Ill-informed, dishonest, though perhaps well-meant, Period.End
of Sentence’s win reflects poorly on the Oscars
Since Period.End of Sentence’s Oscar win last
week for Best Documentary (Short Subject), a steady stream of laudatory
articles and congratulatory interviews of its American director Rayka Zehtabchi
have appeared on the Net. The Indian news media in particular has been flooded
with almost universally and unequivocally positive reviews and reports
celebrating “Oscars’ India connection” since Guneet Monga’s Mumbai-based Sikhya
Entertainment is one of the film’s producers.
Monga has, among
other things, been at the forefront of what some might call the Hindi New Wave
of the past half decade or so. She has been backing Bollywood indies of the
sort that usually struggle to make it to mainstream theatres (Lunchbox and Masaan among them), so if any behind-the-scenes cinematic force
deserves the limelight – international or domestic – it is she. However,
admiration for her track record and even the movie-worthy, charming story of how Period.End of Sentence. was
kicked off by an enterprising teacher and students at Oakwood School,
California, should not divert attention from this unfortunate point: that
though it may well have been started with good intentions, it has ended up a
confusing, poorly researched and, sadly, even dishonest film.
Period.End of Sentence. – a Netflix
original and currently streaming on the platform – is a 26 minute documentary
set in a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Hapur district, 60 km outside Delhi. It
focuses on poor menstrual hygiene and ignorance about periods in this rural
community, told through the story of how attitudes change when a low-cost
sanitary napkin making machine (purchased from funds raised by the Oakwood
students) is installed locally to enable women of the place to manufacture pads
themselves and become entrepreneurs in the field. That machine is the invention
of Coimbatore resident Arunachalam Muruganantham, who was the subject of Amit
Virmani’s 2013 documentary feature Menstrual
Man and the inspiration for the Bollywood film Padman (2018) starring Akshay Kumar.
At a time when the
Sabarimala imbroglio has put the national media spotlight firmly on the
stigmatisation of menstruation in various ways in Indian culture, Period.End of Sentence. has the power to
further mainstream that crucial conversation. Besides, to be fair to Zehtabchi
and to Melissa Berton, the American teacher whose
initiative led to the making of this film, they have both been at pains to
explain to the Western news media that the
stigma around periods is not just a problem of financially constrained
countries like India. In an interview to awardsdaily.com last month, Berton
said: “It’s definitely an issue in the US as well. They put free pads in a
lower socio-economic area recently in New York and attendance went up. It’s not
just a developing country issue.” Likewise, Zehtabchi told Glamour: “After they see the film, I hope people understand this
period stigma doesn’t just affect those in India. We experience it in the
United States and in other cultures as well.” The other side of this coin
though is that a similarly ill-researched film set in the United States is
unlikely to have escaped scrutiny in the way Period.End of Sentence. has.
For those of us who
are not experts on this subject, the first warning sign of trouble should come
from the mixed signals Period sends
out. Almost half the film is devoted to introducing viewers to woman after woman,
girl after girl in Hapur who freezes, giggles or suffers excruciating shyness
when asked about periods. Throughout this segment, the effort is to convince us
that women here do not know of sanitary napkins, that the few who do are too
diffident to buy them, and that they all opt for makeshift cloth pads made from
rags.
Yet when the
central figures of Zehtabchi’s documentary – the charismatic aspiring policewoman
Sneha among them – start peddling the pads they have made under the brand name
Fly with Muruganantham’s machine, they are shown devoting most of their time to
convincing potential customers that Fly is better despite being cheaper than
other sanitary napkins in the market. This is odd, because if the women they
are targeting have never before used sanitary napkins, as we have been told by
the film until then, then they would not know or care, at least not at first,
about what else is available on shop shelves.
Logically speaking,
Fly’s primary challenge should have been to convince Hapur’s women to switch
from cloth pads to sanitary napkins in the first place, but at no point do we
see Sneha & Co doing that. In fact, their brief chats with potential buyers
shown on screen in the second half suggest that most of these women do
indeed know of sanitary napkins and many are perhaps using them. The question
that follows then is why the film would initially try to convince us otherwise.
Could it be that
poor village women in the far off ‘Orient’ who have zero awareness about
sanitary napkins are more exotic and therefore make for more colourful cinema
than poor village women in the far off ‘Orient’ who already use sanitary
napkins and only need to be convinced to switch from one brand to another?
Or could it be that
tarring all these women with one brush is easier than explaining the heterogeneity in this Indian village in
which co-exist women who are aware of sanitary napkins and those who are not,
women who use sanitary napkins and those who do not, women who use unhygienic
alternatives and those who use clean cloth?
Or, could the
confusion in Period.End of Sentence.
simply be the result of lazy research?
The only statistic
available in the film comes from Muruganantham who confidently claims that “less
than 10%” of Indian women use sanitary napkins. He does not cite the source of
this information, but a basic Google search should have told Zehtabchi that it
is questionable.
In fact, this
figure is one of many issues in Period.End
of Sentence. – including environmental concerns – red-flagged in an exhaustive blog published by the Karnataka-based NGO Mythri Speaks immediately
after Zehtabchi collected her Oscar trophy last week.
Muruganantham
himself has contradicted the number on other platforms. In a TED Talk in
Bangalore earlier this decade, he claimed that only 2% of Indian women use
sanitary pads. His company Jayaashree Industries’ website too at present says
that just 2% of Indian women use sanitary pads, though it is unclear from the
language of the site whether it is referring to women across India or only
rural women. Here too, the source is not given. Another part of the website
does however refer to a report by the market research group AC Nielsen stating
that “88% of women in India are driven to use ashes, newspapers, sand husks and
dried leaves during their periods”. What the website does not reveal is that
this Nielsen study, though widely quoted in the media has come in for strong criticism
for its limited scope among other reasons.
The far more
credible, pan-India National Family Health Survey (NFHS) of 2015-16 – easily accessible
on the Internet and also widely quoted in the media – reveals that 48.2% of
rural women and 77.5% of urban women in the 15-24 age group use what NFHS
describes as “a hygienic method” of menstrual protection (read: “locally
prepared napkins, sanitary napkins, and tampons”). Those using sanitary napkins
in particular amount to 41.8% of this demographic.
According to NFHS,
the all-India figure for those using a hygienic method of menstrual protection
in this age group is approximately 58%. These statistics, though far less
sensational than the sole figure given in Zehtabchi’s documentary, are
certainly shocking and unacceptable. It is not this article’s contention that
India has any reason to be proud of the fact that 42% of the country’s young
women use unhygienic methods of menstrual protection. The question mark over Period.End of Sentence. arises entirely because
it misrepresents facts.
There is enough
drama in the truth, but sadly, it appears that Zehtabchi and her team wanted
more. Towards this end, they have gone beyond playing fast and loose with
stats.
In one of the film’s
most memorable passages, a teacher in a school in Hapur is shown pestering her
female students to explain the meaning of periods for the benefit of the camera
before a packed classroom filled with boys and girls. One child in particular
becomes the focus of everyone’s attention as she struggles to speak, nearly
paralysed as she is by a debilitating shyness.
While this
exploitative scene is used to illustrate the average rural Indian woman’s fear
of discussing periods, it should make us wonder how many girls of the same age
even in urban India or Zehtabchi’s home country, the US, would be particularly
delighted to respond to an insensitive interrogator in such a public situation
about a biological phenomenon they are just getting used to in their own lives.
That this particular girl belongs to a conservative society makes the film’s
approach even more problematic.
Child rights
activists in India and abroad will hopefully also take note of Zehtabchi’s own
admission about the unethical manner in which she shot that scene. In an
interview to documentary.org, quoted in Mythri
Speaks’ blog, Zehtabchi says: “...we walked into a co-ed classroom,
unannounced, in India. The teacher asked the 15-year-old students if anyone
could tell her what menstruation was. And there’s a shot in the film of a young
girl who’s called upon, and she stands up completely petrified. In the film,
there is about 30 seconds where she literally cannot say a word. In real life
we got about three minutes of footage of her where it seemed like she was going
to faint…”
Read that again.
She shot interviews of minors. Without their prior consent. And the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her an Oscar. Unarguably the most
sought-after film award in the world.
The Oscar win for Period.End of Sentence. will no doubt
play a part in encouraging more conversations, and more open conversations,
about menstruation in India and the rest of the world. This, however, is no
excuse for the means adopted by the film to achieve its goal. The end cannot
justify untruths and insensitivity. Period.
FOOTNOTE:
The subtitles of Period.End of Sentence. are curious. It
is not clear from the credits whether the subs were given by the production
team or Netflix or another party. Whatever be the case, the terribly
politically incorrect analogies used by an affable elderly woman called Shabana
to market Fly pads in Hapur have been mistranslated. Shabana, who is one of the
key characters in Period, compares
Fly to a “susheel bahu” (good-natured
daughter-in-law) and an unnamed rival brand to a “sundar bahu” (good-looking daughter-in-law), and later equates Fly
with an ugly (“badsoorat”), black (“kaala”) man who is competent. The subtitles merely use
the words “beauty” and “quality” to convey her meaning, although the literal
translation would have also served the purpose. It is obvious from the tone of Period that it wants viewers to like the
likes of Sneha and Shabana whose lives this project claims to have transformed,
and while it is possible that there was no political calculation behind the
writing of the subtitles, the departure from accuracy in the subs here alone
suggests an attempt to camouflage evidence of Shabana’s biases at least from
liberal viewers in the West. The point being missed here is that women have a
right to their rights, to education and to health whether they are nice people
or not.
The subtitles, of
course, are the least of Period’s
problem areas.
This
article has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster courtesy:
