Leaving Home

Gr 10 Up—Sitar music introduces scenes from rural India in this production by award-winning producer Robert Richter. American anthropologist J. Michael Mahar, who has lived periodically in the village of Rankhandi over the course of 50 years, returns to a warm welcome from his former host family. His narration points out changes in the village, artfully highlighted by snippets of vintage film morphing into the same sites today. Through interviews conducted in Hindi (with English subtitles), men and women of the large extended family describe daily village life. Women were interviewed separately by a female journalist and filmed by a female cinematographer. Unfortunately, the tone of the questions reveals the filmmaker's gender bias; for example, "What can boys do that girls can't do?" At least one line of questioning is disturbing: a young wife laughingly asks the female interviewer: "Your husband doesn't beat you? Here, everybody does that." Renu, a village teen, dreams of going to Delhi, 100 miles away, to become a Sanskrit teacher. When the journalist offers to help make the dream come true, Renu acknowledges that she doesn't have the "courage to rebel." In the end, she chooses to leave home to join her new husband's family, following "patterns of life, essentially unchanged for thousands of years." High school students, if guided to approach this story with respect , might grow in global understanding.—Toby Rajput, National Louis University, Skokie, IL