Similarities in differences

The World Before Her is a look at the parallels between a Hindutva camp and the beauty industry

The World Before Her, presented by Anurag Kashyap, which released on the international film festival circuit in 2012, has come to India at a significant time. The Bharatiya Janata Party has swept the general elections on the promise of inclusive development, and its ideological kin, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), hope to ride the crest of popularity. Canadian filmmaker Nisha Pahuja’s documentary shows the battle for women’s minds and bodies playing out on two very different fields — the Miss India boot camp in Mumbai and VHP’s Durga Vahini training camp in Aurangabad.

At the VHP training camp, Pahuja finds Prachi Trivedi imparting martial and moral training on how to be a good Hindu woman. In Mumbai, she runs into Ruhi Singh, a vivacious 19-year-old Miss India contestant, enrolling in the “polishing factory” where the glossy and photogenic ‘modern Indian woman’ is manufactured.

The expectation that the Miss India camp is the more ‘liberal’ of the two is debunked soon enough when Pahuja shows cosmetic physicians trying to alter the contestant’s faces by “0.6” per cent, injecting botox to erase laugh lines, applying skin whitening treatments — all to achieve a “harmonious” look. The Durga Vahini camp trades kitchen knives for guns and asks its young brood, “Are you going to spend your whole life chopping vegetables?” In Mumbai, the beauty contestants are taught that giving in to sexual objectification is the quickest and surest way to success. Each camp plays on the insecurities of women, indoctrinating seemingly opposing world-views that stem from the same patriarchal ideology.

The star of the film, if there is one, is Trivedi, the Hindu nationalist. Her fervour initially seems a product of indoctrination, but as the documentary progresses, Trivedi’s layered introspection raises far deeper questions than Singh’s conventional ambitions at the other end of the spectrum. The bikini-clad Singh wants to enjoy the pageant limelight as she might later have to settle down to a traditional married life, while Trivedi doesn’t ever want to marry and become a subservient wife. It’s a vexatious topic between Trivedi and her parents, who although proud of her devotion to Durga Vahini, expect her to give it all up when the time comes for marriage. Disarmingly self-aware that she’s caught in this unjust vortex, Trivedi is an agent of perpetuation of the social mores that she herself wants to be free of.  

Pahuja deserves to be lauded for the immense amount of groundwork that has gone into the film, from earning the trust of her subjects and their families to making intelligent use of stock footage to help the narrative along. Our memory is refreshed with events such as protests against beauty pageants led by Uma Bharati, now a Union minister, in 1996, and Sri Ram Sene activists attacking girls in a Mangalore pub in 2009.

The World Before Her might induce mild panic over the fate of our nation at a historical crossroads, but its real strength lies in the remarkably sensitive and nuanced analysis of the two apparently antithetical worlds of modern India and traditional Bharat, which reveals how women’s sensibilities are moulded by the ideas they are exposed to.