Sthal (A Match)

India is obsessed with marriages. Weddings take place all over the country in different regions and among different communities and they are celebrated like anything. However, even in today’s times in rural India, the idea of a girl’s forced arranged marriage still exists. Filmmaker Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Sthal (A Match) boldly highlights this social evil. The movie takes place in a village in Maharashtra named Dongargaon and it revolves around Savita Daulatrao Wandhare (Nandini Chikte). She is in her Final year of Bachelor of Arts course and her specialization subject is Sociology. Her father (Taranath Khiratkar) and mother (Sangita Sonekar) wish to get her married off soon but she wants to study further.

As the world customarily deliberates on a woman’s place in society this week, writer-director Jayant Somalkar shows us the mirror through a deceptively simple take on the patriarchal roots of the traditional matchmaking process and the attendant social churn in our villages. Structured like a coming-of-age story of a village girl struggling to find her way out of the dragnet of gender roles and societal expectations, protagonist Savita’s tenacity and quiet rebellion pierce our consciousness. Seen from a girl’s point of view, Sthal’s scope is not limited to the humiliation a girl and her family endure in finding a suitable match through an arranged marriage. It deconstructs its cultural context, its normalisation, and its consequences. When news pages bring the rise in the number of farmer suicides and the sale of mobile phones in rural Maharashtra into our living rooms, one misses the social pressures and moral conditioning that pushes a peasant to the brink and reduce jobless youth to data.

In the last few years, the Marathi film industry has seen filmmakers from the Vidarbha region take the spotlight with films set in the region. Albeit a serious concern, Marathi films based in Vidarbha have had a set template revolving around farmer issues and farmer suicides. But films like Jayanti (Shailesh Narwade), Zollywood (Trushant Ingle), Ghaath (Chhatrapal Ninawe) and Territory (Sachin Shriram), have been changing the tide, bringing forth untapped stories. Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s ‘Sthal’ is the latest entrant in the list. The film, which releases theatrically a day ahead of International Women’s Day and features an ensemble cast of first-time actors, has won accolades across various international film festivals in the last couple of years. Set in Dongargaon village in Wardha, Sthal (A Match) revolves around the Wandhre family’s quest to find a suitable match for their daughter Savita (an impactful Nandini Chikte).

Early on in Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Sthal – four men can be seen discussing a woman’s complexion. “She seems fair, doesn’t she?” one of them asks, only to be shut down by the other: “It is all make-up. Didn’t you notice her elbows? They gave it away.” The woman, actually a young girl named Savita (Nandini Chikte), barely out of her teens, in her final year of college pursuing B.A (Sociology), is being looked at as a prospective bride. Those men could be talking about livestock. Such is the ‘marketplace’ for arranged marriages – especially in India, where such casual indignities are fair game.