The tale of many Paros

Shoma A. Chatterji

Vijay Kumar’s Haryanvi film Paro looks at the issue of bride-trafficking. The story is set in a remote village in Haryana, where outstanding performance by women in sports is juxtaposed against the widespread illegal and cruel practice of bride trafficking. This, in the local language is called Paro Pratha, so the girl in the film is called Paro. Girls and young women who are trafficked as brides are then sold by the husband and in-laws to another family as a bride.

Vijay Kumar, who belongs to Rohtak, says Paro is his diploma film in direction from SIFTV, Delhi. He got the idea for the film from some blogs and newspaper articles he had read online. He knew the language and understood the mindset of local people.

Made in Haryanvi, the film is about a teenage girl, who is trafficked into a family as a bride to a bedridden ailing older man. The bride works the whole day long, nursing her sick husband, cooking, cleaning and doing the entire household work under the watchful eyes of her mother-in-law. The girl has no complaints because she has never questioned her status in life. Her only friends are the younger son of Alok, her husband, and his elder son Devinder, who she gets friendly with. But Devinder is much older than her and her mother-in-law does not like this. As soon as Alok dies, the older woman begins to negotiate with agents to sell Paro off again to a bidder who will pay more than she paid for her. She treats the young girl like dirt. Whether the girl gets trafficked again or not leads to a dramatic anti-climax.

“It was a challenge to shoot the film in seven days,” says Vijay Kumar. He had heard about bride trafficking in Haryana when he was studying at a college in Rohtak, though he had not actually seen it happening. “I once met a young girl who was said to be a trafficked bride. But when I tried to speak to her, all I met with was silence. That convinced me how much this girl had internalised this torture. It was as if she had pulled down the shutter on her life and locked herself up in a dark room,” says Vijay.

“Paro is just a metaphor, a microcosm of hundreds of girls who are sacrificed so easily and traded like cattle to be sold from one family to another”, he says.

He selected the girl who was to play the protagonist from an acting workshop and the woman playing the mother-in-law is a theatre actor.

Another inspiration was an article by Danish Raza in a national dailies, wherein it was mentioned, “The skewed sex ratio in Haryana, Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh has led to a flourishing trading of women from Assam, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha. These women are often bought for as little as `5000.”

Paro is treated with a subtle, understated touch, which perhaps softens the message, but makes the film aesthetically beautiful and sociologically shocking. The acting by the teenager is moving.