I was 16 years old. At the time, I had taken up a job in order to take care of my mother and younger sister. In doing so, I had to face many difficulties at the hands of my family, relatives, and the people in my mohalla.
What is a samjhauta? It is a decision made to wrap up disputes, in a way that ensures everything goes smoothly in the future. In my opinion, a samjhauta could turn out to be either successful, or utterly unsuccessful.
Usually, a compromise is done between two people, as we have often seen. A compromise is done to resolve a fight between a husband and wife, or to resolve other kinds of conflict. But, in life too, we have to go through many compromises.
Today, I have to go and visit my in-laws house. My son, who is 11, got ready to go with me. The kachcha roads here do not invite an easy means of transport, and so, both of us walked.
In this story, a caseworker walks us through her Sunday, that day of the week when she takes her son to visit her husband’s village. What awaits her there are the probing questions of neighbours as well as the calming presence of her best friend – a Mahua tree.
Kya Hai Yeh Samjhauta works with material of the everyday, scraps of cloth, needle thread and the timbre of human voices (“The voices of the caseworkers animate the dolls, and is the documentary part of this,”) to explore these questions. The scraps of cloth in turn, animate the grain of the voices, to gesture at the many choices women make when faced with domestic violence.
The easiest thing to tell a woman in a violent marriage is to just leave. But is leaving always that simple? From financial vulnerabilities to a loss of kinships, to a turbulent clash of hope and fear, to a complex interplay of love and desire, the decision to not leave are also stories that need to be heard.
What are the bargains we make, the samjhautas we strike, the deals we despair in, to feel safe, to feel loved? In this story, a caseworker from Bundelkhand takes us through the many rooms she has lived in, and asks, which room is mine?
The easiest thing to tell a woman in a violent marriage is to just leave. But is leaving always that simple? From financial vulnerabilities to hopes, desires, dreams, fears and responsibilities, all collide in the decision to not leave and stay.
News around us tells us that the brokering of deals over the untimely deaths of women is not rare. It is as common as the crime itself. The nature of such monetary saudas exposes the reality of our most personal relationships – as being hollow, fragile and dispensable.
