CHAMPAIGN,Ill. – Rini Bhattacharya Mehta’s first effort at filmmaking was inspired by the “moment of shock” she felt when she stumbled upon the backlash against the Indian law designed to help women.
Mehta, a visiting professor of comparative and world literature at the University of Illinois, will share her first film, “Post498A: Shades of Domestic Violence,” during the U. of I.’s annual International Week. This series of educational, cultural and recreational events is coordinated by International Programs and Studies with a cross-campus organizing committee, designed to foster interest in the global community.
Mehta said her “epiphany” came through a simple Google search. She was tracking the progress of India’s legislative efforts to deal with pervasive domestic violence when she queried Section 498A, a 1980s addition to the Indian penal code that provides a brief prison term and fine for a woman’s husband or in-laws found guilty of cruelty.
Instead of articles about how the law had saved women, Mehta found the opposite.
“The first page of results was occupied entirely with websites and organizations which exist to protest against the ‘abuses’ of 498A,” she said.
Mehta’s eventual response to that surprise discovery was a 52-minute documentary, filmed entirely in Kolkata, West Bengal, during July 2010. It will be shown at 7 p.m. April 14 (Thursday) in Room 101 of the Armory, 505 E. Armory Ave., Champaign. The screening is free and open to the public.
“I wanted to see and film up close a society in which – in spite of democracy, globalization, equal citizenship and all sorts of ongoing outward progress – lashes out against women’s rights in such a vicious manner,” she said.
In “Post498A,” women of varying ages and economic classes face her camera to detail physical and psychological abuse. A number of interviewees discuss a 2005 civil law called the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, aimed more at providing aid and support for the victims than at punishing the men. Mehta also takes a wide-angle view on how certain regressive attitudes toward domestic violence exist in the midst of an otherwise-progressive society and the era of globalization.
Mehta devotes a portion of the film to addressing the allegations she found online – that vindictive women misuse 498A just to get money from men: The public prosecutor for West Bengal, in an on-camera interview, says he hears many such complaints, but that the actual number of fraudulent cases is “negligible.”
