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A film that centres around a chat room filled with the voices of older Indian feminists and younger urban women searching the ideologies of feminism to find a room of their own
Directed by Paromita Vora
Produced by Sakshi
94 mins, English and Hindi with English sub-titles, 2002 Paromita Vora’s new film examines definitions of feminism and explores the many feminist identities that we provide for ourselves and for others. The Big Questions and the Big Issues are all there, turned over and around and under, through encounters with women, old and young, who are the “movement” in the most open sense of the word. These encounters are bracketed by conversations in a chat room inhabited by the likes of Anarchist Ann, Marxist Usha, Chamki Girl, Atilla the Nun, Fearless and Devi as Diva (among others) who create a spectrum of voices and concerns and confusions. The characterisation of these disembodied voices and the choice of names is quite wonderful. Fearless is the late entrant into the chat room and despite her name, actually has reservations and trepidation. She strikes up a special relationship with Chamki, one of the gentler voices, and it is the questions and interventions of these two characters that really drive the discussions in the room. Fearless is the one that roams the streets, meeting women (including a delightful encounter with Mumbai’s only woman cab driver), excavating positions, definitions, perspectives and prejudices. Even as she brings the doubts and confusions of her real-life encounters into the chat room, Fearless is papering a wall in her “real” room with all that she finds – pamphlets, posters, reading materials – reflecting the plurality of a movement that includes rather than excludes. The film has a refreshing, contemporary, urban feel to it. Not only is it located in the metropolises, the intelligent use of the means and modes of contemporary culture bring life and vigour to the film. Vora uses animation, dramatisations and conversations to explore her theses, but the vibrating centre of the film remains the “room full of voices” and the “history of conversations” among the women in the chat room. The many voices in the film, embodied and disembodied, share experience, knowledge, pain, longing and despite difference, reinforce sisterhood. While Unlimited Girls strikes a very “here and now” note, Vora is conscientious about history and the past, about how the movement came to encompass so many colours, so many lenses and so many perspectives. In that sense, the film is as much about our inheritance as it is about our inheritors. One of the wonderful dynamics in the film is that between the voices of women who have been part of the movement for decades (Urvashi Butalia, Vina Mazumdar, Meena Menon, Sonal Shukla, Satyarani Chaddha, Shahjehan Begum, to name but a few) and the voices of younger urban women who search the ideologies of feminism to find a room of their own, preferably one with a view. Older and younger feminists never interact face to face in the film, but their voices weave in and out of each other’s, creating harmonies and disharmonies that tell us where the movement has come and what it has enabled. In many ways, Unlimited Girls itself stands as the inheritor of a long and vociferous tradition of feminist documentary filmmaking in India. Women have been making political films in India since the 1970s but the real flowering of the phenomenon was in the 1980s. Sadly, the impetus for the hundred flowers to bloom in this arena were the increasing atrocities against women (sati, bride burning, the Shah Bano case), systemic as well as personal. Even as Vora’s film explores the Big Issues and makes reference to all that has galvanised us over the decades, it is also an extremely personal journey for the filmmaker. The film is driven as much by her quest for personal answers as it is by the issues of the movement and the positions and experiences of the women around her. Vora skillfully avoids editorialising in her own voice, as the chat room conversations take over that role. Another major achievement of the film is that it ends with a blank slate, one that we are free to write upon as we begin or continue our own journey along those paths that have been walked before. Nearly 25 five years after the Mathura Rape Case which concretised the Indian women’s movement, it is time, indeed, for introspection and self-examination. Unlimited Girls gives us all an opportunity to do that. For more information contact:
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Andheri (E), Mumbai 400 093 Robust feminists, various feminists An interview with filmmaker Paromita Vora Why do you never reveal yourself in the film? A part of the reason you only see Fearless on the edge of frame is because the film is narrated from her point of view and so you see it as it were almost physically from where she is ‘standing’. On the other hand it is because I wanted to avoid precisely this impression that I, Paromita and Fearless the character are the same and interchangeable. I merely play Fearless. This was to an extent a response to the idea of the personal film, wherein the filmmaker’s presence on camera is often supposed to make it personal but in essence the filmmaker while physically present, is actually absent from the frame. To me, the personal-ness of a film should not have to be signified by the filmmaker’s form, as much as the form of the film – and by the nature of enquiry. I think Unlimited Girls is very personal, but in a way that allows it to be personal for the viewer as well and the element of keeping myself out while assuming the persona of a narrator certainly helps this. You could ask – why not then have an actor play Fearless and be in frame but I think that does the same thing – distances the viewer, makes it someone else’s story, whereas I think it’s crucial to the film that the viewer be brought in to make the film and its questions their own thereby emerging from the film with their own set of answers (or more questions!). Can you tell us more about the relationship between Chamki Girl and Fearless? They are the ones who ask the questions and question the answers and they are also the only ones who seem to develop a relationship outside the room. Fearless and Chamkigirl are not opposed to each other. In a sense they are of the same time and space, although strangers on the Internet. They tackle the same kinds of dilemmas -- the personal and the political. In a sense both are aware of the complexities of this enterprise, but approach it from two different ends – Fearless by letting the ambiguity be, not calling herself a feminist but letting feminism breathe through her life while Chamki goes at it full tilt, perhaps bolstering herself with the certitude of terms and organised thought. Both approaches have problems – Fearless could end up not addressing a whole lot of compromises, sweeping them under the carpet; she need not “purify her choice” if she finds it uncomfortable by constantly questioning her choices from a feminist framework. On the other hand, Chamki is in danger of not acknowledging the ambiguities, of choosing the theoretical understanding of feminism in an absolute way when she comes up against a confusing issue that challenges her feminism. To me it was important that the dialogue take place in a world where feminism is taken for granted and the questions then are philosophical…. to be a feminist or not. Chamki and Fearless as young women accept feminism, but like many who have benefited from the feminist movement have all these unresolved areas of choice and not a very developed notion of how to take this further. It is this idea that I hope their dialogue leads to. They are the only two whose relationship we see build for all the reasons listed above but also because I think in a film you will follow one or two people who take up with each other, so to say, rather than a more symbolic grouping like the other women in the chatroom. Fearless and Chamki speak of these issues in a more personal way outside the chatroom. Their discussion in the chatroom then becomes about the ideas while their discussions with each other are more textured – about their own lives and how to make sense of them via feminism. How did the personalities for the chat room girls develop? The personalities evolved over time and in a criss-cross way. Some of the women in the chatroom are real people and their ‘dialogue’ is taken from interviews with them or discussions at feminist conferences. Reading through all this material a sort of larger conversation seemed to me to be happening, certain themes being discussed over and over so the chat rooms developed on the basis of this imagined conversation, with those people’s voices – imagining that instead of being in different places these women were in one room and saying these things to each other actually rather than theoretically. We chose their lines as one would in cutting an interview, maintaining the flavour of the way they speak. But just putting their lines together in a dialogue didn’t have the absolute natural flow of conversation. So slowly other imaginary people got added. As in any creative enterprise of writing or filmmaking, you don’t just want people there as mouthpieces but to be actual people with lives outside the frame. So they grew the way characters in any other script do. Sometimes you started with a name – attilla_the_nun or MarxistUsha say -- and started to imagine how they were, how they looked, spoke and would respond, what their turn of phrase would be and then you wrote dialogue for them. The main thing that was common between all was that they were feminists and had engaged with it robustly and variously.
What do you think is the main difference between the older feminists, the ‘mothers’ of the movement, as it were, and the younger ones?
Oh boy! I don’t know the answer to that one exactly…. But my impression (underline impression!) is that the older feminists have a more defined relationship with feminism – they’ve had to build the relationship from scratch in a sense and they have a greater historical grounding and a much easier relationship with activism. On the other hand a lot of younger women haven’ t really made the effort to examine and learn about the history of feminist thinking and action and so they are much less sure – they have come into it automatically and not given it much thought, hence their thinking isn’ t always that rigorous, their activism not that original – what people refer to as the NGOisation of the movement. However, I think younger women also have a more easy relationship with the mainstream, are more eclectic, and if they could grow to think about feminism more seriously as an idea, they could use this different set of experiences to develop some creative ideas to build the movement and take it into different spaces in a concerted way. But it’s a loose generalisation so no doubt there are many caveats and complexities to it (for which please refer to the film Unlimited Girls –lol).
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