Double Feature: Two Views of Women in India

HIGHWAY COURTESANS
Special guest, Sunita S. Mukhi, Phd, Director Charles B. Wang Center & Professor of South Asian Studies, SUNY Stony Brook; Storyteller & Cultural Manager. She is a Diasporan Indian born in the Phillipines. This provocative coming-of-age film chronicles the story of a bold young woman born into the Bachara community in Central India – the last holdout of a tradition that began with India’s ancient palace courtesans and now survives with the sanctioned prostitution of every Bachara family’s oldest girl. Their work as prostitutes forms the core of the local economy, but their contemporary ideas about freedom of choice, gender, and self-determination slowly intrude on the Bachara way of life. (USA, 71 min., color, 2005, Director: Mystelle Brabbée)

DAM/AGE: A film with Arundhati Roy
DAM/AGE traces writer Arundhati Roy’s controversial campaign against the Narmada dam project in India, which will displace up to a million people. As the film traces the events that led up to her imprisonment, Roy (author of The God of Small Things, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize) meditates on her own personal negotiation with fame and the responsibility it places on her as a writer, a political thinker, and a citizen. The film weaves together a number of issues that lie at the heart of politics today: from the consequences of development and globalization to the urgent need for state accountability and the freedom of speech. (India, 50 min., color, 2002, Director: Aradhana Seth)