The World Before Her Review
By David Kempler
What a Wonderful World?
Exploring the state and status of women across current cultures often makes them seem very alike and very different at the same time. In "The World Before Her", filmmaker, Nisha Pahuja examines two distinct strains of how women are treated and how they view themselves today in Mumbai, India.
Pahuja tracks contestants vying to be Miss India, interviewing them and their families leading up to the moment when one is crowned Miss India. At the same time, Pahuja is monitoring the militant Durgha Vahini camps run by a Hindu fundamentalist party. I had never heard of this organization and was surprised to learn that fervent exhortations towards violence were even being taught to young Indian women. Every other religion has similar sects, but this one was totally foreign to me.
The most amazing part of this was that Pahuja was granted access to the Durgha Vahini camps, and no doubt this must have been a difficult group to gain access to and she explains that shat she was exceedingly lucky to have avoided the right people in order to gain entrance.
If she had just gotten inside, it would have been impressive, but what really propels this section of "The World Before Her" is the personal access she gained into the life of Prachi, a young woman who is a veteran of the Durgas. We see Prachi in her home-life and at the camps, and what we see often makes us cringe. Prachi's father beats her whenever he sees fit (this is not shown) and he explains to us matter-of-factly, even with a sense of glee, how he once heated metal and burned her foot because she lied about a triviality. Considering that 50,000 female fetuses are aborted monthly in India, it is clear that women have a long way to go in this
democracy that is awfully confusing to me.
By contrast, the stories revealed while following the beauty pageant contestants display a warmth of family and a genuine treatment of equality towards women. By going back and forth between the two worlds, Pahuja paints a portrait of a country very divided in its ideals. When I got over my disgust at this notion, I realized that the same can be said for probably everywhere else. "The World Before Her" is an achievement because it gave us so much information is so short a time, without ever feeling like a dry instructional piece. It left me sad, happy, and questioning values everywhere towards women, and most of all wondering why societies are the way they are.
