Like ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’, this film shows us a patriarchal way of functioning we’ve always been aware of, but the girl’s POV makes the situations fresh and new. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
A friend of mine said yes to the very first girl he met in an arranged-marriage situation, when the two families met and a decision had to be made by the boy’s family. His logic was that this very setup is a gamble, and there was no point seeing a whole bunch of women before making up his mind. Because the most horrible aspect of all this is that the girl becomes a commodity, and he did not want to go “shopping” for the best available option. I was reminded of this incident while watching Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Sthal, which means “match”. This is a story told from the girl’s point of view, as one man after another arrives on a shopping expedition, as though moving from seller to seller in a vegetable market to buy the best and most cost-effective brinjals. Indeed, such a scene does occur late into this story.
The opening scene of Sthal is an absolutely delightful subversion of the arranged-marriage scenario where the prospective bride serves snacks to the members of the prospective groom’s family. I won’t tell you what this subversion is, but it’s fitting that the next scene is that of this young woman being woken up by her mother, who says that people are coming to “see her” that day. This woman is Savita, and the brilliant Nandini Chitke plays her like the robot that she’s been reduced to. Much like The Great Indian Kitchen, it’s the same routine, over and over. The boy comes with his family. They ask Savita the same questions: age, height, hobbies… They say they’ll get back with an answer. And when they say no, it’s time to rinse and repeat. This film could be called The Great Indian Arranged Marriage.
This is a village named Dongargaon, and if the film feels like a series of clichés, it’s because these traditions have become toxic clichés down the years. There are men who say Savita’s fairness is due to facial makeup; “look at her elbows and you’ll see she’s not all that fair”. There are men who talk about women’s empowerment but end up submitting to their family and ask for dowry. There is this tradition that Savita’s older brother cannot get married until she does, which adds more pressure. There is Savita’s interest in writing an exam that will get her a government job in Maharashtra, but her mother asks what good is education when she has to get married off one day. There is an astrologer who is consulted with regard to Savita’s wedding. There is the yearning that intensifies in Savita’s parents when they see her friends getting married off.
There’s also the fact that Savita’s father is a cotton farmer, whose earnings are subject to the vagaries of the market price of cotton on each day. We hear of a man whose farming land was taken up by a power plant. One of Savita’s friends seems happy that she is marrying a lineman. Electrical power appears to have become social power, and many girls say they want a husband who is not a farmer. This adds a layer of commentary about the plight of men, too – but this is Savita’s story. This is not the kind of place where you can tell your parents that you like someone, either. So the endless cycle of “age, height, hobbies” continues. It’s tragic that Savita’s father cannot see that the family’s fortunes will improve if she focuses on getting that government job. But then, logic is often at loggerheads with tradition. The man will probably feel more at peace if Savita gets married, even if the marriage expenditure will leave them in a bigger hole of debt.
Some of the points made are made a little too obviously, like the references to Ambedkar or Savitribai Phule. (In fact, the director may have named his protagonist Savita after Ambedkar’s second wife.) The irony is too easily caught: that despite the work of these great Maharashtrian reformers, nothing much seems to have changed today. But the spare filmmaking and the relentless ordeals of Savita keep us invested. At one point, I wanted her to get married to someone – anyone – just to avoid another round of “age, height, hobbies”. Some of us may wonder at the blissful coexis It’s against the systemtence of smartphones and conservatism, but then we realise that technology only gives us surface-level modernity. Deep down inside the mind, little changes. For instance, caste still matters to Savita’s father. There’s a casual shot of a billboard featuring a wedding ad, with a fair and beautiful model posing as a bride. Usually, we wouldn’t give this a second thought. But here, in this village, the idea of what this ad is selling seems downright cruel.
At one point, we see Savita studying for the government exam while her friend is scrolling through pictures of the Virat-Anushka wedding and the Ranveer-Deepika wedding. The shot passes by in a moment, but the impact stays. Even the younger generation is mostly obsessed with marriage. Does Savita escape her situation? As we move towards the answer to this heavily weighted question, we see that there are no easy villains in this movie. The men who reject her, the women who want her to get a good match – they are all victims of the same patriarchal mindset. So when an uncharacteristic burst of violence occurs from Savita, we don’t see the person on the other side. He doesn’t matter, his individuality doesn’t matter. Her violence is against the collective. It’s against the system. Sthal takes broad, melodramatic points about our society and reframes them from the point of view of Savita. That is the film’s success. Like The Great Indian Kitchen, Sthal makes us freshly aware of, freshly indignant about that’s always been in plain sight.
