You make a movie, show India in poor light, you win an award. This appears to be winning formula. Latest to adopt this is Guneet Monga's documentary film 'Period. End of Sentence' which has just won an Oscar award.
Here is the IMDB summary of the film: In a rural village outside Delhi, India, women lead a quiet revolution. They fight against the deeply rooted stigma of menstruation. "Period. End of Sentence." -- a documentary short directed by Rayka Zehtabchi -- tells their story. For generations, these women didn't have access to pads, which lead to health problems and girls missing school or dropping out entirely. But when a sanitary pad machine is installed in the village, the women learn to manufacture and market their own pads, empowering the women of their community. They name their brand "FLY," because they want women "to soar." Their flight is, in part, enabled by the work of high school girls half a world away, in California, who raised the initial money for the machine and began a non-profit called "The Pad Project."
Though I am yet to watch the film, from the summary, we can see the usual narrative about menstruation about how poor Indian women were ignorant about menses, how lack of access to pads caused them to miss schools and health problems. These are the same narratives which the West and its peddlers in India, as well as those with commercial interest, want to push forward.
In the introduction to my book "Menstruation Across Cultures" as well as in the chapter dedicated to Modernity's treatment of the subject, I provide a detailed rebuttal to this skewed, motivated, and misleading propaganda about menstruation. Modernity and Modern education seeks to delegitimize all cultural knowledge passed onto people about menstruation and wants to promote only a particular way of 'scientific knowledge' alone as "true" and real!
It is high time somebody makes documentaries that bring out the Indic understanding of menstruation as well.
...
Understand the mindset and agenda of White Supremists and Brown Supremists.
Out to civilize us Natives.
Out of the two, the Brown Supremists are the more dangerous.
Btw, cloth is fine, has served me, and the other women of the village, a lifetime. And purchased pads are better only for those marketing them. And for the NGOs living off 'educating Natives'.
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