National Geo.Trashing India's Marriages?

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National Geographic to feature arranged marriages in India

 

IANS

 

NEW DELHI: When filmmaker Anand Kamalakar was approached by National

Geographic to make a film on arranged marriages in India, he was

quite amused.

 

"I mean usually they make films about elephants and zebras, wild

animals and nature sort of thing," said Brooklyn-based non-resident

Indian Kamalakar. "Now they suddenly wanted to work on marriage!"

 

So Kamalakar, an editor with the ABC television network in the US,

arrived in Kolkata, formerly called Calcutta, at a ramshackle

building in the heart of its bustling Burrabazar business

neighbourhood.

 

Amid the grimy and dank shops of oil, rice, grain, iron and teak

traders, he found a wedding bazaar -- a fair where men and women from

the Marwari community gathered to find matches from themselves.

 

"Here were all these people gathering together, wearing badges, going

up on stage to introduce themselves and generally hunting around to

find a match," Kamalakar told IANS about the approximately one-hour-

long documentary, "A Match Made in Calcutta". It won the Best

International Film Award at the Mumbai International Film Festival

(MIFF) last year.

 

MIFF is India's only international film festival for documentaries

and short features that happens once in two years.

 

"They were people who were desperate to find a partner," added the

filmmaker, a science graduate from Hyderabad who went on to study

mass communication at Bowling State University in Ohio and then at

the Syracuse University.

 

The film was finally not made for National Geographic because they

wanted an extremely intrusive account, which Kamalakar thought was a

violation of private space.

 

"They wanted a camera person to stay with a couple (married through

the fair) and film them 24 hours. We weren't ready to exploit them

like that. So we finally made the film on our own."

 

In New Delhi for the first private screenings of the film in the

capital, Kamalakar said his attempt was to make a general statement

about marriages in India and marriages in general through the film.

 

"It's a tale of matches and mismatches, of abuse and sometimes love.

Those, I think, are universal attributes of weddings around the

world."

 

The film follows a rather grim and morbid trajectory, where desperate

men and women marry virtually the first person in sight, and where

women, from the very first instance, are told to blindly follow

anything their husbands say.

 

Like Ritu, for instance, brought to the fair at the age of 22 by her

parents against her will and married to a man who believes that even

if he hits his wife during an argument, she shouldn't protest and

judges her worth on the basis of her ability to do domestic chores.

 

"My husband is my god, if I follow that I am happy," sighs and smiles

a pregnant and rather weary looking Ritu, nine months after her

marriage.

 

Her story is almost joyful compared to Mili's.

 

Crippled in one leg by polio from birth, Mili, an orphan, marries

another parentless man, Janardan. Nine months later, she has aborted

her first pregnancy, and talks of being beaten by her husband and a

rape attempt by his septuagenarian guardian.

 

In many ways, the film reveals the truth about Indian weddings, most

of which are arranged. But Kamalakar, who edits ABC's flagship

shows "Primetime", "20/20" and "Peter Jennings", said there was a

bigger picture.

 

"Though this tale is about India, the issues are the same -- domestic

violence, abuse, incompatibility."