helped turn Hindi cinema away from the self-indulgent escapism
and excesses of Bollywood and toward social realities. Regardless, this is
a spare, exceptionally fine and compelling film that manages to avoid even
a second of exploitation despite such risky material. One might wish that
the film had related the ceremonial practice of rape to the broader issue
of female vulnerability in India; but Digvijay Singh may have hoped that
his film would inspire others on similar themes.
The film’s first movement surveys the mischief
of cousins Sanjay and Maya, who is living with Sanjay’s family while her
mother deals with her latest pregnancy. Sanjay’s father is lenient, not
strict, which makes all the more horrifying the corporal punishment that
he inflicts on Sanjay on three occasions after the boy has innocently
adopted the role of Maya’s protector -- at which he inevitably fails,
which is part of the tragedy of Maya.
Another part of the tragedy is that the grown
women, including Sanjay’s exceptionally smart mother, who it is implied
have themselves gone through the “prayer ceremony,” see nothing wrong with
it.
But against the notion that the tradition is
harmless the film sets a symbolical infestation of lizards -- survivors of
pre-history. Certain unquestioned traditions, no matter how monstrous,
carry their own aura of necessity in the continuity of culture, religious
or otherwise.
Maya is prepared for the ceremony by being
made exceptionally beautiful, as one might prepare a corpse for burial.
Throughout, the child has no idea what is
going to happen to her. Digvijay Singh takes us “behind the door,” but
uses such compositional and framing techniques as to convey the horror of
the event without exactly simulating it. We see Maya’s bare legs dangling
fairly high above the floor -- this is all of Maya that we see -- and must
imagine what we cannot see that is compatible with such a view. (Has the
child been put into some kind of harness?)
One by one, a pair of naked male legs confront
Maya’s and, we imagine, each of the men perpetrates rape; Digvijay Singh
shows three such events, although we understand from the greater number of
elders who later emerge with Maya that Maya was raped more than thrice. We
never see any genitalia -- just legs, and this visual procedure
underscores the level of dissociation involved, including on the victim’s
part, as well as the dehumanization.
During the ceremony, Digvijay Singh uses the
camera to survey the men’s neatly folded outfits on the floor -- a grisly
touch of contrast, given the violations being perpetrated, the chaos of
torture that Maya endures.
After the ceremony, there are food and
festivities (except that Maya herself is too sick to eat), everyone
congratulates the priest, who assures Maya’s father that God blesses his
daughter.
Poignantly impotent, Sanjay assaults the
doorway of the pujari’s home.
None are so blind as those who will not
see.
Erstwhile critic Dita Bhargava has thus
written: “[T]his film puts India and ancient hindu practices in an
embarrassing, disgusting, and false light . . . The footnotes at the end
of the movie reveal that this ritual is practiced on 5000-15,000 wom[e]n a
year. I am not sure [of] the validity of this fact at all[,] but let[’]s
put this claim in perspective. Out of a population of over a billion,
10,000 people is 0.001 percent! There are sick and twisted practices that
occur to girls, boys, men, women and animals all over the world in strange
obscure cults and organizations. To make a movie out of something that is
not part of any hindu text or teaching and portray it as an ancient hindu
ritual is very disappointing and insulting.”
Let us set aside the inaccuracy of Bhargava’s
statistical analysis, which fails to take into account that the number of
victims expands annually; let us accept this fractured math.
A mere 10,000 people?
But the number comprises actual individuals --
each one a living, breathing, feeling girl.
Justice Brandeis: “Sunlight is the best
disinfectant.”
