Liberation Season: Screening – India’s Forgotten Women

India; the world’s largest democracy. A democracy, however, where contradictions are rife. Where the president is a woman, yet presides over a nation where women are bought, trafficked, enslaved and ritually raped often without repercussion.

Pipe Village Trust, the UK based human rights’ filmmaking organisation delves into the sordid buried practices, bringing to light the startling reality of how the lives of women in India are often dictated by ancient rites and pitiless customs. The thousand year old tradition although outlawed in 1988, still flourishes under a thin veil of secrecy;  girls as young as four are dedicated by impoverished parents to temples of the Goddess Yellamma and are bound to a lifetime of service to the temple priests.

Michael Lawson, producer of India’s Forgotten Women and founder of Pipe Village Trust exposes not only the oppression of women in India, but the complications arising from the deeply embedded caste system where the 250 million strong Dalit community-commonly known as the "untouchables" carry the huge weight of institutionalised predjudice.