A Nation Without Women Director: Manish Jha Country: France/India Year: 2003

CAST:
Tulip Joshi, Sudhir Pandey, Piyush Mishra, Pankaj Jha, Deepak Kumar

SCREENING TIMES
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Manish Jha’s A Nation Without Women is one of the most startling debut features to emerge from India in recent memory. It is astonishing not only for its courageous treatment of an incendiary issue – female infanticide – but for its remarkable technical prowess. Jha’s debut conjures up memories of Shekhar Kapur’s groundbreaking Bandit Queen – and it is easily as intense.

In certain parts of India, the expense of furnishing a dowry is so prohibitive that many families prefer to kill their female newborns. This context is established in a prologue that is shocking for what it depicts and for the way it plays off time-honoured neo-realist codes of Indian art cinema. From the prologue, Jha cuts to a middle-class household in rural India. Its ostensible head, the widower Ramcharan, is less concerned with daily needs than with finding wives for his five sons – a difficult task in an area where there are few women. One day, the family’s smarmy priest and advisor, who is anxious to help, happens upon Kalki, a beautiful young woman from a remote household. Her father is quickly persuaded (bought off, rather) to send his daughter to be wed. By the bartering’s end, Kalki is married to all five sons.

Ramcharan and his brood treat Kalki like chattel; her only respite is her relationship with the family servant, Raghu, and the kinder treatment she receives from the youngest son. The story plows ahead with rigorous, nightmarish logic until, by the conclusion, the entire village is ready to erupt in class warfare.

Despite the sordid acts the film documents, Jha is decidedly scrupulous about what he depicts. There isn’t a single action that is implausible, but the ferocity of what is presented almost pushes the film into the realm of the allegorical – or it would if Jha allowed us that level of comfort. Driven by a near-scriptural sense of outrage, A Nation Without Women confronts head-on the notion that some people are born second-class citizens. Baldly put, this film is not for the squeamish, but it is as affecting and important as any you are likely to see.

–Steve Gravestock

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