Leaving Home

Most of India's 1.2 billion people live in villages. Teenager Renu and her upper caste family live in Rankhandi, one of these villages. Leaving Home is their story. Renu wants to become a big city teacher. Instead, after a traditional marriage Renu must move to her husband’s village and hope her daughter’s dreams eventually will be fulfilled. Leaving Home is about rural life, castes, weddings, marriage, sex, abuse, family—and change. As the film unfolds, restrictions on the rights of village girls and women may shock the western viewer. Many in our culture may consider Renu's way of life one step removed from slavery. But all of this is “normal” in Rankhandi.

Anthropologist J. Michael Mahar — University of Arizona professor emeritus, noted for his publications about castes — has intermittently lived in Rankhandi for over a half-century. Our guide, he is a colorful and revealing story teller who has seen the village move from the 18th to the 20th century before his eyes. Nishu Varma, a journalist who is our interpreter, talks with women with no men in hearing distance most of the time. Their frank conversations about sex, love, marriage and marital abuse have rarely been shared before in a film about rural India.