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 documentary 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.
Paromita 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, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad. Directed by Paromita 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, Bengaluru and Chennai, and upcoming ones in Hyderabad and Kolkata.
“When you think of a working girl, you do not think of Kaushalya?” she asks, referring to the Karagattam dancer from Madurai 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, Paromita went with ‘Working Girls’ as a title to smuggle in cheekiness, discomfort, and resistance. This mischievous undertone permeates the film’s language, visuals, music, and intertextual references.
The filmmaker, for instance, avoids the kind of music documentaries often use to stir sympathy or emotion. Instead, the soundtrack is cheeky and upbeat, giving the scenes an energy that frames the women, not as passive subjects in need of pity, but as active agents — confident, resourceful, and working the system to their advantage. At the same time, the tone subtly reminds the viewer of the inequitable society they are forced to navigate.
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. She also credits the platform and says, “I think I got a lot of practice in the last 10 years because many people shared their personal essays about their intimate lives on Agents of Ishq and it really showed me how one person can tell a very big story. It helped me understand that in just two scenes, one can evoke a whole world of emotions.”
Unlimited lives
To understand Working Girls is also to trace it back to Unlimited Girls, Paromita’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 Paromita, 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,” Paromita 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.
The larger context in her work, she describes, is that of great hardship and adversity. That, she also says, often made her “feel a bit heavy”. “When I would come back from a shoot, I would feel that this is so tough and question, ‘How is it going to get any better?’. Because we don’t see, in our own experiences with the system and of people’s social attitude, the compassion that is necessary. We don’t see the change we need to see to make this society more equitable. I used to find that disheartening but at the same time, to stay disheartened is not a political option,” she says adding, “I have realised that I have to find it in myself to hold on to belief, faith, and hope. I have to keep pushing, thinking, and finding ways to engage with worlds which are wider than mine and practice a certain level of solidarity with other realities. Collaborating with The Laws of Social Reproduction project and their research was a chance to do so.
Law, labour, respectability
Paromita 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. Kaushalya’s work as a Karagattam performer is often labelled “vulgar” or “obscene.” Paromita 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 Article 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 laced with humour — that only makes the history of law sting all the more — helping us understand how these prejudices began with colonial law and continue to this day.
Feminism minus hashtags
“To think about care work,” Paromita reminds us, “is really a way of thinking about class and gender and especially of thinking about caste.” She 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.”
(Inputs from Nidharshana Raju)