Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her shows how modern women succumb to existing doctrines. The filmmaker chatted with Darpan Mago
I will kill anyone who speaks against my religion. If anyone attacks us, we won’t step back. We’ll face and crush them,” says Prachi Trivedi, a young girl who is regular at Durga Vahini, a Hindu nationalist camp as a firefighter. The next moment, we are exposed to Miss India aspirant Ruhi Singh, who is ready for a photoshoot. “I don’t feel comfortable wearing a bikini at all, but it is part of the contest and the emphasis is on the body. So you have to do it,” says Ruhi.
These two sequences sum up the sentiments that featured in Nisha Pahuja’s documentary The World Before Her, which has become talk of the town. “Both women are stuck. More than being called a ‘prisoner of their belief system’, these women are moulded and constructed by the society to set doctrines. They are in search of freedom in their own unique ways. It is not limited to just these women but applies to any of us,” says Pahuja, an Indian-born Canadian filmmaker.
The World Before Her is a stark comment over the state of affairs and societal perspectives available to a woman. Initially, the film was to be made on ‘Miss India’ but then the subjects were expanded. It was to show the nuances of the pageant and bring to light many intricacies as well as behind the scene action. “I researched more and wanted to be inclusive of the whole perspective. As I also wanted to include a ‘voice of opposition’, I met Prachi Trivedi through editor of a right wing newspaper. She told me about Durga Vahini camps and provided details of what they were doing. It took me almost two years to obtain a permission for filming inside them,” says Pahuja. The filmmaker is the first to film a Durga Vahini camp in India. Striving for a comfortable degree of independence both the characters in the short film are subjected to different strains to attain an apparent freedom but are further chained in the process. “The point of the film is not to necessarily denigrate the process but to put into context all the limited choices a woman faces in this country,” says Pahuja.
As a filmmaker, the issues of social justice have always caught Nisha’s attention. Her films have been giving expressions to the prevailing silence and attempting to ‘pierce the deaf ears’. Her previous films have been on the plight of people working in diamond industry in Africa. Speaking about the challenges she faced while making the film, Pahuja says, “Finances were the biggest of them. It was extremely difficult to raise money. The documentary film market world over seems to decline. Earlier there were enough ways to generate funds but now such avenues have reduced. Though the popularity of documentary filmmaking is on rise, the ability to finance is showing a decline. Such films are hard to make, yet more people want them.”