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Gulabi Gang is a documentary film made by Nishtha Jain, who has honed her skills in making meaningful documentaries often centered on women and which win awards or gain recognition. The film won Best Film Award in Muhr Asia Africa documentary section at the 9th Dubai Film Festival, which happens to be one of the many awards it has been collecting at different festivals across the world. Jain received a $25,000 grant from the Sundance Documentary Film Program. From her first film City of Photos (2005) to Gulabi Gang (2012), it has been a time of passionate engagement with people’s lives and issues of filmmaking. Her films have received several international awards and have been extensively shown in international film festivals, broadcast on international TV networks and regularly shown in schools and colleges in India and abroad. The documentary traces
the journey of Sampat Pal that grew from an individual crusade to
snowball into a veritable movement comprising a large number of fiery
women of her Gulabi Gang, who take up the fight against gender
violence, caste oppression and widespread corruption in Bundelkhand.
Bundelkhand in central India, the region divided between the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh with the larger portion lying in Madhya Pradesh, is notorious for its rebels-turned-armed bandits. Thanks to the courage and spirit of a group of strong women, Bundelkhand today is witnessing a new kind of rebellion. "I first heard about the Gulabi Gang in 2009. What intrigued me was their location — rural Bundelkhand, one of the most backward areas of our country and women are very oppressed. Majority of gang members are unlettered and that was also true of their leader Sampat Pal. I found Sampat Pal amazing. Completely self-taught, she had the courage to break away from her in-laws to do the work she’s doing now. I thought if these women, despite all their disadvantages, can rise against injustice, so can anyone. It would be an inspiring tale to tell. So I decided to go and meet Sampat Pal. Within days of observing her at work, I realised that the reality was more complicated than I thought and that was good, for it would make for a more nuanced film", says Nishtha. Why the name "gulabi" and why the colour pink? "There were few colours left to choose from", explains Sampat Pal. "Most of the colours are associated with political parties like white is Congress, orange is the BJP, blue is the BSP, green is Islamic, red is communist," she adds. The best part of this group is that their crusade is not only against atrocities against women and the oppression of women. They cover injustices heaped on men in the areas they cover such as land-grabbing by vested parties from the very poor, who are forced to run from pillar to post for legal solutions, which they cannot afford. Women dot the film space in pink as they learn physical skills like lathi-charging and so on to equip themselves for physical fight, if and when called for. The Gulabi Gang, with a membership of thousands, is active across many districts. Suman Singh, one of the leaders, has made it her personal mission to send a land-grabbing village chief behind bars, along with his murderous henchmen. But what is to be done when the brother of a fellow activist carries out an ‘honour killing’. "The Gang is still very new, and many of its members still steeped in conservative values. But through the film, we find them following up the burning of a housewife the family tries to disguise as suicide and the Gulabi Gang try to expose this killing". The film is not all adulatory about Gulabi Gang. One incident depicts that one of its core members, Husna feels betrayed by the gang and leaves it. Why? "Husna feels betrayed because she has worked closely with the gang for five years and she expected that her immediate boss Suman, the vice-commander of Gulabi Gang, would sympathise with her situation. But neither Sampat nor Suman were ready to support her regressive views about women and asked her to disassociate with the gang. Her sentiments were hurt. She’s caught in a double bind. Perhaps, she fears her brother and is pressurised by her family to take his side. For me, this is the most important part of the film because it goes to show how patriarchy is so deeply entrenched, women, too, speak the language of men. That shows that the struggle for women’s freedom is going to be a long one. Also, Husna’s dilemma is a universal one — she’s caught between personal allegiance and ideology," Nishtha elaborates. "This spontaneous uprising of women in these villages is very different in tone and manner from the urban movements that we are familiar with. The Gulabi Gang has come to represent a kind of "practical" rural feminism that’s trying to grow within the mores of rural patriarchy. There’s something taking place here that challenges many of our easy urban feminist assumptions; the ambiguities and dissonances, in fact, making it a phenomenon worthy of a film. I realised within days of meeting the Gulabi Gang that my film will be a dialogue between these different feminisms, which sometimes overlap and sometimes are at odds with each other," Nishtha adds. They encounter resistance, apathy and corruption, even ridicule. Sometimes entire villages connive against them to protect the perpetrators of violence. The film pulls us into the centre of these blazing conflicts and uncovers a complex story, disturbing yet heartening. The Gulabi Gang is determined to erase the negative labels of Bundelkhand being a place of desolation, dust and despair.
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