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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.
The film explores gender and education inequalities in the village of Gorubathan in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, India by exploring the experiences of young women as they navigate traditional gender roles and higher education. The accompanying artist statement seeks to add nuance to gender equity initiatives presented by international development organizations by representing the 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 films impact on anthropological knowledge and representation for marginalized communities. Because reflexivity is vital for ethical production, the artist statement discusses the construction and evolution of the film in order to emphasize the way my own understanding of empowerment was challenged and bring visibility to the sociocultural complexities in Gorubathan simplified by the numerical data used by international development organizations to secure funding.
To view artist statement, click here.
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.