We turn right as we mature!

Dev Bhumi - Land of the Gods (2016)
Director: Goran Paskaljević

As we grew up and our eyes slowly peeled open to the changes around us, we felt ashamed. Maybe because of the western type of education taught to us, we were embarrassed by our heritage. We perceived our own culture as archaic and that our parents were living under a rock. The world, it appeared then, was changing, and we did not want to be left behind. We could wait to grow wings and pave our own paths.

We ran through the gruelling mill of life, and soon enough, we realised that there was wisdom in what our ancestors did what they did. The raging hormones of youth and the lure of material gains clouded our judgement. We tell ourselves, perhaps, they were right. We yearn to get back and make amends. But, no. The others think you are a fool and are best left alone.

This 2016 movie made by a Serbian director with co-writing input by the famous Victor Banerjee, is a slow-moving film with the breathtaking view of the Himalayas as its backdrop. Banerjee acts in the central role. It was shot entirely at the icy hills of the State of Uttarakhand in India. The story unfolds in instalments as Rahul Negi (Victor Banerjee), after a 40-year self-exile in England returns to his village. We gather that he will soon be blind after contracting an incurable disease and had returned to see his village before becoming completely blind. He plans to spend the remaining of his life in Kedarnath, Uttarkhand.

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He had fallen head over heels over the village dancer, Maya, in his youth. This was vehemently opposed by his father. A tiff had ensued, and Rahul had struck him with a sickle. He then ran away from the village and out of the country. The father had opposed the union because of the dancer's lower caste status.

Rahul is not received well, even after all these years. His brother thinks Rahul is there just to claim his due inheritance. His father had earlier died due to old age.

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As Rahul wanders around the village, he tries to understand the village. Things have not changed much. Small scale farming is still going on with primitive tools. The village school is just a ramshackle building with the bare minimum. Girls are still married off young. It looks like time stood still on them. Women are second class citizens, just seen but not heard. Child marriage is the norm. Rahul's girlfriend, Maya, for whom he had attacked his father, is still in the village. She is, however, mentally severely deranged.

The kind of living arrangement that the primitive communities had devised worked well then. Relatively exposed to the elements of Nature and extracting food from it, the brute muscular force was invaluable. Biologically, men were bestowed such physical attributes. The female gender was then assigned to home management and nursing duties. As society became more settled and commerce developed, the streetsmart skills and education were reserved for the males. With modernisation and cities becoming domesticated with no wild animals roaming around, females could no longer be contented with second-class duties. Furthermore, the 19th and 20th-century economic order slowly gave both genders the need to be educated.

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Guarding the household no longer became the domain of the community's male members. The question of security is handled off to the auspices of the Government. Nobody has to depend on the muscle strength of man anymore. There is nothing a machine or a weapon cannot do.

At the community level, the distribution of duties is decided by a system by a division that accesses the aptitude of the member of the community to put them in a specific vocation to ensure continuity of services within the community. Along the way, this aptitude system became hijacked to mean a person is born into a caste and is destined to do only the job his ancestors had been doing. Points to ponder. Of course, movies will picturise traditional Indian communities as patriarchal and caste-centric.

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