The next morning, Devi manages to escape and return to her family. "You're my wife you have to do this," he says, before forcing himself upon the screaming child.
Though he has decided that she's not quite "ripe," the bridegroom becomes aroused while slapping her around. In her husband's home, Devi becomes little more than a slave, though it's obvious she hasn't the strength to carry the heavy water jugs or the skills to herd the goats. Her mother tries to hold on to her little girl for another six months, but the bridegroom is eager and needs someone to do the chores. The 11-year-old daughter of a poor lower-caste farmer, she is married off to a much older man in exchange for a cow and a bicycle. And while director Shekhar Kapur doesn't graphically depict the frequent assaults Devi endures, he does not flinch from the sordid material either.ĭevi is a flat-chested stripling (Sunita Bhatt) with an already well-developed contempt for men when her life takes its first terrible turn.
Set in a remote corner of India, the film is a veritable catalogue of mental and physical abuse, including pedophilia and gang rape. Based on Devi's diaries, this powerful but grueling Indian film is not only a tribute to her spirit, but also a searing indictment of a culture corrupted by the caste system and degraded by chauvinism. A low-born Hindu woman becomes a folk heroine when she turns on her upper-caste abusers in "The Bandit Queen," a brutal biography of famed outlaw Phoolan Devi.
0 kommentar(er)
