Young woman wearing a light purple kurtha has her curly hair clipped and turns back from cloth line
The Darshana-Basil shoulder dance bit from Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey that went viral before the movie came out is not included in the movie. But those few seconds – Basil dancing, moving his shoulders up and down and forcing an annoyed looking Darshana to do the same – capture the entire mood of the film very well. Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey, written and directed by Vipin Das, focuses the lens on the life of Jaya, a girl growing up in a very typical lower middle class family, and effortlessly shows the amount of unfairness in a woman’s life that’s taken for granted.
The casting is absolutely apt, you know when you see a curly-haired little girl run through the fields and turn to show a very Darshana-like face. Glimpses of her childhood show two sides of the story of raising a girl. “I will raise her like Nehru raised Indira Gandhi,” says the father holding the newborn, and the uncle quips, “But make sure she has long hair, or else no one will marry her.”
Vipin Das, along with his co-writers Nashid Mohamed Famy and Ajith Kumar, has neatly picked and arranged specific moments of the life of a girl growing up into a young woman, to show the many different ways she gets the short end of the stick. When she asks for a teddy bear, she gets the toy car her brother had played with. When she wants to do a degree in Anthropology, the same uncle who had advised to keep her hair long directs the family to the local parallel (private unaffiliated) college. Not that Jaya never asserted herself, but no one paid attention to her.