Much has been written about the role played by multiplexes in giving space to “smaller” films — the sort of movies that single-screen halls of yore would not have found profitable to accommodate even for a day, let alone a week. However, even in the multiplex era, small films don’t always find the audiences that might appreciate them. Lack of information continues to be a problem: I was surprised last week to discover that many of my friends — including informed movie buffs who keep their eyes peeled for low-profile works — had not even heard of Nila Madhab Panda’s Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid. And this despite the fact that Panda’s previous film was the much-awarded I am Kalam.
Jalpari isn’t a masterpiece, but it deserves better than this lack of awareness. It begins with a widower named Dev taking his two children, the tomboyish Shreya and her little brother Sam, from Delhi to his ancestral gaon, where he wants to set up a hospital. The children — weaned on Enid Blyton books — fantasise about an idyllic setting with “bade bade trees, lush green fields and ducks in ponds”, but they are soon disabused of such ideas. There is very little water anywhere, there is resistance to the encroachment of modern medicine, and there is talk about the existence of a wicked daayin (witch) who lives over the hill. But the true horrors aren’t supernatural ones, and soon the film’s central theme of gender discrimination is revealed.
At one point Shreya gets into a fight with the local kids — all boys — who don’t even realise at first that she’s a girl. The adults intervene; a village elder disapprovingly remarks that a chhori should behave like a chhori, and Devendra sharply responds, “I haven’t taught my children the difference between a boy and girl.” In the given context, one completely approves of these words: all Dev means is that he treats his daughter and son as equals. But for me this scene raised another, very subtle question: has this sensitive, caring father become so frustrated by the treatment of women in his village that he has played a small part in moulding his daughter’s personality — in keeping her out of touch with her feminine side?
It’s a contentious thought — after all, there is nothing wrong with Shreya being a tomboy if she is also happy and emotionally secure. But I think this story about gender inequality and its far-reaching effects does draw our attention to situations where a girl can achieve respect and parity only by being “one of the guys”, or by practising a particularly male form of aggression.
In one of the film’s first scenes we see Shreya dressed as a mermaid for a school dance performance, and apparently enjoying herself, but there’s something about this scene — filmed like a fantasy sequence — that places it outside the ambit of the film’s “realistic” narrative. Within that main narrative, we gather that Shreya has a strong aversion to girls’ clothes. In the village, she gets the better of the local boys by beating them at their “boys’ games” — but later, when she is dressed in a salwar kameez for a kanjak puja, they smirk at her, and even her own adoring brother treats her like a creature from a different species.
It is in little moments like this — and not in its expository climax — that Jalpari is most effective. Though the local men pray to a goddess, this is a place where women are mainly anonymous, confined to their houses, performing an ornamental role during festival dances or traipsing down a path, faces covered, chanting mystical songs like mermaids (which, one might remember, are women who are only “half” people). It was a mazedaar adventure, Shreya writes to a pen-friend in the closing scene. But one doesn’t forget that she is among the privileged ones, free to choose her clothes and her personal identity. Most other chhoris aren’t so lucky.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
