What India-born Canadian filmmaker Nisha Pahuja set out to make was a documentary on the liberalisation of Indian women — seen through the lens of the Miss India beauty pageant. She ended up making the much more complex The World Before Her.
“I started off with the idea that it would be interesting to see the transformation of women from various parts of the country into icons of a younger India. But the beauty of a documentary is, if you are not stubborn about it, you usually start off with something and end up with something totally different and fascinating. As you research, you discover fresher aspects and it’s this process that’s amazing,” says Nisha, whose documentary profiles two young women in two diverse situations — Ruhi Singh is training to compete in the Miss India pageant, while Prachi Trivedi is the leader of the Durga Vahini training camp that trains girls to combat ‘anti-nationalism’.
The film won the award for Best Canadian Feature at the 2012 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and Best Documentary Feature at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, and was a nominee for Best Feature Length Documentary at the first Canadian Screen Awards. Nisha, who has been living between Canada and India for the last six years, says the process of filmmaking has been long and tiresome, but she’s happy with the outcome as she now is up with the India release. “We shot for three long years and the editing took a year!” she says.
Boot campsThe Durga Vahini camps are not easily accessible and it's the first time a film crew has been allowed inside. Nisha says that when she met Prachi she was taken in by her personality, and realised that she personified not a fraction but a relatively large segment of girls in India. “Prachi has a very magnetic personality. I wanted her to be part of my documentary but we knew that, obviously, permissions would be a big thing.”
However, Nisha says the shooting at the pageant posed the bigger challenge. “I couldn’t believe it, but there were more restrictions at the pageant than at the camp. It was also different in terms of production challenges.”
Behind the gloss of the beauty world and the hatred of the Hindu camps, these women are seemingly getting ‘empowered’. “It was a painstaking thing to document. In both worlds, these young women are being manipulated to conform to certain norms. It isn’t empowerment, is it? It was mentally challenging to film.” Nisha had to wade through the plastic smiles, body sculpting and 'personality development’ at the pageant and the I-hate-Gandhi shockers at the Durga Vahini camp to bring out the actual underlying reality of modern day India, a reality that girls in both these worlds spoke of — female infanticide.
“At the pageant, I met Pooja Chopra whose father did not want her because she was a girl child.”
Filmmaker firstSpeaking about the challenge of detached attachment, she says, “Detached attachment is just what Ruhi says in the film. It’s terribly difficult but one has to do it. I remember when I was interviewing Prachi and she suddenly revealed something about her father. It was a devastating moment; I couldn’t let the camera stop but all I wanted to do at that moment was hug her. But your job is to document the moment,” says Nisha. “Yet, we are not dispassionate filmmakers. If I can bring even an ounce of change with my film, I’d be very satisfied." The film releases countrywide on June 6.
