Feminist clarity begins at home

Gloria Steinem often recounts an encounter with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay in the 1970s that had a lifelong impact on her. The American feminist met the great Indian activist with the goal of exploring the potential of Gandhian organisational tactics for use in feminist campaigns worldwide.

Steinem recalls that Chattopadhyay listened patiently to her, before responding, 'Well, my dear, we taught him everything he knew.' She proceeded to explain how Mohandas Gandhi himself had been inspired by India's decades-long women's movements. You will be hard-pressed to find this insight in textbooks for Indian schoolchildren.

As I listened to Steinem discuss Chattopadhyay some months back on 'Wiser Than Me', a podcast hosted by actor-comedian Julia Louis-Dreyfus, I was reminded not just of how women's contributions are routinely erased or diminished by patriarchal historians, education systems and news media, but also of how Black and Brown women are relegated to the margins in the global - and even Indian - discourse on feminism. This issue is particularly on my mind as we bid goodbye to 2024, a year on which India's Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) has had a profound impact.

Too often, public conversation on feminism in India portrays White women and those operating in the West as leaders of this transcontinental ism. Steinem and Germaine Greer are more likely to be cited than Savitribai Phule, Chattopadhyay, Mary Roy, Bhanwari Devi, or the numerous others whose courage, diligence, perseverance and sacrifices reformed society and opened doors that were once shut to women.

During a TV panel debate about a decade back after a heinous rape made headlines, I was torn between amusement and exasperation at the ignorance of a news anchor who asked me, 'Does India need a feminist movement?' As though we have not had one for centuries.

Indian journalists were captivated from Day 1 by the #MeToo revelations in the US in 2017. Yet, it has taken seven years and a sensational news development in August 2024 for the national media to finally give WCC the coverage that their groundbreaking feminism merits.

WCC came together in early 2017 following the sexual assault of a Malayalam film star, many months before #MeToo in the US. This year, the group attracted international attention with the release of the Hema Committee Report on the working conditions of women in Malayalam cinema.

The committee was set up by the Kerala government at WCC's urging. Le Monde described its report as 'explosive' for 'revealing widespread sexual harassment and abuse' in the industry. The conversation has since fallen off the national radar. But WCC is unrelenting in its pursuit of equitable workplaces for women.

While the media and public remained preoccupied with the sexual crimes unearthed by the Hema Committee Report, WCC determinedly kept drawing our focus back to the fact that these crimes are just one part of the report and a symptom of a larger problem - gender inequality - pervading the film industry and society at large.

As the Kerala High Court monitors the action taken by the authorities on the Hema Committee Report findings, WCC is quietly working towards shaping government policy in the state.

This single-mindedness has extracted a heavy price from the organisation's members. Actors Parvathy Thiruvothu and Ramya Nambessan are among those who have publicly spoken of losing work in their male-dominated industry as retribution for their activism.

That said, the group has provided a useful template for activists in other film industries. Women of the Telugu industry, for instance, got together to form the Voice of Women with similar goals in 2019, and have repeatedly acknowledged WCC as an inspiration.

Any future encyclopaedia on feminism will be incomplete without a chapter on WCC. That chapter will be written, though, only if we acknowledge the persistent marginalisation and erasure of women's pivotal roles in rights movements, and course-correct. Our time to do that starts now.

The writer is author of The Adventuresof an Intrepid Film Critic