The power of pink

The recently released documentary Gulabi Gang presents a well-rounded picture of this unique movement

Nishtha Jain's documentary Gulabi Gang, completed in 2012 and released commercially this week, has many aesthetically pleasing scenes. The opening moments give us beautiful nature shots, vistas of fields surrounding Bundelkhand, and the vivid fuchsia of the saris worn by the Gulabi Gang group, founded by Sampat Pal to tackle injustice against women. She banters with other members; the mood is warm and convivial. Yet great ugliness is soon revealed beneath the surface of this setting, and the film doesn't flinch from it.

The camera follows Pal into a hut containing the charred body of a young girl, and then we see the first steps in an amateur investigation as she questions the victim's in-laws, wonders how roof and walls have remained undamaged after such a fierce "accidental" fire. Other viscerally disturbing scenes follow: a conversation with the dead girl's husband, who might be a murderer; the faces of men standing outside a car, looking in through the window, offering justifications and rationalisations, changing stories as per convenience; children at the scene of the crime, staring at the camera, primed to grow into adults who will keep this cycle of violence and concealment going. The contrast between how the film began and the bleakness of these scenes is telling - here is a "simple", "God-fearing" community that closes ranks in the face of a terrible crime.

At this point Gulabi Gang also has the texture of a busy investigative thriller, driven by Pal's determination to see justice done. But as if to remind us of the true pace of life in this setting, things slow down. The case becomes entangled in local politics and taken over by apathetic policemen, the girl's own family stoically invokes the will of God, one gets the dispiriting sense that nothing can ever really change in a place so mired in patriarchy and feudalism.

And yet, Pal's group has been an agent of change in the past decade - its influence has spread, it has won small battles and the woman at its centre is a strong, magnetic presence. Gulabi Gang makes for a good double bill with another documentary, Kim Longinotto's 2010 Pink Saris - together they present a well-rounded picture of the movement. Jain's film is more concerned with the larger picture - the work being done by the group's other leaders such as the robustly likable Suman Singh, the promotional campaigns, the participation in grassroots politics - while Pink Saris employs an intimate, worm's eye perspective, focuses on relatively low-key problems (a pregnant girl being deserted by her husband, a married woman wanting to run off with another man) and uses the particular to illuminate the general, by setting the facts of Pal's life against the situations of the people she is helping.

In both films the camera seems drawn to Pal. Whether she is yelling at people who cross her with mumbo-jumbo about divine sanction or softly consoling a weeping man who says his brothers were killed, she has the poise of a minor-key movie star who knows the precise emotional register required in each scene. It is possible to feel ambivalent about her as an individual, for there are traces of hubris in her behaviour. "Main police se zyaada hoon," she tells people, and refers to herself in the third person. ("Log Sampat Pal ko auraton ki masiha bulaate hain.")

But this doesn't undermine the value of the work done by her group over the years, shaking up the status quo and striking fear in the hearts of people who were used to having everything their own way. And an achievement of both films is that despite Pal's forcefulness, we never lose sight of just how hard it is for real change to happen. Gulabi Gang offers a bitter pill near the end, through a woman named Husna who has been asked to disassociate herself from the group because she is trying to shield her brother, a murderer. In a long, unbroken shot, Husna - who prides herself on having worked with the Gulabi Gang for years - speaks to the filmmaker, defiantly justifying the "honour killing" and revealing an attitude that is the very antithesis of "Change begins at home". It is a chilling scene, made more so by Husna's self-assuredness, and our realisation that she isn't the stereotype of the illiterate woman hopelessly insulated from the outside world; that she has been out there, seen terrible things… and then returned home to preserve "tradition". It is such betrayals from within that, more than anything else, point to the magnitude of the challenges facing Sampat Pal and her group.