MUMBAI: After Aamir Khan‘s Peepli Live focussed on the farmer issues faced by rural India, it is now the turn of National Award winning film Antardwand, based on groom kidnapping, to reveal the blatant truth going on in the interiors to moviegoers.
The film is a peep into the reality that is mofussil India, a feudal India refusing to die. It‘s a story where everybody involved pay a heavy price for the ugly patriarchal power play. It‘s a society rotting while the country surges ahead to be a global power.
The film is based on a true story of the film‘s director Sushil Rajpal‘s closest friend, who still suffers from the psychological scars of being kidnapped and forcibly married to someone, he didn‘t intent to get wedded to.
Though he later escaped and lives in an urban city presently, the case is in Court because he is still legally married.
Rajpal felt it was his moral duty and sacrificed his entire savings to bring this issue of ‘Groom Kidnapping‘ to urban India, which had closed its eyes to rural India and the twin social evil of ‘Groom Kidnapping‘ and related issue of ‘Dowry‘.
It is still surprising that because ‘groom kidnapping‘ has got a social sanction amongst the upper caste, in states like Bihar, where potential bridegrooms who have done their IAS, engineering etc are targets, because the bride family can‘t afford the high dowry rates. It‘s a society where human beings are ‘traded‘ as animals, with social sanction, wherein its ‘acceptable.‘
Comments Rajpal, "This is just one side of the larger story that propelled the director in me and more moving was part of the story. Such forced marriages wreak huge emotional damage on both the girl and the boy. More for the voiceless girl who is deeply entrenched in a male dominated feudalistic society where she has nothing else to fall back on. Whether deserted or divorced -the life of a hapless girl in such a claustrophobic society becomes a hellish and endless journey. She bears the stigma of ‘being married but not married‘."
The film is set to hit the silver screen on 27 August.
