Pahuja communicates how two kinds of women blindly seek empowerment in their own ways. And yet, they are waylaid by a feudal system. ‘The World Before Her’ is a powerful documentary and I strongly recommend that you see it – this is the kind of cinema that will leave you shaken and stirred.

This film is frightening but it is also deeply moving and significant. I urge you to time for it.

Documentary shows two faces of the Indian woman…

‘The World Before Her’ must be watched as to see how westernisation has in fact strengthened patriarchy and women continue to struggle to have the freedom of choice.

The film’s most touching moment comes when a mother reveals that her husband wanted to dispose of their girl child, and the child went on to achieve massive success. It’s when you realise that The World Before Her is one of the most important, skillfully made and powerfully provocative films to come in a long time.

The power of The World Before Her is its sensitive alertness to how these two very different platforms for Indian women both appear to be rotten planks. For all their apparent differences, Durga Vahini and Miss India have a lot in common. Whether in India or Bharat, it seems all anyone wants to do with women is mould them while pretending to empower them.

The World Before Her also offers a rare window into the goings-on of the Durga Vahini. While the propaganda and physical training that take place in the widespread Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) shakhas are well documented, there’s little in the popular domain on the Durga Vahini. It’s unnerving to see the camp churn out rabid young girls who, while endearing as sprightly adolescents usually are, induce mild panic over the future of this country. Hopefully this is an aspect of the Hindu right that will be contained within a few camps during the reign of the BJP-dominated National Democratic Alliance.

The reward of watching such non-fiction on the big screen, or the magnification of unspoken intimacy and shared history, is a discomfiting thrill. That’s the response Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her extracted from me. In the best tradition of American documentary film-making, which allows subjects to speak for themselves and the viewer to absorb what she or he wants, Pahuja’s film about Ruhi, a beauty-contest aspirant from a middle-class family in Jaipur and Prachi, an opponent of that aspiration, is not as much an eye-opener as it is an example of clever, narrative non-fiction.

Nisha’s victory as a filmmaker lies in her ability to draw out candid responses from her subjects and letting us judge the truth without really trying hard to put a spin around the film.