It was in 2017 that we had begun to hear these little sputters around Raya Sakar's crowdsourced list of sexual harassers in the academia called LoSHA. It was parallelly aligning with what was happening in Hollywood with the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse cases. I remember how it triggered things in Bollywood with Tanushree Dutta accusing Nana Patekar of sexual harassment which was followed by a big expose in The Huffpost.
In all this, we would hear about the sexual assault case that happened to the actress in Kerala but there was no clarity on the details. Just that there was a moving car and a sexual assault and that it was contracted by a mainstream Malayalam superstar. I could totally blame myself [for not knowing more]. Maybe I wasn't interested because it wasn't about my industry. Outside of that, there was no other memory of it over a period of time even as we developed a stronger, deeper view of Me-Too. We saw the ramifications of the movement in our industry. We saw how things played out from that time and what exactly changed or not. But I don't remember anything significant that got recorded in my head about what was happening in Malayalam cinema, the WCC’s inception and how it became this strong engine of women. They were parallelly working towards something that I didn't honestly believe would see the results that it has seen today.
What did Bollywood do that could possibly have borne fruit like it has with WCC, despite the red tape and other pushbacks that the Hema Committee report faced since it was ready in December 2019? The fact is that Malayalam cinema has something like this and we have nothing. In fact, we may have gone two steps back from where we were.
I do remember that ten prominent women filmmakers had come together to form one committee and vowed that they will not be working with proven offenders. I remember, there was a Zoya [Akhtar], there was Meghana [Gulzar], Konkona [Sen Sharma] on it.
I can't say that there have been no conspicuous benefits of the Me-Too in Mumbai, even though they may not have happened in such a strident way as in Kerala. Some sets are ethical because of the people who are leading them. Now there is an inclusion of a clause in our work for hire contracts which does look at the issue of sexual harassment. The right studios are doing it. But I feel it's window-dressing, it’s for its own sake. In case someone points out, they can show that they were following ethical practice. But I don't know if it is really the norm in the industry.
With men we can never really discern their intentions but they have become slightly watchful of their words. They definitely have become better at cleaning evidence. Things have become slightly more sanitized since then.
But we know people who were questioned were never brought to legal reckoning. Cases were never really fought in the courts. They stayed on Twitter. If one woman of stature had made a case of it with a big name and had come out of it victorious, and also continued to do well in her career, I think that would have made a lot of people come out. Nobody fought the war in that sense, someone who could be looked at as a mascot of justice.
I know that the idea of Me-Too, as a movement, was about believing every woman, but because the men were not really brought to some kind of judicial reckoning, most of the perpetrators were exonerated for one reason or the other in the POSH/ICC committees that were set up by the corporates to support most of those men. In fact I feel that the system has gone even more watchful or vigilant in making sure that it protects men even more fiercely. I feel the recovery for them was just too fast. I feel there was this urgency for everyone to quickly brush past it all and not make this a big issue.
Most of the men who got exonerated may have the legal right to work and make the films that they do. But we know how they got exonerated and we also know what they did. Just because there was no evidence how can we say they were exonerated?
Everybody who was questioned is back to work, doubly rewarded by the industry. The women are, in fact, much more in jeopardy for coming out and putting their heads and careers on the line. If anything, what has happened is that now things legally are also very protective about possible situations for men from the word go. Men might be shunning certain men, or just cosmetically respectful of women, I think, in the guise of all of this, from the outside, the inside is really dirty.
I think the biggest evidence of this is the deafening silence of the entire Hindi film industry on the Hema Committee report. As if they are oblivious, as if it's happening in another country, and as if they have no parallels that can be drawn in the Hindi film industry. It's definitely on people's minds. Of course they read newspapers. Of course they hear the stories. Of course they hear of the biggest pillars of the Malayalam film industry falling down. They are aware of everything. It's just that they choose to say nothing. Because, how will the kettle call the pot black? It's like everybody is complicit. And it obviously keeps the business going. Silence is the best way to ignore all this.
We have just turned a blind eye to it, because it is something that could trigger a deep fault line within the business, the models of the industry that have now become even more stringent [in protecting men]. I feel we have gone in the absolute other direction from the Malayalam film industry.
(The author is the screenwriter for films such as Ulajh, Sahela, Agra, Chhapaak, Guilty, Margarita with a Straw and Waiting. As told to Namrata Joshi.)