Pink Saris debuts tonight on HBO2 at 8 p.m. Eastern.
“If girls spoke up, the world would change,” says Sampat Pal, the subject of Kim Longinotto's new documentary Pink Saris. It’s the kind of sentiment that, when expressed by a Westerner, sounds like an easy, “girl power” platitude. But in a place like the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where Pink Saris takes place, it’s anything but a cliché. The women in this corner of the world are more accustomed to hiding bashfully behind their veils than defending themselves, but as Sampat puts it, “If you’re shy, you’ll die.”
This no-frills documentary follows Sampat as she mediates on behalf of the desperate women who show up at her charity home—though “mediate” is perhaps too delicate a term for her strong-arm tactics. Each of the situations is, according to Sampat, “worse than the last”: a pregnant woman's higher-caste boyfriend won’t marry her; a barely-teenage girl divorces her husband in order to be with her boyfriend, but he changes his mind because she is an untouchable; a woman who runs away from home because her father-in-law has been raping her. Sampat intervenes when there’s no other recourse, stepping in to negotiate peace agreements between women and their in-laws. She has little respect for personal boundaries, telling perfect strangers how to manage their families and encouraging young people to rebel against oppressive caste and gender traditions. Brazen and assertive, Sampat is just the kind of larger-than-life figure who makes an ideal subject for a documentary.
At the risk of sounding retrograde, it must be said: Sampat is one ballsy woman. Adding to the overall impression is her habit of chewing paan and her fondness for sitting with her legs open. Most radical of all is her domestic situation: she lives with her partner, Babuji, even though she’s still married to another man. (Her husband lives nearby in a house with their 12 grandchildren.)
If Sampat’s fearlessness is awe-inspiring, then so too is her arrogance. She calls herself the “Messiah for women,” calls one man an idiot to his face, and boasts about beating up cops. She’s also a bit of a hypocrite. Her niece, Niranjan, comes to her in desperation after her in-laws allowed her sick infant daughter to die, but Sampat sends Niranjan back to them in order to maintain peace with her husband’s family. This decision upsets Babuji, who suggests all the attention has gone to Sampat's head: “Be famous if you want, I’m not interested.” You wish the film would really dive into the apparent contradictions in Sampat’s personality, we’d hear some outside perspective on her controversial tactics. You get the impression that, like so many great activists, Sampat is a deeply complicated woman, but, frustratinglly, Pink Saris leaves these contradictions unexplored.
Whether for aesthetic or budgetary reasons (or more likely, both), Pink Saris takes a fly-on-the-wall approach to storytelling, with very little music, no voiceover, and only a few explanatory captions. Longinotto captures plenty moments of vivid drama that speak for themselves, but there’s not a tremendous amount of information to put Sampat’s work into context—or, indeed, to explain what it really does. The title Pink Saris refers to the Pink Gang, a group of hundreds of lower-caste women who, following Sampat’s lead, are bucking the oppressive traditions that have relegated them to lives of misery, but we don't hear from a single one of them in the 90 minutes of the documentary, nor do we really understand the relationship between Sampat and the Pink Gang. Likewise, the explanation of India’s caste system provided in Pink Saris is, at best, cursory. All we're told is that in Hindu society, “untouchables”—now more commonly known as “dalits”—are the lowest caste. Admittedly, explaining the vastly complicated and continually evolving caste system is no easy feat, but Pink Saris might have tried a little harder.
In the end, though, the biggest problem is that Sampat can only provide a stopgap solution to the more fundamental gender problems in India. In one of the film's most wrenching scenes, a young man, under pressure from Sampat, marries the girl he’s gotten pregnant. For the girl, the wedding is quite literally a lifesaver, but the occasion is utterly joyless, and both bride and groom look catatonic throughout. Only minutes before what ought to be a joyous ceremony, the bride tells Longinotto she wishes she could escape with her to London. Sampat is determined to help save these women, but there’s a kind of defeatism inherent in each of her small victories: the goal is, simply, to marry the women off so they don’t throw themselves in front of a train in desperation. Later, when Sampat defiantly tells one of her charges “Marriage can go to hell,” you can’t help but agree.