Tasneem Kabir
Movies come and go with the speed of light, but very few stay in our collective conscience like faithful lovers. The movie Bhor falls in the latter category.
With already a host of laurels to its credit, Bhor stands as the proud claimant of over thirty film festival recognitions including ‘Cairo International Film Festival’, ‘International Film Festival of India’ (GOA), Indo – Berlin Film Week (Berlin), Melbourne India Film Festival, Australia. The film has also earned the best director award at Ottawa Indian Film Festival and two awards at the Caleidoscope Indian Film festival of Boston.
These themes are similar to the ones in Shree Narayan Singh’s Toilet: Ek Prem Katha but Bhor feels much less cosmetic and a lot more poignant.
Bhor means “dawn,” and it represents the time between absolute glory and absolute fall. It is the story of a young Musahar girl, Budhni, from rural Bihar who has tasted education and so aspires for what our privileged selves call the basic right to a toilet. All this, while in the 21st Century India is striving to become a $5 trillion economy.
The story beautifully canvases an interviewing of three issues: caste, child marriage and access to toilets. The biggest achievement of Bhor lies not in the splendidly realistic cinematography, but in the fact that it attempts to document a voiceless people who are yearning to be heard, a people whose screams for help run hollow in a country of 1.2 billion.
The Musahar community is the section of the Scheduled Castes that Budhni, the protagonist, is part of. The term Musahar”, is derived from “musa” meaning rat and “ahar” meaning food. This represents the fact that this community is so backward that out of poverty, their staple diet includes rats that they catch and consume. The condition of this community is such because it falls under the lowest strata of even the so-called “lower castes,” as members of this community aren’t associated with a particular skill like weaving or pottery.
They are essentially unskilled agricultural labourers. The issue of caste in the movie is dealt with in a tactful manner, as we find untouchability practiced in the smallest of life events. The dancer who refuses to perform in the area the Musahars live so she does not lose out on the upper caste customers, the son working at a restaurant to pay for his father’s medical expenses wondering if the customers would eat the food his “untouchable” hands would serve, the police officer refusing to file a complaint of domestic violence on the grounds that the victim was a Musahar and hence accustomed to it. The movie documents these events plainly and simply without annotation, without telling us what to think.
The facts are before us plain and simple, without the all-consuming Bollywood-style dance numbers, and we must make of them what we can. Herein lies the finesse of the cinematography of Bhor, and this is the kind of gentle sensitization the Indian youth needs.
Coming to the issue of child marriage, seeing as the Musahars are unskilled labourers, they do not expect their women to work with them in the fields. Hence, the women remain confined to the household, attending to domestic chores. This homebound labour of the women does not amount to much in the society’s eyes, and women are seen as non-contributing consumers in the household.
This is the backdrop within which the poor Musahar father of Budhni gets her married off at a tender age despite her wanting to study further and forge a career. The concept of child-marriage is not something an agricultural labourer from rural Bihar would fathom. To Budhni’s father, all the girls around Budhni’s age are married, and he assumes it to be the right thing to do. In essence, the movie-makers make it hard for the viewers to pick sides between Budhni and her father.
This picking of sides becomes even harder when the movie documents the wedding festivities. The celebration is what even the poor would pronounce as humble, but the joy the Musahar folk seek every opportunity to celebrate something – anything – including the fact that Budhni topped the Zila in her board exams. The father-in-law and husband of Budhni sought to celebrate this achievement despite not knowing what it meant and despite not appreciating it.
The much-enjoyed small scale of the marriage itself is an indicator of how the downtrodden people dare to dream, and provokes deep thought about the disparity between haves and have-nots by showing us the disparity in dreams. Whereas mainstream Bollywood has led to the rise of the trend of “Bollywood-style-weddings” full of pomp and show, movies like Bhor show us that aspirations come in all sizes – big, small and everything in between.
Whereas mainstream Bollywood has led to the rise of the trend of “Bollywood-style-weddings” full of pomp and show, movies like Bhor show us that aspirations come in all sizes – big, small and everything in between.
Lastly, the movie deals with the issue of sanitation and toilets. These themes are similar to the ones in Shree Narayan Singh‘s Toilet: Ek Prem Katha but Bhor feels much less cosmetic and a lot more poignant. Toilet: Ek Prem Katha came full with a stalker of a lover, jazzy song numbers, crude humour now synonymous with Bollywood and a Bollywood-style happy ending rarely seen in real life, the story of Bhor, however, is a study in contrasts that exists within the society, as well as the similarities that are not limited within geographical bounds.
The protagonist realizes the problem of inadequate sanitation facilities was something that not just existed in rural, but urban India as well, after she reaches the capital, Delhi. Perhaps the most heart-wrenching aspect of this theme is when Budhni demands a toilet, the upper-caste Thakur of the town states that since he, “unchi jaati” and all, does not have a toilet in his household, what was the need for the Musahars to have one? This scene reminds one of the fact that we still live in a time and age where access to sanitation is as much political as it is personal, as much socially-driven as it is biologically-driven.
The movie abounds in these scenes, and they form a mosaic that bears the message that the struggle for dignity, education and rights of a woman is a lot more basic in the interiors of our nation, and it is something that we so take for granted in our lives that we forget that it even exists.
In a time and age where Bollywood is all out in its mission to normalize activities no sane person would deem reputable, parallel cinema movies like Bhor lead the way in bringing us closer to India – the real India – where age-old and baseless hierarchies puncture a community’s humanity and where things we take for granted (like toilets) are a luxury many can only dream of.
We have a long way to go, and Bollywood stalls this forward movement by painting rosy pictures of a fictional India where all that there is left to do is woo girls and fight a bunch of dacoits single-handedly. As averred before, in this regard, movies like Bhor gracefully lead the way.
The writer is a feature editor with the Legitimate.
