The Problems of Indian Women as Seen Through 1 Film

Last year, an Indian coproduction set in contemporary Mumbai, “All We Imagine as Light,” won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Although the film came out last year, the challenges that it presents have not faded away – not even a shade. In a nutshell, the movie focuses on the lives of three women – all of them working alone in Mumbai, but each facing a major problem of Indian society. One is attempting to reject the arranged marriage that her parents are imposing on her. One has been abandoned by her husband. And one is a widow whose house is about to demolished by a greedy developer. Taken together, these pictures present a grim, but realistic, picture.

Arranged marriages are still the order of the day in India. A 2018-published study by Lok Foundation and the Oxford University, conducted on a massive sample of 180,000 Indian households, revealed that 93 percent of respondents had their marriages arranged by their families. The number is smaller across the richer and more educated sections of society but, altogether, this is not a vast difference. The vast majority (87 percent) of respondents with Ph.D. degrees also had their marriages arranged.

It thus not surprising that “All We Imagine as Light” presents the story of an Indian nurse from Kerala named Anu – working in Mumbai, far from home, and obviously a college graduate – who is receiving photographs of potential grooms from her parents. More than a hundred years ago, Jawaharlal Nehru, then a young Indian student in the United Kingdom, and later the first prime minister of India, would also receive such images from his parents (until he finally agreed to one). The only difference was that he would receive them by regular mail, while the movie’s protagonist, Anu, obtains them more quickly, via her smartphone.

One would perhaps expect that with greater control of the family over their children, there comes greater care. But even this is not always so – the problem is shown through the story of the second protagonist, Prabha, also a nurse. Though married, she is in fact alone, as her husband lives in Germany, and stopped contacting her. Such a case, obviously, is much rarer than an arranged marriage, and represents a minority, not a majority, of all marriages. Still, this is far from being an insignificant occurrence. Over the last several years, there have reportedly been tens of thousands of cases of Indian women being abandoned by their husbands, who live overseas.

In case of the movie protagonist, we are not told the exact reason. Her husband used to call her, but gradually called less often, and each time, they spoke less. “Perhaps we just ran out of things to say,” she concludes. But the thousands of cases from real-life India are often about extracting a dowry.

Even though offering a dowry is officially forbidden, it remains a very common social practice, and thus many men living in other countries marry women for the dowry (even though they may often earn more than they would in India, and need a dowry much less) and then vanish. Their residence overseas helps them remain unfound. While it is the cases involving overseas Indians that have become notorious, abandoning wives happens within India too, as in the case of current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The third protagonist of the movie, Parvati, faces a partially different socio-economic problem in the sense that her plight is not restricted to women alone. Her house is to be demolished because, it seems, it had been illegally built; she also has no rights to it. This, again, is a very common occurrence in India. In Mumbai, India’s economic heart, the demolition of illegal structures is often connected to the rampantly growing need for new housing. In Delhi, large-scale demolition drives also occur as part of attempts to beautify the capital, and to build new infrastructure for grand events. This had happened in 1982 before the Asian Games, in 2010 before the Commonwealth Games, and in 2023 before the G-20 Summit. In 2004, as part of a beautification drive, 350,000 houses were demolished, as per estimates referred to in Aman Sethi’s “A Free Man.”

Such work is in accordance with the law – in the sense that across India, encroachments are very common. There are thousands of structures built on government land, and the authorities have a right to demolish them. But as much as the process is legal, it is debatable how often it is just. Many illegal structures are slums whee the country’s poorest live. While it is true that they had broken the law, once their homes are demolished, they simply have nowhere to go, and are forced to start anew. When such buildings were being razed in Delhi in 2010, a majority of their inhabitants were not offered any other accommodation by the authorities, as per a report by the Housing and Land Rights Coalition.

Parvati at least has a home to fall back on – but back in her village. Moreover, like other women in the movie, she had been, in a way, abandoned by men, and so the decision does not come easy. Her husband had died, and her son has a family of his own, and she does not want to become a burden by moving in to their place. Moreover, like many other poor people, Parvati is not very educated and thus not prepared to fight a legal battle against the people who are to demolish her house. She is not even aware that her husband possessed no property rights to the flat; she looks for the documents in vain. “Everything is about papers nowadays,” Parvati concludes. “It’s like if you don’t have a paper, you can just vanish.”

But the story of Parvati, while focused on the poor, reflects one more problem of Indian society. The lack of education is suffered more by women than by men – because quite often, families invest far less time and money in educating their daughters, assuming they are to become housewives anyway. As per the 2011 census, the total average illiteracy in India was nearly 26 percent. But in the case of women, it was 35.5 percent. In some of the poorer, less developed states, not only is illiteracy higher, but the gap between genders is wider. In Bihar, a state of 100 million, women’s illiteracy was at the level of 50 percent in the 2011 census. Those conservative parents who assume their daughters need education less do not envisage a situation like that of Parvati’s – when a woman is widowed and has to fend for herself.

Taken together, these problems show the scale of inequality between Indian men and women. Indian women are, quite often, expected to remain housewives, a problem exacerbated by the widespread tradition of arranged marriages (choosing a partner of their own could mean finding one who would accept their choices, including them undertaking a career). Because of this, women are often offered less education earlier in their lives, and thus become even more dependent on their husbands once they marry. To make it worse, if a husband dies or abandons them, their relatively lower education means they have fewer job options available to them.

Second, while the law may seem equal to both genders, social practice usually favors men in a myriad of ways. Not only it is the bride’s family that is to pay the dowry (even though it is forbidden), but thousands of men get away with having abandoned their wives.

It is praiseworthy how so many of these problems were so boldly shown in “All We Imagine as Light.” The problems of Indian women are not, however, ones we should imagine as light.