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Undergraduate Honors Thesis, December 2017.
Behind the Numbers: Voices of Gorubathan is the culmination of my field work in rural West Bengal, India and the contextualization of ethics in visual representation and anthropological theories of development.
The research was funded by a Florida State University IDEA Grant.
While this is my first solo produced film project and one that is full of moments and edits that make me cringe, it is still an important lesson I learned as a filmmaker and researcher. I learned how easily interview questions can be manipulated to get a certain answer and push a certain narrative—as you will hear someone tell me “that is a leading question”—as well as how data sets and statistics do not tell whole and complicated truths. And that the people both try to represent are full of life and complexities that demand to be acknowledged.
This film project also taught me a lot about being an openminded human, a friend, and that Nepali momo’s are the closest to heaven I will ever come.
The film explores the experiences behind the statistics used by the UN and other development organizations to illustrate gender and education inequalities. The film follows young women in the village of Gorubathan in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, India as they navigate traditional gender roles and higher education opportunities. It seeks to complicate and humanize the issue, as well as provide insight (and accountability) for how those numbers influenced my initial bias. The accompanying artist statement adds context on gender equity initiatives, tensions of globalization, localized pride in traditional gender roles, commodification of education, and Western Ideology of empowerment. Additionally, the artist statement gives a brief history of ethnographic film’s impact on anthropology and representation for marginalized communities. Because reflexivity is a pillar of ethnography, the artist statement discusses the evolution of the film in order to emphasize the way my own understanding was challenged and bring visibility to the sociocultural complexities in Gorubathan that are overlooked in the numerical data used by international development organizations to secure funding.
To view artist statement, click here.