“Close your eyes. What do you imagine when you think of a working girl?” That’s how Working Girls begins. And with that, filmmaker Paromita Vohra cracks open the polished office door and walks us straight into the unseen, underpaid and often unspoken world of women’s labour in India, from sex work to surrogacy, erotic dance to domestic care. The film crafts a moving, irreverent and deeply political portrait of the women who keep the country running yet remain invisible in policy, pay and prestige.
Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose work focuses on gender, feminism, urban life, love, desire and popular culture. Her films include Q2P, Where’s Sandra, Partners in Crime, and Morality TV and the Loving Jehad. Directed by Vohra in collaboration with the Laws of Social Reproduction project, Working Girls is a genre-defying, visually layered documentary. It has been criss-crossing the country with recent screenings in Delhi, Chennai and Bengaluru, and upcoming ones in Hyderabad and Kolkata.
“When you think of a working girl, you do not think of Kaushalya,” she says, referring to the Tamil stage dancer in the film’s opening sequence. This absence is the film’s central provocation: to expand our collective imagination of what it means to work and who gets to be called a worker.
Behind the title
While “working women” may evoke white collar respectability, Vohra went with Working Girls as a title to smuggle in cheekiness, discomfort and resistance. This mischievous undertone permeates the film’s language, visuals, sound and intertextual references. The filmmaker’s signature playfulness, drawing from her years of creating Agents of Ishq, her award-winning multimedia platform for sex, love and desire in India, shines through the upbeat soundtrack and animated sequences.
Unlimited Lives
To understand Working Girls is also to trace it back to Unlimited Girls, Vohra’s landmark 2002 documentary on feminism in urban India. That film upended the documentary form with a feminist chatroom, big ads and cool music. “I was young, 30 years old, growing up in a post-liberalisation world of the ’90s as someone who was also deeply engaged with feminism,” she recalls. But something was missing in public discourse: “Love, desire, sex, just what it is to be an individual woman roaming around in the world living this feminist life.”
Unlimited Girls brought that inner, personal terrain into the public realm. “I never saw it as going against what came before me, rather it was about adding to it,” she says. Feminism, for Vohra, is always in the making. “It’s always imperfect, always becoming. Politics by nature is imperfect.” That openness, where feminist thought could be funny, complex, even romantic, has laid the foundation for her latest work. If the former foregrounded the feminist self, the latter roots that self in a web of economic, legal and caste realities. “Individual journeys exist in political context,” Vohra remarks, about how the journey from Unlimited Girls to Working Girls is a political one with unflinching gazes, collective spirit, spontaneous laughter and moments of solitude.
Law, labour, respectability
Vohra is keenly aware that legal frameworks shape how we value women’s work and how we judge it. “People always think law is automatically progressive. But if we have more laws, do we have more freedom?” she asks. In the Madurai section, we meet Kaushalya, a stage performer whose work is often labelled “vulgar” or “obscene.” Vohra notes that these judgements are rooted in colonial morality.
“The sex worker also became outlawed at the same time as homosexuality,” she points out. “We’ve fought to overturn 377. But who is fighting for the erotic dancers or sex workers? Nobody, right?” This intersectional critique runs throughout the film, from ASHA workers demanding fair pay, to domestic workers whose care work is essential but rarely recognised. The film’s animated segments are a running thread about the history of law, helping us understand how these prejudices began with colonial law and continue to this day.
Feminism minus hashtags
“To think about care work,” Vohra reminds us, “is really a way of thinking about class and gender and especially of thinking about caste.” Vohra expresses her frustration with the "flabby" conversations on social media in the last 10 years, wherein feminism has been strongly appropriated by corporate communication and packaged as only being about the individual woman's ambition." She stresses the importance of class consciousness and a connection with on-ground activists, citing the example of the successful ASHA workers' strike in Kerala, which received little to no coverage online or in the news.
The film is an opportunity to reintegrate these complex conversations and celebrate the multiplicity of being a working girl. After all, she reminds, “Thinking about the world in more complex ways can make all of us feel less lonely, because finding solidarity with people very different from ourselves can be transformative. When you encounter many different ways of seeing and being, it is very humane about the experience and it's humane to yourself.”
Next screening dates: Hyderabad, Aug 16 (NALSAR) and 18th (University of Hyderabad school for social sciences) and Sept 3, Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata