‘Working conditions have become worse’: Filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj speaks

One from a circle of women sitting on the floor of a house in rural India says without a prompt that men are afraid of the “strange kind of power” women have – of being able to give birth, create a new life, and to control that power, they invented menstrual taboos. Another says, 70 % of the households in their slums are run by women, and that ‘man of the house’ is just an empty title because all he does is gamble and drink and play cards, while the women sell vegetables, clean, cook, and raise children. A third woman says with a smile that motherhood is not something you can impose on someone, and that one will be a mother only if one’s heart desires it.

These gems of wisdom fall from women who were victims of state-enforced sterilisation in the early 1990s when they had volunteered for it in exchange for monetary promises or on the insistence of their male partners. The little-educated women appear very much at home as their free and casual conversations are documented in the film Something Like A War by Deepa Dhanraj, one of the pioneers of documentary filmmaking in India. “They are very intelligent and it was an atmosphere where they could be free and relaxed,” Deepa says in a conversation with TNM on the first day of the International Documentary and Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK).

She has been chosen for the Lifetime Achievement Award that the festival gives away in recognition of the many contributions of a filmmaker toward the cause of cinema. Deepa herself is a little puzzled that the earlier films (made for the Yugantar Collective mentioned below) are still making it to the festivals. “What do they see in them that they want to show it today – is it the early days of the feminist cinema, or the history of that kind of labor organisations of the time?” she asks and then answers herself, “Some things maybe don’t go away, the working conditions, the sexual harassment. In fact, things have become worse.”

Still from Something like a War

Growing up in Hyderabad and studying English literature and journalism, Deepa had not planned to be a filmmaker. But Tikkavarapu Pattabhirama Reddy, who made the much-acclaimed Kannada film Samskara, was a family friend and he roped her in for his next, Chanda Marutha. She assisted him and a few other filmmakers of the time like MS Sathyu and Huli Chandrashekar. This was the time of the Emergency and Deepa’s was a generation of young people who had a political awakening, wanting as young people do, to be part of the many movements against the system.

Deepa says this was when an autonomous women’s movement emerged – women in formal parties, Left or Gandhian groups came out of it because they were not taken seriously. She was part of it too, and in 1980 began Yugantar, the first feminist film collective in the country, with three kindred spirits: Abha Bhaiya, Meera Rao, and the man who would be her partner in life and work, the late cinematographer Navroze Contractor who passed away in June this year.

“Navroze was the accomplished one of the lot. He was trained, whereas I had a little experience as a fiction assistant director,” she says. The collective made a few films together before going their separate ways – Abha to full-time activism and Meera to the US. But Navroze and Deepa continued their work in the field. He was, Deepa says, very good at filming, and she called his a tender camera, a very affectionate one. “Don’t you feel that?” she asks.

Still from What happened to this City

Of their films, Something Like A War is in the Navroze Contractor homage package of the IDSFFK. Nine others of Deepa’s films are screened in the category titled ‘Deepa: Collectivising Resistance on Screen’, for she did not only stick to women’s issues. In 1986, two years after the communal riots in Hyderabad, Deepa made What Happened To This City, a film trying to analyse the riots, identifying the fundamentalist organisations that were behind it. The initial idea, she says, was to find out what attracted hundreds of young men to the Ganesh processions that would end up in riots. “Two, three years earlier, when these had started to become a public event (before that it was done at homes), every time the procession ended, there would be riots, and people would get killed. But while we were there, long riots broke out and there was this whole question of NTR (former Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, whose sudden removal from the post triggered the issue). We just continued filming. And that film was really made on the editing table,” she says.

The film is often cited as one of the first records of analysing communal riots in Indian politics. Deepa did not, when she made the film, foresee or imagine the kind of riots that would follow across the country, she says.

In the years that followed, Deepa took up issues circling and not limited to gender “because it is also about religion, about caste, about economic class.” In 2006, she made Love in the Time of Aids, about a group of gay men and their stories of love, desire, and ostracisation (this is not in the IDSFFK package).

From the film about KG Kannabiran

She also made a documentary about KG Kannabiran, activist, lawyer, and co-founder of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, and another about Sudesha Devi, the environmental activist in the Chipko Movement. She covered domestic violence (Is this just a story, as part of the Yugantar collective), and the functioning of Muslim women's Jamat (Invoking Justice). In 2018, she made We Have Not Come Here to Die, on the student movement that arose after the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula.

All of these, she had made with Navroze. “We should be sharing this [Lifetime Achievement] award. His contribution to all the films is immense. Without him, they wouldn’t be what they are.”