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By:

Shoma A. Chatterji

21 August 2024 at 4:19:40 pm

Childhood for Sale

Khilawadi, a short fiction film directed by the young and sprightly Shobhita Thakur, alumnus of the FTII, Pune, is making news wherever the film is being screened. Why? The subject of the film is shocking in its inhuman brutality. Through a brief but powerful narrative, the film tells the story of the 12-year-old Sapna who is good in studies and dreams of becoming a doctor one day. The term “Khilawadi” is a locally used word associated with the Banchada community in Western Madhya Pradesh,...

Childhood for Sale

Khilawadi, a short fiction film directed by the young and sprightly Shobhita Thakur, alumnus of the FTII, Pune, is making news wherever the film is being screened. Why? The subject of the film is shocking in its inhuman brutality. Through a brief but powerful narrative, the film tells the story of the 12-year-old Sapna who is good in studies and dreams of becoming a doctor one day. The term “Khilawadi” is a locally used word associated with the Banchada community in Western Madhya Pradesh, particularly in the Neemuch-Mandsaur region. The word is believed to have evolved within the local dialects as a descriptive label for women employed in sex work, especially those living along or near major highways. Over time, strangely, the changes in social customs, in media technology, in traditional rituals, have not affected the age-old custom of putting daughters to prostitution the minute they reach puberty. Therefore, the term “khilawadi” has become an informal, locally used word associated with the Banchada community used rather pejoratively to refer to girls or women from the community who engage in highway-based prostitution, a practice historically linked to complex socio-economic and caste-based circumstances within the region. The term carries social stigma and reflects structural inequalities faced by the Banchada community. “We could not shoot in the actual location because we were told that it would be dangerous for the team to shoot there. So, we shot several kilometers away at a different location to keep the rural spirit of the topic intact. As a woman filmmaker and an artist, I feel compelled to tell this story of unimaginable suffering and exploitation of young girls. This film is not just a reflection of their pain, but a call for social change, urging society to recognize and address this persistent injustice,” says the director. The film uses a raw, unembellished cinematic style that highlights the stark realities of their lives. It opens in the classroom of a girls’ school. We are introduced to the 12-year-old Sapna. On her way back, she waits outside the window of the community health centre in the area to watch the lady doctor at work. The lady doctor beckons her inside and asks her why she is waiting at the window. Sapna asks her whether she can become a doctor like her. But when she is asked by the teacher what she wants to become when she grows up, a giggling classmate mocks her saying, “She can only become a dhandhewali - a vulgarized term for one who sells one’s body for money.” Sapna belongs to the Banchada tribe and while her mother, a prostitute herself, plans to sell her to prostitution planning to make some money from the “nath utharna” ritual, a traditional term for the first night, the price for the first night’s customer who gets the right to strip the girl of her virginity. The doctor however, takes the help of a social worker to get a caste certificate for Sapna which will convince her mother to continue her education as she will be entitled to a scholarship for her further education. But all attempts at getting a caste certificate come to naught and while the mother sits in front of the highway for customers in vain as she is ageing, she also prepares for Sapna’s initiation into the profession. Strangely, the males in this community extract huge dowries when they get married though they are practically pimping and their wives are drawn from communities other than the Banchada community and they do not practice prostitution. The entire family then begins to live off the daughter’s earnings. When Sapna fails to get a caste certificate, she is forcibly prepared for the nuptial night and the first customer who pays Rs.10,000 is a middle-aged man. The film closes on the figure of a crying Sapna squatting on the floor after the first night, while the camera pans to focus on the bed and captures the image of an ointment Sapna’s mother gave her to prevent from the first night turning into a torture of pain. The film is aesthetically well-crafted with beautiful cinematography, good music and above everything else, brilliant piece of acting by every single actor. The film is currently on its international festival circuit, having won major awards at the FascinAsian Film Festival (Canada) and been officially selected for the Kazan International Film Festival and Festival du Film de Nancy in France. (The writer is an award-winning film scholar and author of several books.)

Credibility Problem

Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) convenor Abhijeet Dipke’s self-styled “school movement” is beginning to look less like a campaign for educational reform and more like a political stunt in search of a scandal. The deeper he ventures into Maharashtra’s schools, the more his own methods are coming under scrutiny. And the latest episode in Latur is particularly revealing.


Dipke reportedly arrived expecting to discover the kind of institutional collapse that makes for convenient Instagram outrage. Instead, he found the school toilets freshly painted and clean. Locals told him the work had been done only the previous week under the BJP government. Then came the pièce de résistance: a broken toilet outside the school. Officials reportedly explained that it belonged neither to the school nor the municipality and was not even being used.


Dipke, who hogged headlines during the recent NEET paper leak protests, is now finding other targets for his brand of political theatre. He needs to answer a very simple question: who made him the authority on Maharashtra’s schools? What expertise, mandate or institutional responsibility does he possess that allows him to storm into government schools accompanied by cameras and a posse, berate principals and publicly pronounce judgement on people who actually work inside the education system?


A school is not a political campaign office. The allegations made by the Latur principal are even more disturbing. He claimed Dipke arrived with 10-15 people and media personnel, inspected the school while students were studying and, according to his account, deliberately entered through the back gate to find things that could be presented as failures. He says he had himself sought funds from the local elected representative to improve the school. Yet the infrastructure problem was apparently converted into a convenient excuse to target the principal. If this is how Dipke conducts his “movement”, then the question is no longer whether he is exposing the system but whether he is exploiting it.

There is the extraordinary spectacle of Dipke positioning himself as an education crusader while questions have been raised about his own educational credentials from Boston University. Allegations concerning his degree and academic history cannot simply be dismissed with social-media bravado. If his qualifications are genuine, let him produce the documents and settle the matter. If they are not, the man who cannot establish the authenticity of his own educational credentials has some nerve lecturing India’s teachers about education.


India desperately needs people who will fight for better government schools but not charlatans who manufacture convenient villains. Dipke cannot demand that everyone take his accusations seriously while refusing to subject his own credentials, funding and methods to the same scrutiny. And that is perhaps the most revealing fraud - a man claiming to expose the system now appears increasingly incapable of surviving exposure himself.

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