Writer-director Ananth Narayan Mahadevan has often given us socially relevant films, for example, rough notes about the importance of girls’ education. His latest, Bitter Sweet (Kadu Bhagwan in Marathi), is a damning look at greed, covetousness and a singular lack of compassion, part of the ongoing film market organized by the National Film Development Corporation of India. And with horrifying social implications.
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Mahadevan focuses on the sugarcane harvesters of Maharashtra, most of whom are from Beed. He has a seasonal job of cutting sugarcane for about six months in a year. A wicked nexus of sugarcane mill-owners, contractors and even doctors, young female workers, are coaxed and even threatened to have their uterus removed so that they are forced to work while menstruating. Don’t miss a single day. If the women protest, the contractors tell them that they will be fined heavily, and having already taken the advance, the workers have no option but to queue up. The contractors in turn are pressured by the owners, who are rushing to build India The number one sugar producing and exporting country, overtaking Brazil. Mill-owners or contractors or doctors don’t care whether women suffer hormonal imbalances, as well as the threat of an entire generation being wiped out!
Mahadevan takes up the case of young Saguna (played with a lot of emotion by Akshay Gaurav), who is not even married but, seeing a sick father, an overworked mother and a lazy brother, has her uterus removed. Motherhood deprives itself of happiness. There is a horrific scene in which the doctor and his wife (!) lift the scalpel to remove Saguna’s womb. It seems they are doing this with calculated evil.
Mahadevan certainly touched on a very sensitive but mind-blowing incident which I am told is very common in the prosperous state of Maharashtra. And all this for a meager amount of income that the mills will lose when the women workers take a day or two off every month.
In a country like India, which is rushing into the 21st century with modern gadgets and thinking, if this sounds alarming to me, it is even more so that hysterectomy is happening so clearly in the sugarcane fields of Maharashtra. What is even worse is that the mainline media has rarely written about this horrific lure of benefits at the cost of poor women’s health and motherhood.
At 101 minutes, Bitter Sweet is a very important piece of work that needs to be seen, but I wish Mahadevan could have made it less dark and serious. There’s no relief, and the work lacks dramatic elements that would have turned Bitter Sweet into something more effective and perhaps more enjoyable to watch.
(Writer, Commentator, Movie Critic Gautman Bhaskaran has been covering NFDC Film Bazaar for many years)
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