Al Jazeera English’s 101 East series has put together another astounding, heart breaking piece on Bangladeshi culture, its sociology. This time around, film makers sponsored by Al Jazeera have examined the wide spread phenomenon of violence that so often churns along with the covert exchange of property rights that is tagged euphemistically in cities and villages in Bangladesh as, simply, gift giving.
I invite you to watch the documentary. It is short at only 22 minutes. It will leave you with more questions than answers, its images indelible, seared into your mind, electric, charged on by unforgettable, unhappy stories.
I found it difficult to contain my unsheathed anger at the sight of the village meeting that you will see in the documentary, convoked to decide one young woman’s fate. The panel accept that she has been beaten for years and that it is just that her husband has been remanded to jail. However, the members of the panel refuse to address the central issue–that the young woman has suffered for years due to unmet expectations for a set dowry. That dowry giving is illegal might have served to protect her interests in the arbitration. Instead, due to the very illegality of the blighted exchange, the arbitration committee proposes to examine the issue through other means and indeed, promises to hear the abusive husband’s side of the story.
There is something Kafkaesque about this business, something strikingly banal and bureaucratic about the prospect of a life adjudicated and adjourned by a committee of the willingly uninterested. The proof stands quietly, the relevant history, present but all the same, the end game is the status quo.
