Portland, OR: Collective Eye Films, 2018. 1 DVD (94 min.). US$295.00. In English.
A Suitable Girl provides an intimate portrait of three unmarried (and marrying) Indian girls (Dipti, Amrita, and Ritu) and their parents as they go through the tortures and thrills of seeking and finding suitable spouses. All three come from urban Hindu families with a range of socio-economic backgrounds and the film does very well to demonstrate the marriage stakes and constraints in India today. One of the three of the film’s protagonists, Dipti, celebrates her birthday in her parent’s flat with neighbours and friends cramped around a cake with the number “30” scrawled ominously over it. Did it really need to be advertised, she wonders aloud. Interestingly, the unassuming Dipti has a fan-following of sorts in her Bhayandar building; we are drawn in by her warmth and open-heartedness and begin to see why her parents so dote on her; even her building neighbours seem to be willing her into marriage through their friendship, prayer, and love.
As a snapshot of the home truths about the gendered nature of marriage in India and the importance of both caste and class (the latter as an economic and symbolic system), this film comes up trumps through three intimate portraits that involve a range of measures to arrange a good match. Whilst Dipti seeks a “straightforward” man, the language of the wider marriage market involves a different sort of equation. “Height 5’2”, Weight: 70 kg,” says the gleaming plastic Rotary Club of Bombay banner advertising Dipti and two other suitable girls trying their hand at a modern version of the swayamvar (“self-choosing”) ceremony. The girls (accompanied by one parent) sit facing a room full of prospective male suitors who are made to stand as their names and castes are called out by an elderly local Rotarian running the ceremony. As in the ancient epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, a woman can choose a suitable boy from amongst a group of male suitors and garland the one she wishes to marry. In Bombay, Dipti’s garland languishes in her lap at the end of the occasion. The Rotarian-sage provides his diagnosis: In today’s day and age, boys must consent to marriage too. Dipti’s weight, he says, was a bit too much and this is what caused “confusion” amongst the boys. We may add that socioeconomic standard, education, occupation, age, and skin colour are boldly seen in this film to play their parts alongside the size of one’s waist. Eventually, Dipti’s kind heart and warm and loving smile come to rest (via the good offices of shadi.com—a popular marriage website for South Asians in India and abroad) with a handsome dark-skinned South Indian man who dares to call her “darling.” She properly redirects him to speak to her father, and soon, it’s a done deal.
In another encounter, a “face reader and astrologer” (with a cream office and auspicious orange painted door frames) receives Ritu’s mother as she seeks his assistance in narrowing down possibilities for her daughter’s marriage. Staring down her phone at an image of a young man’s face declaring ominously: “He has medium fortune only. Medium.” The message to the mother is to subtly recalibrate her ambitions for her daughter in the upward direction, so that both their fortunes might be greater than this medium-ranked loser. He advises her to press delete and move swiftly on. Meanwhile, Ritu’s Delhi-based father has also built up high hopes, citing with amazement a marriage “application” (note the subtle and telling shift in language from marriage “proposals” of yesteryear to today’s “applications”) from “a small city like Agra,” where, he states, his daughter would have “no future!” On these grounds, the final destinations of these three women reveal something of the co-constitution of social class and caste through careful calculations around prospects post-marriage: Dubai (big future), Bangalore (not bad), and a very small town in Rajasthan called Nokha (oh dear); though it is notable that the one who marries into the family living in this small desert town marries a wealthy boy who fell for her in school and hotly pursued her (and her parents) into making this union. The argument that the family, rather than the individual, is the source of class in India (Sara Dickey, “Anjali’s Prospects: Class Mobility in Urban India,” in Everyday Life in South Asia, edited by Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002], 217) finds strong resonance in the film. For instance, a suitor who visits Dipti’s home fails to call again and when pressed for a reason cites “standard of living.”
Interestingly, Amrita (now of Nokha) is also highly qualified with an MBA, and prior to marriage spends her time working and strolling around Delhi’s malls in jeans and t-shirts. Amrita’s husband promises before marriage to ease her into the family manufacturing business he runs once they are settled. She folds up her jeans and deposits them in her cupboard on a shelf too high to reach, presumably awaiting the time when they may return into her life. Donning saris selected especially for her by her mother-in-law, she proceeds to play the part of a loving and respectable wife in the home of a rich man from a politically prominent family. Sadly for her, Nokha soon imposes further expectations upon her which provide a test of her resilience and good-natured submission to the requirements of being a beautiful and dutiful bahu (daughter-in-law) running her husband’s home. Poignantly, her mother-in-law asks Amrita in Hindi: “Did you remember to put dried mango into the cauliflower?” With remarkably little bitterness, Amrita says no as her husband busies himself with his food. Amrita provides this closing observation about her life in Nokha: “You lose your identity when you get married, and that’s one thing I never wanted to do. More than 80 percent of people who come to the home would not even know my name. They just recognize me as Keshav’s wife.”
Perveez Mody
University of Cambridge, Cambridge