F-rated: Being a Woman Filmmaker in India

By Nandita Dutta

What does it mean to be a woman filmmaker in India? One famous director suffered from depression, unable to take on film projects because of her young child. Another was asked in an interview if she drinks and smokes to deal with the stress of filmmaking like men do. Some faced cinematographers who refused to listen to them. Almost all of them struggle to raise money for films with female protagonists. But they are also cool and sassy. One attended film-school with her two-week-old baby. Another stormed the once all-male bastion of the 200-crore club. They can make a hit film about a middle-aged housewife, as much as a bisexual teenager with a disability. F-rated brings together diverse stories of eleven women filmmakers in India: Aparna Sen, Mira Nair, Farah Khan, Meghna Gulzar, Nandita Das, Shonali Bose, Tanuja Chandra, Anjali Menon, Reema Kagti, Kiran Rao and Alankrita Srivastava. A celebration of their womanhood as much as their work - this is a must-read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Jul 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353029524

Nandita Dutta

Nandita Dutta works at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University. She has an MA in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London. She has written extensively on Indian cinema for national and international publications. This is her first book.

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APARNA SEN

‘If I have nail paint on, can’t I be a good director?’

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In 1980, Satyajit Ray made a short film called Pikoo for French television. It showcased a day in the life of six-year-old Pikoo, in the backdrop of his mother’s extramarital affair. Despite her husband confronting her about the affair in the morning and it being her son’s school holiday, she invites her lover home in the afternoon as usual. A seemingly reckless woman, she is torn between amorous love and guilt. In the unrelenting climax of Pikoo , while she is having sex with her lover in her bedroom, her ailing father-in-law dies of a heart attack in the next room, and her son cries helplessly over his dead grandfather and a smudged drawing. This heartless wife and mother in Pikoo was played by renowned Bengali actor-turned-director, Aparna Sen.

Born on 25 October 1945 to the well-known film historian and critic Chidananda Dasgupta, and Supriya Dasgupta, Aparna grew up on a diet of the best of Indian and world cinema. Satyajit Ray was a close friend of her father’s and a regular visitor to their home. She grew up in the company of some of the most prominent Indian and international filmmakers. With her strikingly beautiful face, it is hardly surprising that Ray cast her in one part of his 1961 three-part anthology film Teen Kanya (based on Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories) – ‘Samapti’ – when she was just about fourteen: her portrayal of the tomboyish Mrinmoyee, a girl with a mind of her own, earned her critical acclaim and opened the doors as an actor. Within a decade, Aparna rose to become a major star of mainstream Bengali cinema, paired successfully with stars such as Soumitra Chatterjee and Uttam Kumar. There was, however, a caveat – this was not the kind of cinema that she admired or was proud being part of. Nevertheless, it provided her with sustenance and a great deal of fame – both of which were hard to give up.

When she was at the peak of commercial success in Bengali cinema, she got frustrated playing shallow and hackneyed characters. One day, while waiting in the make-up room on the set of a Hindi film (she did dabble in a few, unsuccessfully), she had an epiphany when she felt that she could not waste the rest of her life acting in films she did not believe in. That is when she decided to do something more meaningful. She wrote a short story and showed it to Satyajit Ray who insisted that she turn it into a film. That short story became 36 Chowringhee Lane, marking Aparna Sen’s foray into direction in 1981.

Going back to Pikoo, Aparna later confessed in an interview¹ that she found it very difficult to cry in the film because she didn’t feel the tears were justified. She felt that Ray had been very unsympathetic to the mother. ‘I think Pikoo is a beautiful film, but the attitude towards the parents is judgemental,’ she said. On the other hand, Ray proclaimed in an interview² that one of the statements that Pikoo was trying to make was that if a woman is to be unfaithful, she has to be ruthless. She cannot afford to be tender to her child.

When Aparna directed her second film, Paroma, in 1984, adultery was still a taboo in Indian cinema. Even when it was dealt with, the stories revolved around philandering men and their suffering wives. The husband eventually saw reason and returned to his wife. If a woman walked out on her adulterous husband, the film was labelled as ‘bold’. Then Paroma came and revolutionized the treatment of adultery in Indian cinema. In this film, a middle-aged Bengali woman, steeped in domesticity, crossed the threshold of her perfectly stable middle-class home in the quest for romantic love. The Seema of Ray’s Pikoo, who felt she had got the raw end of the deal, shocked the audiences by treating her ‘wayward’ Paroma with love and compassion: it was the story of a woman told sympathetically by another woman without dehumanizing her or letting moral righteousness tear into the fabric of the film. Ordinary cinemagoers were scandalized and outraged – men saw the film as encouraging adultery among women – but it ran in theatres in Kolkata for weeks on end.

In one of the early scenes in Paroma, an American woman visiting Paroma’s family during Durga puja is perplexed at the various names she is addressed by – ma (mother), bouma (daughter-in-law), boudi (sister-in-law) and kakima (aunt). ‘What is your name actually – is it kakima or boudi or what?’ she asks Paroma innocently. ‘Paroma,’ her husband answers on her behalf. In a clever and humorous scene, it is established that Paroma is so ensconced in family life, in her various roles as a wife, mother, daughter-in-law and aunt, that her identity as a person has been diminished. When an NRI photographer who is a family friend wants to click her pictures for an assignment, her consent is assumed and granted by her husband and her mother-in-law.

On one of their adventurous detours, when the photographer asks Paroma if she likes to read poetry, she answers that she used to. ‘Why past tense? You don’t like it any more?’ he prods. ‘What does it matter?’ she laments. The photographer is the first person to treat her as an individual independent of her relationships with others and that is a reason good enough to make her fall in love with him. She embarks on a dangerous, no-holds-barred affair, transforming from a dutiful housewife to a tempestuous adulteress.

The remarkable aspects of Paroma’s character are not only her courage and wanderlust but also the fact that she is not a young woman but a mother of three – including two teenage children – thus presenting an unusual and subversive image of a woman who would go out in the afternoons during her family’s siesta time for clandestine trysts with her lover. ‘Why does it have to be a young person – as if the right to love, lust and sex only belongs to the youth?’ Aparna, who drew inspiration for Paroma from the life of a friend, asks. She thought that a middle-aged woman with children would go through many more inhibitions than a young person would, and hence make for a more compelling character.

Besides, neither Paroma’s husband nor the other members of her family offer any provocation for her to find happiness outside the bounds of her home. She is treated well by everyone and leads a seemingly satisfactory – if not perfect – life, until the photographer arrives and questions the point of her dreary existence. This brings years of suppressed longing for love and fulfilment to the fore.

On discovering Paroma’s affair, all her family members including her husband and her kids distance themselves from her, abandoning her in a sea of turmoil. The relationships that she had invested in – merely extensions of her primary relationship with her husband – fall apart one by one, leaving her disillusioned. Finding no one by her side, Paroma eventually attempts suicide. ‘I wanted her to go to the doors of death before she could take stock of her life again,’ says Aparna. ‘You look back at your life when you are almost on the verge of losing it.’

When she is recuperating from the suicide attempt in a hospital, her family members advise her to go for counselling. But she shocks everyone by saying she doesn’t feel any guilt for what she has done. She would rather continue the quest for her own identity by taking up a job, an unthinkable thing to do for a middle-class Bengali housewife like her.

More than thirty years after Paroma’s release, Aparna still remembers the audience reaction vividly. At the premiere of the film, during the intermission, some men cornered her and said, ‘What do you think? Women’s liberation means committing adultery?’ She got nervous. When the film ended, there was so much commotion that she had to pick her daughter up in her arms and leave the theatre.

‘A man attacked my father saying – How can she not have any guilt? There has to be guilt. What kind of a film has your daughter made? My father said – Look, I haven’t made this film. My daughter has. Why don’t you talk to her?’ Aparna recounts. Dipankar Dey, the actor who plays Paroma’s husband in the film, came to her house after the film’s premiere and said, ‘The Bengali audience won’t accept the film. You have to edit it.’ Aparna remembers being really upset. She refused to edit the film and said, ‘The film is complete. If they accept it, fine. If they don’t, let it be.’

Paroma ran in Kolkata for seventeen weeks. Producers who had upcoming releases lined up had to pay theatres to get Paroma off their screens. Many of her female friends called Aparna to say – ‘I really liked the film. But please don’t tell my husband.’ She also distinctly remembers three diminutive, old women who walked up to her after a screening and whispered in her ears, ‘May you live long, daughter!’

Being a mother and a filmmaker: What’s in a label?

Aparna Sen’s debut film, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) was a beautiful meditation on the loneliness of old age and the recklessness of youth. Produced by Shashi Kapoor and starring Jennifer Kapoor, the film tells the story of an elderly schoolteacher in Kolkata, Ms Stoneham, one of the last remaining Anglo Indians in the city, who is fond of Shakespeare and lives alone with her cat. One day, she runs into one of her former students and her boyfriend and invites them over for tea. The couple, young and unemployed, is on the lookout for a place to get intimate, and they spot a great opportunity in Ms Stoneham’s apartment that is vacant most of the day while she is out teaching at school. They take advantage of her kindness in return for keeping her company in the evenings, thereby providing a sliver of affection and warmth in her utterly lonely life. But they eventually get married and forget her after their purpose is served, leaving her heart-broken and disillusioned.

36 Chowringhee Lane was a brave and unusual debut in more ways than one: the film featured a woman – old and wrinkly – as the protagonist, it was in English, and it made no bones about premarital sex. It is difficult to imagine that a film like this, which apparently had little commercial viability, would have got made had Aparna Sen been a novice in the film industry without the kind of reputation and references that preceded her. Especially at a time when Bengal had few practising women filmmakers, with the exception of Arundhati Devi.

‘There are so many talented young people who have written good scripts but they don’t even get a hearing. Because I was known, because my career as an actor had given me celebrity status, if I wrote to a producer, at least I would get a hearing. After that, it was up to me how good my script was,’ Aparna admits. ‘When I wrote to Shashi Kapoor sending him the synopsis of 36 Chowringhee Lane, he knew who I was and I think that was very important.’

Aparna then took a leap of faith completely based on her belief in her own abilities. She was meticulous with her artistic choices but had yet to master the technical front of filmmaking. She could describe the images she was seeing in her head but didn’t know how they could be achieved. Like in one particular scene, she told her cinematographer, Ashok Mehta, that she wanted the protagonist to appear very sharp and her surroundings to be blurred. Mehta told her that she was talking about a telephoto lens. ‘When you don’t know something, you have to keep your ego aside. I was always frank with my cinematographers. Ashok would ask me – Which lens should I use? I would say – I don’t know. Let me see through the eyepiece and then I will be able to tell you.’

36 Chowringhee Lane won Aparna Sen the National Award for Best Director in 1982. When she was making the film, her older daughter Kamalini was all of twelve, and the younger one, Konkona, barely two. There was no other way for her to function than to multitask. ‘I remember I didn’t even have a study then. I used to sit on my bed feeding Konkona. One moment, I am cajoling her to eat and the next moment, I am discussing a trolley shot with my cinematographer,’ she recalls.

Aparna had to single-handedly raise her two daughters – the older one from her first marriage with Sanjay Sen, and the younger from her second marriage with Mukul Sharma – after her second divorce. She worked as the editor of Sananda, the highest circulating women’s fortnightly in Kolkata, from 1986 to 2005. She took it up after she realized that it was hard to raise her daughters solely with the income from making a low-budget film every few years. ‘If films were to be my only source of income, I would have to compromise and start making all kinds of films, which I didn’t want to do,’ she says. She also worked as an actor in professional theatre for three days a week to supplement her income. Konkona says of her mother, ‘She never tried to give us the impression that all was okay. So, if there was any financial trouble that the family was going through, she would tell us – listen, we can’t afford this right now. We will have to save up. It was understood that we were in it together.’

As much as Aparna loved her daughters, being a single mother was no easy task. In the late 1980s, soon after her second divorce, a distraught Aparna confided in American journalist Elizabeth Bumiller: ‘I’ll tell you something – it’s very difficult to live without a man. Very difficult emotionally, physically, socially. My daughters feel that they have no one to fall back on but me.’³

She was often riddled with guilt – that constant companion of working mothers – for not coping very well in her various roles. When she was at work, she worried for her daughters. When she was with them, she became anxious about her career. Despite the guilt that women feel, they provide healthy role models for their children. A 2015 study by Harvard University⁴ found – using data from 24 countries – that daughters of working mothers have better careers and more equal relationships.

While Kamalini now lives in the US with her family, Konkona is an accomplished actor herself and made her directorial debut with the much-acclaimed Death in the Gunj in 2017. Konkona feels that her mother set an example for her daughters as a working woman who was passionate about her profession. They were not only exposed to her work-life but were also allowed to be part of it. She remembers spending a lot of time on her mother’s film sets as a little girl. While her mother would be having a real production meeting, she would imitate her and have a meeting for her own imaginary film. She would play a game where she was the director and her mother, the actor. Konkona remembers her upbringing as ‘progressive, liberal and almost bohemian’. She fondly recalls how she travelled with her mother to the Moscow Film Festival when she was ten, and was often made to write essays on the films she liked. ‘She was always so affectionate and so demonstrative of her affection. Even now she drags me into her lap sometimes,’ she chuckles.

The one thing Aparna was really terrified of was falling in her daughters’ esteem. Today, her daughters couldn’t be more proud of her. ‘She is an icon for women in modern India. It’s a privilege to be her daughter – I mean, who can say that?’ Konkona blushes.

One does not get the impression that Aparna Sen led a heroic life – she rose over its mundane challenges and lived it to the fullest, decidedly on her own terms. Not surprisingly, the female characters in her films follow similar trajectories. They do not possess heroic traits in the conventional sense; they are ordinary women who negotiate the patriarchal world to find their place and identity. They are not born with any extraordinary virtue or valour but undergo a journey to find their strength. Moreover, they possess a streak of reckless love and unorthodox sexuality that often defines their choices.

Her fifth film, Paromitar Ek Din (2000), explores an atypical friendship between two women connected in their loneliness: a middle-aged woman Sanaka and her daughter-in-law Paromita. In this film, Aparna revisits the familial set-up of Paroma and poses a question that could be seen as an extension of its theme: what is the worth of secondary relationships a woman forms in her marital home? After going through the trials and tribulations of a failed marriage resulting from the birth and subsequent passing of her child with cerebral palsy, Paromita decides to divorce her husband, finds new love and takes up work in an advertising agency. Sanaka, on the other hand, is regularly visited by a friend from yore, a man she had once wanted to marry, whom she now helps financially in his old age despite her family’s disapproval. Aparna not only helmed the film deftly but also delivered one of the finest performances of her acting career as Sanaka, walking the tightrope between acting and direction.

Then came Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002), one of Aparna’s most well-regarded films that also launched her daughter Konkona Sen Sharma as an actor. In the film, Konkona plays an orthodox Tamil Brahmin who instinctively saves a Muslim co-passenger’s life during communal violence and then slowly overcomes her fears, suspicions, and prejudices to forge a bond with him. The conservative married woman who is at first sceptical of the Muslim ‘other’, ends up falling for him. In her 2010 film Iti Mrinalini, Aparna dealt with the story of a washed-up actress contemplating suicide and reminiscing about her tragic life, with Aparna playing the older Mrinalini and Konkona, her younger self. The film focuses on the ebbs and flows of Mrinalini’s acting career as well as her botched-up love affair with a director whom she marries discreetly and has a child with, even though he never leaves his first wife and children. Thus, her female characters are strong-headed yet vulnerable, heroic yet fallible, perfectly containing dualities within them.

Her 2013 film Goynar Baksho was a comic-horror exploration of the lives of three generations of women in a family, based on a short story by famous Bengali writer Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay. In the film, Somlata, a new bride, saves her bankrupt family by coaxing her indolent husband to set up a sari shop. She herself transforms from a coy and stuttering bride to a confident businesswoman. ‘I believe in strong women who are in control of their destinies as much as possible, and that doesn’t happen unless they are financially independent,’ says Aparna. ‘But I don’t like men or women who are authoritarian. In fact, you will notice in my films that when the woman achieves strength, she becomes non-aggressive.’

In Goynar Baksho, Rashmoni pishima (aunt), who was widowed at the age of twelve, embodies an earlier generation of women when widows had to forgo all worldly pleasures. After she dies, her ghost follows Somlata curiously to know how it feels to have sex with one’s husband. She also prods her to have some fun with another man while her husband is away. ‘Bring him home and devour him,’ the old widow’s ghost, who lives vicariously through Somlata says, comparing husbands to regular meals and lovers to special treats. She also reveals how she had planned to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh with a servant during her early widowhood before he was found climbing the stairs to her room at night and beaten to death. Aparna’s female characters are unabashedly sensual and do not always take the safe and conventional route to fulfilling their desires.

A prolific filmmaker, Aparna Sen’s oeuvre also includes films such as 15 Park Avenue and Sonata that pale in comparison to the powerful films discussed above. But the incontestable fact remains that from her first film to her latest, she has not shied away from bold subjects and subversive female characters. A majority of the films directed by Aparna Sen feature female protagonists. In fact, she can easily be proclaimed as one of the most feminist filmmakers in India. However, that is one label she has vehemently tried to shrug off since the beginning of her career. Her aversion to the use of the word feminist is something that comes across as surprising as well as intriguing – for the simple reason that her films bear testimony to her zest for women’s liberation and equality.

‘Why have you categorically denied being a feminist?’ I ask her straightaway when we first meet on the sets of her film Arshinagar.

‘I think the feminist cause is a very important cause

Reviews for F-rated

[Feyha Tejani · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is too underrated. Please read it. It's become one of my fave books :)