About 360 kilometres and – it would seem – as many years away are contestants competing for the Miss India crown in Mumbai. Holed up in a five-star hotel for a month, these girls – one of them is Ruhi Singh, a sweet and somewhat naïve girl from Jaipur – spend their time doing strenuous butt-shaping exercises, walking the ramp in tiny bikinis and undergoing botox treatments. Famed Miss India etiquette trainer Sabira Merchant likens this process to being put through “a little factory, in which you’re polished like a diamond to the best that you can be: the modern Indian woman”.

Both Prachi and Ruhi are – amongst other characters – fully convinced that they are torchbearers of present-day Indian femininity. This dichotomy is the pulsating heart of The World Before Her, a feature-length documentary by Canada-born filmmaker Nisha Pahuja that examines the choices young girls have in an India that seems to be caught in an eternal tug-of-war between traditionalism and modernity. 

The World is a rive­ting watch, one that’s hard to shake off because of its stark honesty. Pahuja’s camera captures everything sans prejudice, even in difficult-to-watch scenes that involve either sickening objectification in the Miss India segment or shockingly regressive doses of fundamentalism being administered to pre-teen girls in the DurgaVahini camp (“Ask for Kashmir and we’ll slit your throats,” they’re made to scream during one team-bonding exercise). It becomes, in the end, an all-encompassing film that casts a harsh, questioning spotlight over everything from post-feminism to free-market capitalism.  

Having spent over two years on the festival circuit, where it has won several accolades ranging from Best Documentary Feature at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival 2012 to Best Canadian Feature at Hot Docs 2012, The World finally arrives in Indian theatres on June 6, in a limited release. For a country on the cusp of seemingly significant socio-cultural upheavals courtesy a new government, the timing of this release couldn’t be better.Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who is backing the release (pro bono, he says), calls it one of the most powerful documentaries he has ever watched, comparable to last year’s Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing.

Pahuja, 47, has made two documentaries before – Bollywood Bound (2002) and Diamond Road (2007) – but this one, she says, has been an especially rewarding and often gut-wrenching journey. At her tiny, sparsely furnished apartment in Lokhandwala Complex, she digs into a breakfast of poha and tea as she talks about the dichotomies of her own life in Toronto, Canada, where she grew up.

“I was born into that culture, but my parents, who emigrated from New Delhi, were understandably protective of me,” she said. “My father was quite the patriarch. So, obviously, this meant no talking to boys, no partying, focusing on my studies and those kinds of things. And obviously, after a certain point, I rebelled.”

The idea of the film occurred to her during a trip to Mumbai in 1999, where she attended an event that turned out to be former Miss World Yukta Mookhey’s homecoming. “I found it extraordinary – the attention, the sense of national pride around that event,” she said. A seed of an idea planted itself in her mind but it started germinating only about nine years later when she met producer Ed Barreveld in Toronto. “We were tossing around ideas and this came up and looked really appealing.”

Originally, she intended to focus on the Miss India behind-the-scenes and use interviews with womens’ organisations and the VHP – elements opposing beauty pageants for being derogatory and/or Westernised – as outside voices. This changed after, through an influential VHP member, she met Prachi, who told her about the existence of the Durga Vahini. With her help, Pahuja, in 2009, became the first filmmaker ever to be granted access to these camps, spending ten days immersed in that world and cap­turing extraordinary footage.

The film, she said, had changed her fundamentally. Confronted with two polar extremes of society, what really surprised her was how similar women from both sides of the fence seemed to be. It’s also a film that, despite being set in India, is really about women everywhere. As Pahuja relates the story of a recent screening in Mississippi, USA, where a Caucasian woman in her forties gushed about how much she identified with the film, she says, “We’re all fighting the same battles everywhere. It’s only the parameters that are different.”

The World Before Her opens on Fri June 6.