Anwar Jamal is a man with a mission – and the mission is to use cinema as a tool to highlight socials ills and evils before whoever is interested. You would probably never get to see his films get a top billing in one of your neighbourhood multiplexes – even his only full-length feature film Swaraaj – The Little Republic had only very limited release in a few cities of the country.
But they are reaching the intended audience almost oven fresh, thanks to his modus operandi, which of late involves tying up with an NGO that has not only produced his latest two short films but is taking them to the target audience that comprises rural as well as urban people.
Jamal, who is planning to start his new feature film soon, five years after his first feature won a National Award and got shown in over 50 international film festivals, has just come out with Teesra Rasta, a short film which is the second in the series of six such short films he wants to make focusing on various social evils that impact women in both rural and urban India. So, if his Uska Aana – Vanishing Daughters made a poetic-yet-strong comment on female foeticide. His latest, Teesra Rasta focuses on the subtleties of dowry, which manifests itself in various forms like a hydra-headed monster from the subconscious to the overt levels of Indian psyche.
While the selection of the subject matter of both the films have been results of research done by Ekatra, the NGO that has produced the two films, it is the imprint of one incident on Jamal’s mind that seems to have spurred him to use 13th century saint poet Kabir’s couplets in a contemporary scenario to make a telling comment in his typical subtle-but-forceful style of storytelling.
Anti dowry icon
As he says, “dowry is a huge problem in Indian society, but my mind was agitated over the incident involving Nisha Sharma, who has been dubbed as the ‘anti-dowry icon’. Well, it is true that she refused to get married to her fiancé because her prospective in laws’ family had demanded a huge dowry, but nobody tried to focus on the most important aspect– that her father had actually gathered a significant amount of dowry over the years. Had that dowry been considered sufficient by the groom’s family, probably the wedding would have taken place, and nobody would have known about it. That is what my anger is focused on – that dowry continues to be practised by a large section of the society without any morsel of guilt, almost as if it is a sanctified social custom.”
Sense of anger
Jamal’s sense of anger finds several manifestations in his 40-minute film – from the ‘training’ that a young girl undergoes in her parents’ home on how to conduct herself post-marriage to the virtual rejection of the girl once she returns from her husband’s house humiliated over and over again for not bringing in enough dowry.  “And the tragedy is that it is the women themselves, whether the mother or the mother-in-law, who help perpetuate this evil in various degrees,” rues Jamal, who has used a virtually-unknown but competent cast of theatre activists and NSD pass-outs for his roles.
Teesra Rasta tells the story of Kiran, a free soul who gets entrapped in the dowry tangles, but it is not a straightforward storytelling. He uses lot of poetry and some symbolism to take the film to a higher plane from a simple recounting of someone’s life story. With some impressive background score and cinematography, the film done in the digital format has some particularly interesting use of a motif of a hand emerging out from inside the dress of a veiled women who begs by the roadside, an image that gets imprinted in the mind of the protagonist.
“There are so many women we see like that on the roadsides. Who knows what story lies behind those veils, or how many of them are hiding their figures burnt in dowry-related cases?” says Jamal. It helped that his views coincided with the results of the research by Ekatra, which show that the roots of the dowry problem lie in deeply-internalised patriarchal attitudes that is responsible for the inferior status accorded to women, as well as the strong son preference that precipitates it. For Jamal, the reason behind making this film as well Uska Aana is to raise public opinion about the twin evils of society. He does not – “and will never” – use the in-your-face style of storytelling that commercial cinema follows, instead using subtlety of the art to make his comment, and going by the two short films that have come within a space of months, he has been able to make his point quite tellingly.