However, the widows in the temple on this side of the river did not live a purely holy religious life. In order to survive, they had to send the beautiful young widow to the other side of the river for the nobles to enjoy. For thousands of years, this tradition has been adhered to as God's command, like a clock, ticking back and forth in an orderly way until a man named Gandhi stood up and said, "For a long time, we thought that God was the truth, but now we find that truth is God."
But how attractive is Gandhi's new ideas in India, a society with a stubborn religious tradition?
The film tells the tragic story of a young widow named Kariana. The young man from the mansion across the river fell in love with this widow, Kariana, and of course, she fell in love with him. Although there was a strong resistance from the temple, it was not enough to stop their determination to be together, but one thing made Karina back down, because the father of the young man on the other side of the river was the one who was forced to give her body for her lewd pleasure. Karina broke through the shackles of religious ideas and traditions, but was defeated by the shame in human nature. She can't go to the other shore, nor can she go back to the temple. She had to throw herself into the river to escape from this world where she could not find a place to live.
Her death is a great blow to widows and sisters who abide by religious rules in the temple. When Chua, Karena's friend and the youngest widow in the temple, suffered the same fate and was sent to the other side of the river, one of the awakened widows put Chua on the train and followed Gandhi. Cai was liberated from the dark religious tradition.
At the end of the film, a line of subtitles shows that tens of millions of Indian widows still suffer the same fate until today. In other words, nearly a hundred years after the ideological revolution initiated by Gandhi, the stubborn religious tradition is still a powerful and decisive force in Indian society.
Today, many intellectuals in China envy the preservation of Indian traditional values, but they don't know that many intellectuals in India envy us for launching a thorough revolution, thus sweeping away the dark and decadent feudal hierarchy to a great extent.
This kind of mutual envy of Chinese and Indian intellectuals is really a bit emotional to think about. It makes people have to rethink what revolution is, why it is needed, and what is the real reason for it.
The Marxist sentiment of this film is obvious. The film tells the reason of the revolution through the mouth of Gandhi followers who live in a mansion across the river and fall in love with Karina: widows can save money for their families by being sent to temples, and religion is just an excuse. There is no other reason to lead to their tragic situation except economic motivation. The implication is that people's liberation is the liberation of people's economic/social status, and there is no other liberation.
In other words, if economic motives make Kariana have to endure a miserable life, then the only way to liberate Kariana is to let them go to modern society and gain economic and political autonomy. The only reason for this revolution is that "there has never been a savior, and everything depends on ourselves."
But is the question really that simple? Let's look back at our society. After a revolution, we drove away all the "saviors" with traditional concepts and moral standards, and economic dependence like slaves and slave owners no longer existed universally in our society. Our women will no longer be bound by Indian religious beliefs. But are our women (including each of us) liberated? No, man is a person who inevitably lives in a certain situation. No matter how revolutionary it is at first, any situation will eventually turn alienation into a force that enslaves people and makes them enemies. Revolution makes our women no longer trapped in religious and moral traditions, but in the post-revolutionary era, our women are trapped in an immoral and unconventional dilemma; They will not be widowed for a traditional value, but because they are in a society with no traditional value at all, they are thrown into an extremely anxious and unsafe nothingness.
With regard to the attitude towards traditional values, the famous saying "removing the rough and selecting the fine, removing the false and retaining the true" always sounds correct, but who can judge what to keep and what to discard has become another problem. The film says "it's up to you" through Cagliana's mouth. The implication is determined by everyone's own conscience. But the question is, do individuals have the strength to make such a decision? Didn't karina make a decision by his own courage, but he was finally defeated by his inner struggle?
It can be seen that the plight of mankind can be easily solved without relying on the economic and social revolution of the outside world, and there is no personal liberation without the economic and social revolution. The liberation of mankind is a complex and eternal struggle that will never stop.