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By the People

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A rural North Indian outpost governed by corrupt officials who extort the locals for personal gain serves as the setting for Gulaab Gang. The protagonist, Rajjo, formed a gang of women focused on justice and education. Her story is tied up in education for women, as in her youth she resisted repeated beatings for her attempts to educate herself. The adult Rajjo therefore feels compelled to build a school, making it her sole motivation in life and establishing the titular gang as a means of providing a safe space for rejected women. Adopting the pink sari as their uniform, the Gulaab Gang trains academically and militaristically, proving to be able combatants throughout the film. Rajjo is set in opposition to a powerful woman whose insecurity regarding her authority compels her to enforce the title of “Madame” with brutal efficiency. Throughout the film her authority is maintained through force and financial influence; her deep pockets enable her to buy the loyalty of many local officials, who in turn help her consistently win political elections. The two women are drawn into conflict when one of Chawla’s supporters, a local Don, attempts to cover up the rape of a local girl perpetrated by one of his sons. The Gulaab Gang thus enters a protracted political war with “Madame,” resulting in the deaths of numerous people and the eventual imprisonment of Rajjo and her nemesis.
While the movie itself “is as make-believe as make-believe can get” according to Shubhra Gupta of The Indian Express, it does reveal some interesting lessons about authority and perceived legitimacy in government. The official government is very clearly portrayed as corrupt and ineffective, leaving the village elders to go to the Gulaab Gang if they want anything done. It’s a classic, “old-style good vs evil story” in the sense that the gang is continually depicted “going up against villainous husbands, cops and politicians (Gupta).” In regions lacking a strong, centralized government capable of asserting its own checks or balances, people often look to folk heroes or less legitimate forms of protection. Rajjo’s role as justice keeper is manifest in her repeated assistance to the townspeople, first with restoring electricity through coercion, then through violently retrieving some stolen grain. At each step, her illegal actions are depicted as both heroic and necessary. The movie paints an important image of rural India, focusing on backwards elements of its society which favor the oppression of women and the corruption of bought elections, lending a tone that is wary of democracy and official governmental channels and supportive of local leadership and justice. America’s “Wild West” cannot be ignored as a comparison, as Hollywood was at one point inundated with movies of a similar nature, where rural government failed the people it was sworn to protect and forced them to seek their own forms of justice. And so, while this movie is far-fetched in many ways and serves more for entertainment than education, it can provide powerful insight into the thoughts and feelings of rural populations who feel unrepresented in their supposedly representative government.

 

Gupta, Shubhra. Gulaab Gang is actually the old-style good vs evil story. The Indian Express, 2014

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