A Young Woman in India Struggles With Losing Her Identity to Marriage in This Clip From A Suitable Girl
Entertainment
In this clip from A Suitable Girl, a documentary about the divisive tradition of arranged marriages in India, a woman named Amrita explains the burden of being seen as a man’s property. “You lose your identity when you get married, and that’s one thing I never wanted to do,” she says. “More than eighty precent of people who come to home, would not even know my name. They just recognize me as Keshav’s wife.”
Shot over the course of four years, the film is centered around three young women in India (Ritu, Dipti and Amrita) who face pressure to lean into marriage and find a suitable husband.
In a review of the documentary, which premiered at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Jezebel’s Prachi Gupta, reflecting on her own upbringing wrote, “A Suitable Girl successfully demystifies the process of arranged marriages—dispelling the kind of Western ‘otherizing’ and exoticizing I experienced in school—while simultaneously casting a critical eye on how it uniquely affects women.”
The film, directed by Sarita Khurana and Smriti Mundhra, is available to stream on Amazon today.