Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri introduces #Shout, a documentary by Vinta Nanda that documents the position of women in Indian society against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement and centuries of oppression and injustice and converses with Vinta about the film.
Women are not asking for protection of their vaginas – they are asking for the freedom to live their lives as equal citizens.
The landlord’s son making out with a Dalit girl is a coming-of-age ritual.
These are just two of the many views that stun you in Vinta Nanda’s thought-provoking and disquieting documentary, #Shout. In a little over 90 minutes, the film covers a huge ground, taking into its ambit not just the #MeToo movement, from which it originated, but also the deep-rooted patriarchy and misogyny that has been written into the DNA of our nation. As a respondent in the film, a transgender, says: “We are not good enough to be regular citizens purely because a sexual harassment case filed by a woman could lead to a punishment of seven years whereas a transgender getting raped gets only six months.” The matter-of-fact nature in which the interviewee puts this across only serves to highlight the agony that permeates every word. And the hopelessness of the situation.
You realize – yes, women have an uneven playing field, but the issues the film underlines are not circumscribed by that. And that there are nuances to the debate that we do not even think of. As Tara Kaushal, author of Why Women Rape, says, the discussion on rape has to account for the fact that there’s a whole different dynamic at play when we talk of it in the context of a marriage or when a sex worker is involved. How do you address the fact that ‘stalking’ is seen as a courting ritual than as an offence or as trespassing?
There’s also something intrinsically wrong with a society where a labourer is made to pay with both his arms and a leg for daring to speak up against the rape of his minor daughter in the way Bant Singh of Mansa was. One of the most harrowing and at the same time inspirational passages of the film tells his story – and that brings another dynamic into the dismal picture: that of caste. If there’s one thing as unfortunate as being a woman in this country, it’s being poor and a Dalit.
One of the striking aspects is the range of respondents that the director has interviewed. There are academics and writers like Urvashi Butalia and Nirupama Dutt, who bring their experience of the feminist movement in India to bear upon the narrative. There is journalist Namita Bhandare who argues cogently how the conversation in #MeToo tended to become a case of ‘he said /she said’ – the woman’s word against the man’s. There’s Sabita Lahkar from Assam, a journalist who alleged sexual harassment at the hands of a leading journalist and Sahitya Akademi award winner way back in 2003, before ‘me too’ became part of our discourse. And there is Bhanwari Devi, whose ordeal led to the landmark Vishakha guidelines in 1997 and The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act 2013. It is with a sense of awe that you listen to Bhanwari Devi narrate not only the ignominy she was subjected to – imagine the accused in the case being acquitted on the ground that her husband couldn’t have passively watched his wife being gang-raped – but also the vast reserves of fortitude that comes through in her responses on camera.
What’s also commendable about the film is that it does not become an exercise in agitprop. It would be easy to approach the subject with anger. And much of what Vinta documents does leave you seething. However, the anger here is leavened by an intrinsic understanding of the fact that haranguing against or blaming any one section of society serves no purpose. And that there are no overnight solutions in a country that lives in many centuries at the same time. That lends the film an elegiac tone that’s impossible not to be moved by. What also adds to the film’s ‘objective’ take is Vinta’s own history – she was one of the prominent voices in India’s #MeToo story and as such aware of much of the discourse in the film. Against that background, her decision to leave herself out of the narrative is a brave one, and one that gives the film a rare distance too. It must have been tough to condense such a vast spectrum of narratives – the filmmakers had to restrict the number of respondents to 55 – in the span of 90 minutes, and you wonder if the film runs the risk of paying lip service to the issues. The narrative does get somewhat diffused in the last quarter of an hour, when the background score, otherwise well-modulated, tends to sound a trifle at odds with the tone in the rest of the narrative. However, as Vinta argues, none of these issues can be seen in isolation, and each aspect flows into and is born of the others.
To Vinta’s credit, the film does not lose sight of the little details even when being aware of the larger picture. Justice Sujata Manohar, who was part of the three-member bench which formulated the Vishakha guidelines, has two of the film’s rare amusing moments – which ironically tell a lot about the way we continue to think of women in the workspace. Reminiscing on one of the first cases involving a women barrister in Indian jurisprudence, she narrates how the woman was handed a case that she could not possibly lose. When the lady expressed her surprise at being given the responsibility, something that the male lawyer could easily do, she was told that her client wanted her to take it up only to inflict on his adversary the humiliation of being defeated by a woman! Not much had changed decades later when Justice Manohar was asked if she was in the profession looking for a husband.
These off-the-cuff insights give the film its potency, coexisting with the fiery poetry of Amy Singh or the debate on how a woman’s body becomes a playground for scoring political and religious points. Nowhere better illustrated than the heart-breaking testimony of Deepika Rajawat, advocate of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court, vis-à-vis the Kathua rape case, where the inhuman killing of an eight-year-old snowballed into a Hindu-Muslim debate. Or in the way Chinmayi Sripaada highlights how her testimony in the #MeToo movement was given a political twist. While it was alleged that she was acting at the behest of a powerful political party, Priya Ramani’s equally damaging claims against one of India’s celebrated journalists and a minister at the Centre were sought to be dismissed as a smear campaign against the same party.
This is an important work. And a bleak one. Watching this brought to light the fact that beyond the cases that make the headlines, there’s a whole world that we are simply not aware of or concerned about. And that in the era of social media everything comes with a fifteen-day sell-by date. Not a single region of the country emerges unscathed from the filmmaker’s scalpel. If there’s Asifa Bano in Kashmir, there’s the rape victim in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, whose father died in judicial custody under suspicious circumstances. If Bhanwari Devi and Roop Kanwar are the shame of Rajasthan, Manorama Devi of Manipur remains a blot on our collective conscience. From Dr Sister Jesme of Kerala (recounting her abuse at the hands of a priest) to Bilkis Bano of Gujarat – the malaise runs deep and wide.
After all, what do you say about a country where a former Chief Justice of India addresses allegations of sexual harassment against him by offering his ‘modest’ bank balance as proof of his integrity. Or where almost all the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes of sexual predation have been rehabilitated in major literary, cultural and political circles. This is a film puts the whole country in the dock.
***
Directed by: Vinta Nanda
Produced by: Gayatri Gill, Siddharth Kumar Tewary and Rahul Kumar Tewary
Cinematography: Shanti Bhushan Roy
Editing: Puloma Pal
Sound Supervision: Bishwadeep Dipak Chatterjee
Sound Design: Mohandas
.
Tell us something about the genesis of Shout.
It came to me from out of the blue. I got a call from Siddharth Kumar Tewary, one of three producers with Gayatri Gill and Rahul Kumar Tewary, that Gayatri was toying with the idea of making a documentary on the #MeToo movement. This was in 2019, when the movement was still smouldering. Gayatri and Siddharth were understanding about where I stood, personally, on the issue. The first draft of the write-up I gave to them was a clincher and we were ready to sail.
It covers a whole gamut. Were you daunted that it could become unwieldy with each individual aspect not getting enough space?
Manisha Mashaal, a Dalit leader and women’s rights activist in Kurukshetra, Haryana, says, “We don’t know when the media will have a #MeToo movement for us. We are invisible to the world?” In my understanding of things, she is a feminist. But did she participate in the #MeToo movement? Was she even a voice? Obviously not!
While the #MeToo movement did several things to empower women in general, it also didn’t do other things that it could’ve done. I was clear in my mind about what I felt about the movement. My approach was to put the #MeToo movement in perspective to the attitudes and behaviours of Indian men and women towards women’s rights and also in context of the many other movements that have dotted the gender landscape over the last fifty years or so. Without understanding patriarchy, without applying the context of feminism to the #MeToo movement and without discussing rape, there could only be a voyeuristic offering, and that meant we would be feeding the monster.
I never felt daunted or ever thought it would be unwieldy to deal with the many things because rape, patriarchy and feminism are discussions that belong to the same discourse. The support of the media during the #MeToo movement gave women the confidence to publicly name the men who had abused them, men who were brazen because collective misogyny had provided them a cover.
For something this vast – was there a definite plan to the way the actual shooting was structured. Can you give us a snapshot of the logistics of putting together the documentary?
(Retd) Justice Sujata Manohar says, succinctly, in the film, “We live in several centuries at the same time.” This was also our primary challenge when we started working on the film. How do we make a film which will resonate with people from all walks of life, urban, rural, young, senior, everybody?
We started working on the film in mid-2019. We headed straight to research. Bani Gill, Paroma Sadhana and Shiv Bhalla formed the research team and they came back to us with a vast ocean of knowledge. We were a small but formidable team. Gayatri and I were at the centre, flanked by our creative consultants Priti Chandriani and Veena Bakshi, and then we had Siddharth at the outer ring to present to and who would respond objectively. For about three months we worked every day and dived deep into the way the gender discourse has played itself out in India over many years before the #MeToo movement happened.
While research was under way, we started connecting with the people that our findings were throwing up. We had a huge list but had to put a stop at fifty-five. We divided them by the geographies they belonged to, and planned our travels accordingly. We had worked on the questions but I was also aware that we were meeting women and men of great significance. So each interview I canned is over 40 minutes long because there was so much more to talk about with each of them, which was way beyond what the film could contain. We are working on a website that will carry some of the material, also a YouTube channel. We are also working on a book we plan to publish later this year.
My DOP[Director of Photography], Shanti Bhushan Roy, and I were aligned perfectly. We were travelling to so many places and we decided to capture the beauty of every place that our subjects inhabited – we wanted to capture the sound, the music. Most importantly, we wanted to capture the stillness, too, in India, which was in correspondence with the emptiness we felt.
We were fortunate to finish the shooting before the pandemic was declared, before the first lockdown. I remember we returned to Mumbai from Imphal on 15 March 2020 and the lockdown was declared on 22 March. We were in a good place to start editing.
The editing process was a long one but Puloma Pal, the editor of the film, did a brilliant job. With the first cut, Siddharth, Gayatri and I knew that the soul and the scale we had imagined was there. Then, Puloma divided the film into parts, a process which gave the film its form and rhythm.
Our real struggle started when we handed over our final cut to the sound supervisor, Bishwadeep Dipak Chatterjee. After he saw the cut, he called for a meeting with us where shared his thoughts about the possibilities he could see us achieve with the soundtrack. His conviction was compelling and we decided to revisit the final cut. Puloma and I took a break for a few weeks. I told Puloma that we should give ourselves four weeks, and if we had a Eureka moment we would regroup and re-edit the film. If not, we would go with what we had.
About three weeks later, Puloma called me. She had an epiphany and narrated what she had in mind. She had caught Bishwadeep’s pulse and was ready to give him what he needed to build the soundtrack. After three more rounds of editing we were done. The experience was magical. Then we went to Kolkata to record the song with Usha Uthup, which was composed by Raja and written by Amy Singh. Mohandas started working on the sound design.
One remarkable feature is the variety of experiences you have gathered. Can you give us an insight into how you went about choosing the people you have spoken to.
The research brought up many names. The four people who showed us the light along the way were Namita Bhandare, Preeti Gill, Nirupama Dutt and Mitra Phukan. It was Namita who guided us to (Retd) Justice Sujata Manohar, Nikita Saxena, Vandana Grover and others. Preeti led us to Nirupama Dutt, Urvashi Butalia, Bibi Kiranjot Kaur and Amy Singh. Subsequently, Nirupama took us to Bant Singh, Mitra connected us to Bijoy Kumar Tayenjam. It was through Bijoy we met Pradip Phanjubaum and Ratan Thiyam and so on…
Social media helped to trace Sabita Lahkar, some others too. We went on this forty-day journey by road and air to meet survivors, families of victims, feminists, authors, legal experts, activists, poets, religious leaders, actors – all those who had a deep connection with the issue as well as the politics surrounding it.
The most astonishing aspect of the documentary is how all-pervasive the malaise is. We seem to be country united only by the way we mistreat our women.
It is true that if there’s one factor ubiquitous it is the way women are treated in our country. It is no secret that women are second-class citizens wherever they are and whichever profession and hierarchy they belong to. They work as hard as men, often more, but they are not called breadwinners. It is one of the problems. Moreover, as some of the speakers in the film have said, rape is about power and about how power is expressed in our world. It is political, it is feudal and it is the harshest face of the deep patriarchy that defines our culture, our society.
Irrespective of the progress we make, irrespective of the several revolutions of the past centuries, industrial, information-communication or technology, the system remains feudal. The culture that drives behaviours and practices, across economic and social divides, is inflexible. It is intimidated by women and designed to keep them in control, guide the course of their lives.
The system is neither fair to women nor to the men. Why should men be forced to bear the burden of women’s safety on their shoulders? When a system can deliver vaccines to 2 billion people, why can’t it deliver a message, a powerful idea, to every corner of the earth? Obviously there’s a lack of intention and political will. And, moreover, the world still cannot see the advantages, dividends and profit in doing that!
It’s only in recent times that women are beginning to find a voice, and the credit for it goes to the feminist movements that have taken place in India and the rest of the world over the last 50 years at least, at the grassroot level as well as in metropolises. We were sure that we didn’t want to leave the efforts of the past out from our narration. After all, the #MeToo movement would find no ground to keep its feet on if it wasn’t for several battles fought by women for their rights as equal citizens.
As someone who became an important driver of the #MeToo campaign – would you like to share your personal experience of that and how that shaped this film?
I broke my silence during the movement in October 2018 and, overnight, I was speaking to the national media about myself and what had happened to me. Barely a couple of months later it was business as usual for everyone. When left alone, I felt a hollowness and it was then that I, for the first time, introspected and explored the situation. I realised that in India, we had just about touched the surface. And now, we were already waiting for something ‘else’ to happen that would resolve the issue. The introspection decimated my fears and gave me the courage to move forward.
The emptiness I felt, then, was for many reasons. Primary among them was the fact that #MeToo was a media movement and an urban phenomenon. And that it belonged to the upper crust, whereas the most disempowered, excluded and disadvantaged among the women of India are nowhere close to having the access that we have. Neither did the statistics reveal that the #MeToo movement has had an impact. The number of women molested, abused and raped in India kept on rising consistently thereafter. It was the same after Bhanwari, Nirbhaya, Asifa, after Unnao. The anger, the outrage, the vigils, they peter out and an oppressive system knows that well.
Also, I would not have made this film if I wasn’t able to draw from the well of my personal experiences. When I said yes to directing the film, the one condition I put was that I would not be a part of it. I wanted to remain objective in my approach – as far as it was possible. Another advantage of my having been a part of the movement was that all the survivors I interviewed, especially Bhanwari Devi, Asifa’s parents, Sabita Lahkar, Simran Kaur Suri, Saloni Chopra, and Mandana Karimi, felt comfortable and unhesitant. In fact, Bhanwari Devi took me to task for having taken 20 years to talk about what had happened to me. She reprimanded me and scolded me, saying that she had not waited a single day – she was at the police station the next morning.
We wrongly believe that we, who have access, are greatly empowered, because the courage of a Bhanwari and a Bant is way beyond what we can ever imagine to have! All the other interviewees, too, I could sense while making the film, wanted that #SHOUT be made – they were encouraging and stepped out of their way to help us.
Bollywood cops a lot of blame for the way we treat women. Do you agree that our films are to blame? Or is Bollywood a favourite whipping boy.
Bollywood is to blame to some extent. Yet, the question will be a conundrum because it is more complex than what can be taken at face value. In our film, Tara Kaushal, author of Why Men Rape, asks a pertinent question. “Stalking is akin to love for some men, whereas for women who are stalked, it is harassment. So, how will the two paradigms meet?” Do we blame Bollywood for making stalking an expression of love, or do we blame society for Bollywood adopting stalking from it. We can blame films for all the evil in society, but where does that take us? It’s nothing more or less than a mother saying that her son is a paragon of virtue and it’s his friends who have spoiled him, or it is the movies, social media, or whatever else he is under the influence of. Fact is that it is important for women to feel safe at home and in public spaces, irrespective of what they wear. Their ownership of their bodies is non-negotiable.
I don’t believe it is the item number, so to say, which is wrong. Our classical culture and folklore is full of provocative expression through art, dance, theatre and music, and all of us enjoy the performances as viewers and as actors. It is every man and woman’s right to dress the way he and she wants to, and feel beautiful, be admired and appreciated. It is the angle of the camera and the lens through which the item number is presented to audiences, the positioning, in the most unesthetic and distorted ways, that must change.
Here, I’d like to add that the executive producer of #SHOUT, Sandra de Castro Buffington, is also the co-producer of Nina Menke’s film Brainwashed – another film from Hollywood that is a must-watch, because it shows, historically, how the camera has objectified women and thereby created a perception, over several decades of the existence of cinema, which is not at all justifiable.
Having said all of the above, I would add that Bollywood does need to be careful of what it promotes as acceptable and appropriate behaviour. All the creative folk in the industry need to be sensitised to the impact they have on lives and livelihoods – also the damage they can do consciously and unconsciously. But who is studying behavioural science here, and who cares to impart the knowledge? Everyone is too busy making money to be bothered about how the decisions taken are harming the world, and that’s where the debate rests for now, unfortunately.
One startling statistic that is referred to in the film pertains to the #MeToo campaign – that only 159 cases actually came up despite all the uproar. Would you say that the movement failed? Or was it good enough to bring attention to something that was not spoken of?
We can’t say that the movement didn’t make a difference, in the sense that the implementation of POSH [Prevention of Sexual Harassment] was made mandatory at all places of work, and committees were constituted, but that is where it also ended. The #MeToo movement brought attention to something that was difficult to speak about. Unfortunately, it lasted for too short a while. Ironically, the silence has grown ever since instead of the other way around. Before the movement could go further from urban to rural India, it was over.
I shudder to think what the girls who were abused by Sajid Khan, and had dared to speak out against him during the movement, go through when they watch him on national television. But then, we have to ask the following questions: Who took the decision to make him a participant in the popular show? Did it not cross their mind that what they are doing is ill intended, that a wrong precedent is being set, that it is immoral, sexist and misogynistic?
The answer to all the questions is also clear: of course they knew it. And, that is exactly why they did it. They wanted to be sensational, controversial. They wanted the feminist’s and activist’s outrage to flood social media. They could have made Sajid Khan apologise before he was brought to the house, but they didn’t do it because that would have made neither the viewer, nor for that matter Bollywood happy.
The symbiotic relationship between the content creator and the viewer (especially the male) demanded that Sajid Khan be repositioned strategically in the most crude and brazen manner so that it would result in the outrage required to capture eyeballs. How will women find the courage to speak out against injustice in the future when the whitewashing of Sajid Khan and the feting of the many predators, the editors and writers, at lit fests is the overarching reality they face?
Watching Shout, I could not help wondering if women themselves failed the #MeToo campaign. And that it was also misused to settle personal scores.
I was alert to the reactions of those around me during the movement. One among the many significant things that happened was that all my male friends disappeared – almost immediately. Except for Mahesh Bhatt, who called me and spoke on my behalf right away, Amit Khanna, who reached out, Suryaveer Singh Bhullar, along with his wife Aroona Bhat, Salim Asgarally, my nephew Shiv Bhalla and Kishore Velankar, all the other ‘men’ I knew became incommunicado. Some did make their wives and girlfriends call me to offer their support, which was amusing because the conversations were inquisitorial to my inner space. But by and large everyone else went silent on me.
Among my girlfriends, Ritu Bajaj, in Mumbai, and Ginger, who flew down from Punjab to be with me, and my niece Devki, were my rocks. But there were other girlfriends who said things like, ‘Oh, so this is a nice way to make a comeback to the scene.’ Another girlfriend, an ex-colleague who met me at a coffee shop where I was with some friends, said, ‘By the way, the joke in the industry going around is that the men are now greeting each other with, “#YouToo!” when they meet each other.’ And then, she burst into peals of laughter. These experiences made me realise how far we were from the goalpost. How much longer the struggle was going to take.
To answer your question about women using it as a tool to get after men for personal vendetta, well, there are instances and I, for one, would not deny it. Men face abuse too. The battle we are fighting is against patriarchy and feudalism, against discrimination and exclusion, which hurt both men and women.
Another aspect that comes across tellingly is how women’s bodies become playgrounds for scoring political and religious points. Even as you were putting the final cut together, there was the shameful Bilkis Bano episode playing out.
The perpetrators were released to appease a section of voters prior to the elections in Gujarat. Deal with it! It tells us clearly where we are in the discourse. Bilkis Bano, a woman who belongs to the minority community, fears for her life after the release of the men. The perpetrators roam free. They are celebrated as heroes by a section of one community, which harbours hate for another because our politics has polarised and divided the people of India to this extent – we have become inhuman, barbaric and medieval. That explains it all.
More than a couple of interviewees mention that in the new generation of women we have hope of the tide turning. That every generation builds on the battles the previous generation fought.
Yes, that’s right. As I enter the sixtieth year of my life in 2023, I realise that many of the battles fought by us have given courage to the new generations of women. I also understand that many of the battles fought by our mothers is why we, as a generation of women, could leap ahead from where we were stationed previously. But we must not ignore the roadblocks that the new generation of women will also face as so did we.
The economic, religious and caste inequalities, disadvantages and the exclusion of many of our fellow women will make progress much harder for those of us who are at the frontlines of this battle if there isn’t a dramatic change that takes place immediately. Women of the present generation have to become a part of politics, of administration, of policy and decision making – they must enter the boardrooms and take positions of power in greater numbers to bring about the desired change.
If there is one takeaway from making the film that you were asked to pinpoint, what would that be?
The one takeaway would be that we need to invest in our allies as we go forward. There are so many men who supported and encouraged us during the making of this film. In our immediate circumference, two among the three producers are men, Siddharth and Rahul, the DOP Shanti Bhushan Roy, Sound Supervisor Bishwadeep Dipak Chatterjee, Sound Designer Mohandas VP, and several other members of the crew, who have stood by us are men. I don’t think Gayatri, Puloma and I, the women in the team, could’ve asked for anything more.
We have had arguments, discussions, even disagreements with the men, which even led to long spells of cold wars between us, but not for once did anyone impose his will upon us. They understood that this was a film about us, about something we felt more deeply about, and were as often surprised by what they learnt along the way as we were.
My own experience during the #MeToo movement makes me aware that against every detractor, I have at least ten allies in both men and women who I can name. While making the film, the experience was the same. There are more men who wish for change to take place than there are those who don’t. And it is now time for us to tap into this resource.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles
Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International
Borderless 