#HGWatch: A Feminist Short Film Questioning Beliefs Through 3 Generations Of Women

For Maya was made to commemorate 50 years of Indian Independence and it also revitalised the trajectory of feminist documentary and discourse in its own palatable way. As, K. P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro in Reimagining the Familial state, “For Maya (1997), a remarkable film by Vasudha Joshi, revisits the space of the familial. It is a voyage that brings forth not spectacular acts of violence, but the quotidian force fields of female power and resistance, through an autobiographical narrative that draws the viewer into its gentle vortex of memory — memories of subjugation of women over generations. A new kind of feminist ethnography unfolds. For Maya, made as a part of a series of films to mark the 50th anniversary of India’s Independence, marks a shift in the Indian feminist film-making, a shift towards interweaving the personal with the political, through an exploration of middle-class `normality’, a gentle, non-polemical introspection, which foregrounds everyday struggles in women’s lives.”

Vasudha Joshi’s 1997 short film For Maya, with its melancholic gaze of transcendental pathos, furthers questions around Indian feminism, generational gaps and what women want. The thirty-minute film portrays the generational story of Joshi’s grandmother, mother, daughter and herself, capturing the plight of women that differentiates itself only through time and agony. In a sense, the social customs of eating out of your husbands ‘joothi thali’ and not contradicting what the bread-earner male in the household says is both reflective of India’s history with their women and its unnerving sense of subjugation towards them.

Between the gliding hills of Almora and the ragas of Shubha Mudgal, the film questions as much as it discovers the personal histories of familial bonds. It questions the nature of these relationships and the passing on of curtailed desires, dreams and identities of women within the family unit.

You can view the entire short film here.

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