Leena Yadav‘s contemporary tale of village life in rural India told from the perspective of four women : three close friends in their mid 30’s and one new bride, starts off by being sufficiently harrowing to shock western audiences and then it gradually tapers to end on a more rosier note less we should think that all is lost.
The story opens with 32 year old widow Rani who is negotiating for a bride for Gulab her teenage son which will entail her having to re-mortgage their very simple hut just to pay for the demanded dowry and the wedding. She has chosen 15 year old Janaki from a neighboring village who is even more reluctant than the groom to enter into this arranged marriage as she has her eyes on another boy back home.
We see in flashbacks that before her own husband died when she was very young, Rani was treated very badly by her in-laws when she moved in with them, yet she is repeating this now with her new daughter-in-law.
Rani’s best friend is Laijo who desperately wants a child but cannot conceive which gets her regular nightly beatings from her alcoholic husband. Laijo is actually a vey talented seamstress and is the star worker making handicrafts for the cooperative run by the village entrepreneur Kishen who is the only local man still not wedded to the entrenched patriarchal system. The women want to raise enough money to buy a television dish as the only adult entertainment now is the dance tent where Bijli the star is the village prostitute as well.
Bijli is also the close friend of Rani and Laijo and is the more liberated and worldly one of the three. Even though she cannot come up with a way to live without a man, she does at least help empower Rani to deal with Gubal her immature son who gets int0 a great deal of trouble. Also Bijli is the one who finds an unorthodox way for Laijo to finally have a baby.
The actual stories in Parched are similar to the ones that Yadev collected from village women and are full of melodramas all based on the simple long-held traditions and beliefs of those communities. The sheer brutality of such a misogynistic culture effects even the movie’s protagonists, as Laijo’ beatings don’t stop when she becomes pregnant, and Biljo is having to deal with her male boss wanting to cast her off and replace her wth a much younger girl. What was more surprising however was that the women left to their own devices pepper their conversations about their own sexual desires, and there is even one scene where the intimate tenderness that Rani is showing Laijo may even develop into something more physical if they had not been interrupted at the very wrong moment.
Yadev draws some very powerful performances from her talented cast which adds to the potency of this intriguing but disturbing scenario. The only answers that she could evidently settle on was by finally setting these particular women free, which makes for a comforting end to the movie if you only don’t think about all the other women left behind.
