Bappaditya Bandopadhyay’s Devaki premiered at the Osian Cinefan Asian Film Festival in July 2005. Since then it has traveled to 11 International Film Festival amidst much critical accolades and has been touted as a 'must watch for every woman'. Nominated for the best feature film at Sao Paulo International Film Festival, Brazil, Ashville International Film Festival, NC, Global Knight International Film Festival, Malta, and Golden Gate International Film Festival, SF, it won the award in Asheville. Officially released in January 2006, this small film has been doing the rounds in the video stores for some time. 

Devakibai’s crime: she was a Dalit woman who eloped with and married Gulab Singh, an upper caste forest ranger. She was caught after ten years and auctioned off, along with six other women of the Bhil tribe, some of whom are still untraceable. During the auction, Devakibai was made to stand for 72 hours with a heavy stone on her head while the men hurled abuses and taunts at her. An old man bought her for Rs 5,000, but her husband fought to get her back with the help of the media attention this story garnered. Devakibai, who now lives with Gulab Singh and their son, attended a press conference in Mumbai as part of the publicity campaign of the film. She confirmed the veracity of the narrative saying that the reality was far grittier than the film portrayed. She is hopeful that the film would create awareness about what goes on in tribal regions and help change it.

That seems to be the director’s main objective in this film - create awareness about atrocities meted out in the Indian society on the basis of gender. Like Manish Jha’s Matrabhoomi, 2004, Devaki too depicts the status of women in a society where they are treated as commodities. Devakibai’s story inspired Bandopadhyay to take the theme of oppression beyond rural India by incorporating a parallel narrative about women in upper class urban India. The result is a hard hitting film about two women from totally different backgrounds, each suppressed, abused, exploited and humiliated in similar ways. The two protagonists, whose stories move on a parallel track, are Devaki, the downtrodden Dalit woman, and Nandini, a social activist who makes futile attempts to rescue Devaki from an abusive marriage, and ends up being abused and exploited herself. 

Devaki’s story is simple. She is forced into marriage to a 70 year old man to whom her father owes money. Her husband is impotent, and has three wives living in the same household. On her wedding night, her husband tells his brother to rape Devaki to teach her the meaning of male dominance, an act that becomes a pattern of her tormented life. Escape comes in the form of a Dalit fugitive fleeing abusive landlords, who she begins to meet regularly in the wilds. This relationship gives Devaki something to live for. However, the lovers are soon caught and brought before the Panchayat who decide that Devaki should be auctioned and the money from the highest bidder given to her husband to compensate for the money her father owes him. The severity of the punishment is also aimed at setting an example to all women and teach them their rightful place.

Nandini’s life is more complicated. She starts off as an activist working for an NGO, trying to empower the village women through literacy and awareness. Seeing the atrocities rural women have to endure, and disillusioned with the ineffectual NGO movement that only pays lip-service to emancipation of the oppressed, she returns to the city and finds a job in an advertising agency. But she soon discovers that urban life is not that different for women. Helplessly caught up in an affair with a married man, Rahul, she feels herself losing self-respect. She also feels betrayed and disillusioned by Rahul’s treatment of his pregnant wife, Sumana, and the lies he has been telling both women. She forces herself to end this illicit relationship, even though it leaves her emotionally bereft. She does find some satisfaction in her work, where co-incidentally, her own father, who had deserted the family 15 years ago, is her boss. He doesn’t seem to remember the fact that he left behind a wife who is now in a mental asylum, still awaiting his return, and a daughter who he doesn’t recognize though she works for him. The ultimate betrayal comes when her father/boss advises her to satisfy his client sexually to clinch a deal and offers her 2% of the profit as a reward. She decides to sell herself to this lecherous old man, avenging her father’s betrayal by sacrificing herself. Her vindication comes in the form of his shock when she eventually tells him the truth! 

Performance-wise, Suman Ranganathan as Devaki is quite convincing as the village girl. Known as a sex symbol and seen primarily in item numbers, Ms Ranganathan does justice to her first serious role and gives a heartfelt performance. Perizaad Zorabian is competent as Nandini. If her acting lacks conviction, it is because the character is completely unrealistic. It is difficult to imagine an educated, emancipated woman like her, who has made a career of teaching underprivileged women the meaning of freedom, equality and self respect, making the personal and professional choices she makes. Especially her decision to sleep with the client merely to prove a point to her father. Bandopadhyay does try to make this character complex by giving Nandini a history of early betrayal that has left her insecure and needy. But it seems to me that he has manipulated all the characters and situations to corroborate his hypothesis that women are helpless victims, whether it is the illiterate Dalit women who are sold by fathers and husbands, or educated professional women who sell themselves, or the abandoned wife eternally waiting for her husband, or the dependent wife who is willing to accept and forgive her husband’s infidelities because she believes she has no options.

The supporting actors are adequate in their respective roles. Not much can be said about the rests of the cast, most of the acting is theatrical and unrealistic. I am still a little confused about the character of the village hermaphrodite who dresses as Lord Krishna. If this character was meant to have any significance other than that of the only supporter of Devaki and Nandini in the village, it is not clear to me. Going by the fact that Devaki doesn’t get the sympathy of any other woman in the village, perhaps the director is trying to say that one can only be sexually ambiguous to have any sensitivity or compassion towards women? Or perhaps Bandopadhyay is playing with the ironic reversal of the legend of Lord Krishna who rescued Draupadi from public humiliation into an emasculated cross-dresser who has to helplessly watch Devaki being auctioned. 

There is an amateurish air about the entire film, though Rana Dasgupta’s cinematography captures the rural ambience very well, and the music score by Bikram Ghosh, Amar Haldipur, P. Sameer is effective. The metaphor of a tree in the village that is believed to be an unhappy woman frozen into a tree is evocatively used as emblematic of the two women and the similarities of their lives. Making it bilingual, narrated in Hindi when the setting is rural, moving to English as the natural language of the urban upper class seems to me to be a deliberate cinematic technique to make this film appeal to the multiplex audience, as is the totally redundant song-dance sequence supposedly a part of Nandini’s first solo production in the ad agency.

On the whole, Devaki is an interesting, even moving film that conveys a poignant message about the double standards of contemporary Indian society that has inherited a hierarchical, patriarchal, and even feudalistic social structure that is resistance to change, merely because those in power have vested interests to main status quo. Change would engender the dislocation of the nucleus of power, and the only way to prevent that from happening is by unleashing fear and systemic oppression of the disempowered. As far as awareness-raising is concerned, Bandopadhyay has done a good job. 

However, I have several concerns about the film, particularly seen in terms of the international recognition that it has received. Hailed as a movie about women’s empowerment, I feel that all Devaki achieves is the perpetuation and perpetration of stereotypical notions of barbaric behavior meted out to women in traditional societies. Particularly troubling to me is the final defeatist message -- that women are helpless victims of the system and have no chance of achieving legal, social, or political emancipation. That terms like equality and freedom are no more than meaningless rhetoric. That urban or rural, educated or illiterate, economically independent or destitute, women are destined to surrender to a structural male dominance and continue to be exploited and abused, sexually and emotionally. 

Where is the empowerment here? Why has Bandopadhyay not taken the step that follows awareness – action? While the international acclaim for an Indian film is commendable, if we try to analyze the reason for this acclaim, we’ll see that it is not because of the cinematic quality of the film or for a message of empowerment. Rather, it is for depicting a gruesome picture of women’s endless oppression. Sure, it is a true picture! Many women in every society face what Devaki and Nandini and Sumana and Nandini’s mother face, and perhaps far worse. But couldn’t Bandyopadhyay have resolved it in a way that could at least have given women some agency to fight against injustice and oppression. He could do well to review Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala, 1985, made over two decades ago, that deals with same theme, but empowers women through solidarity and courage. Devakibai’s own life is evidence of this agency, why is that missing from this film?