Gangor captures dark Indian reality

Gangor. That is the title of one of the more talked about films at the ongoing 41st International Film Festival of India. Why has it got a buzz going? Could it be because its international title is ‘Behind the Bodice’?

There is much more to the film than the name on the poster. For one, Gangor is an Italian production set in Purulia, West Bengal. The screenplay is adapted from Choli Ke Peeche, a stark, disturbing Mahasweta Devi short story about the exploitation of Sabar tribal women. But more than anything else, the film is being talked about for the unaffected manner in which director Italo Spinelli has addressed the sombre theme. 

Anchored by a rock-solid central performance by Adil Hussain as an aggressive media man who becomes an unwitting agent of grief for a vulnerable tribal girl, played with courage and conviction by Priyanka Bose, Gangor exposes a dark reality of a remote pocket of India. But it does so without appearing to be gloating over the misfortunes of the marginalised.

The film provokes a sense of anger – that is precisely what the Mahasweta Devi story, too, does – but leaves you groping for answers. There are no pat answers. Faced with a situation that is beyond his control, the journalist-protagonist is at his wit’s end, and so are the people in his life, personal and professional.     

“Gangor was shot exactly where Mahasweta Devi’s story is set, in the heart of the desperately poor tribal belt of Purulia,” says Rome-based Italo Spinelli, the director of the film. “But the film isn’t about poverty at all. It addresses the issue of violence, physical, social and emotional, against women.”

The film is set in a benighted terrain where not just the men in their lives but also the police posted in the tribal belt to protect them subject tribal women to rape and constant exploitation. Although it has a specific cultural and geographical context, Spinelli’s approach to the material turns it into a story of universal relevance.

The story of the ill-fated protagonist, the eponymous Gangor, as presented by Spinelli and as interpreted by Bose, acquires a degree of resonance that helps the film breaks out of the confines of its locale.

A photojournalist clicks a snapshot of a breast-feeding tribal girl. The photo is printed in a newspaper in Kolkata as an accompaniment to an article espousing the cause of women who are forever at the mercy. The write-up’s plea is direct: “stop the rapes”.

But back in the boondocks, exactly the reverse happens. Gangor is branded a woman of easy virtue and is preyed upon more brazenly than ever before by men in uniform who think they are above the law. The photojournalist feels responsible for the fate that befalls the girl and he returns to the small town in the hope of rescuing Gangor from her plight.  But it is a battle that is hopelessly unequal...

Spinelli is delighted with the response that Gangor has evoked in India. “It is important that the film is well received in India. It is made primarily for an Indian audience although the idea is also to sensitise people around the world to the circumstances in which these tribal women live and die,” he says. By the looks of it, Gangor is well on the way to achieving its avowed end.