Feminist subjects are a rarity in a national cinema geared almost solely toward men, in which, as Elliott Stein has written, “the heroines of 95 percent of (the) films spend 35 percent of their time on screen running around trees and singing songs.” In the parallel cinema, of course, women don't have time for such goings on, but even here, few works address the socio-political situation of women with the scope of a film like Umbartha. Directed by Marathi physician and filmmaker Jabbar Patel, it is the story of sociologist (Smita Patil) of lower-middle-class origins who is choking to death in a marriage to an upper-class lawyer (Girish Karnad). She accepts a position as superintendent of a rescue center for battered women--a move which takes her far from home and her small child, and thrusts her into a hotbed of female oppression. In the prison-like “remand house,” run by a corrupt and indifferent management, she encounters the outcasts of a male-dominated society: sexually abused and abandoned women, prostitutes, the insane, the suicidal. She realizes a profound love for the inmates (many of whom are portrayed by actresses from a Dalit, or untouchable, theater company), and a sense of community which she had never approached at home. Elliott Stein writes in Film Comment (June ‘83), “Umbartha's script, by playwright Vijay Tendulkar (based on Begar, the autobiography of Shanta Misal) is admirable.... (The) film does not resemble any other Indian film of recent years and, if (directorially) flawed, is socially an important work.”