The eleventh edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival concluded on December 4. The two-day festival at The Lalit Ashok hosted a number of insightful sessions with celebrated authors and artistes.
While several sessions this year were about history and had the likes of young historians like Aniruddh Kanisetti and Manu S Pillai participating, a lot of the sessions also focused on women in male-dominated spaces.
Some of them included The Female Cinematic Universe with filmmaker Alankrita Shrivastava as the guest speaker, On My Own: Feminism and Finance with author Aruna Nambiar, and The Sex Book with popular content creator Leeza Mangaldas.
Women in cinema
“I write about such women because I find them interesting,” said Alankrita Shrivastava, who is best known for directing Lipstick Under My Burkha. At the session aptly titled The Female Cinematic Universe, Alankrita was asked about the female characters in her Netflix series Bombay Begums. In an industry that stereotypes female characters, especially the ones above the age of 40, Alankrita’s stories are predominantly about women from different age groups and socio-economic classes.
When women write about women, they write from lived experiences, Alankrita thinks. And when women write about men, the narrative often tends to take a critical look at masculinity. But what does she feel about female characters written by men in contemporary Indian cinema?
In a quick chat with Indulge, the director said, “I think that some filmmakers are very sensitive to the female gaze. Their female characters are complex and interesting, like what Soojit Sircar did in Piku or how Neeraj Ghewan dealt with the women characters in Masaan. If we go back in time, we can see how Satyajit Ray made Charulata and Mahanagar. So, it’s not like men can’t write or deal with layered women characterisation.”
However, according to Alankrita, in mainstream films, women often tend to be one-toned or serve a particular need for patriarchy. We often see women portraying the role of “the virginal love, the sacrificing wife, or the titillating vamp.”
The director added, “They are often appendages to the main character and don’t have much narrative agency. Even if the woman is meant to be the key player, you will find her being saved by the male character. These things often tend to happen when there are not enough women in writing and directing roles.”
The director also noted how films and shows with alternative voices find more space in OTTs but the big screens are often restricted for mainstream cinema, excluding women from public spaces.The reason behind this, she finds, is not the economies of scale but the patriarchal system. “It is not that the system is inherently patriarchal, you know? This system has been built by institutions, by money, and by people in charge who have made it to benefit themselves. So now, systemic changes are what we need to break this patriarchy.”
Indulge asked her if she has noticed any such change since the time she joined the Hindi film industry. Alankrita responded, “A lot of streaming platforms now have a lot of female executives. This has helped them tell stories that focus more on the female point of view. And that has helped in the greenlighting of shows and films with female perspectives. And I definitely think that when women have deciding roles in the production of films, they are able to take action in terms of hiring more women into the crew. That makes a lot of difference.”
Fighting Taboo
Popular digital content creator Leeza Mangaldas’ session The Sex Book was named after her debut book of the same name. For those uninitiated, Leeza is one of the pioneering internet personalities in the country to create social media content on sex education. With over 8,82,000 followers on Instagram, Leeza aims to make the world a place “where all sexual experiences are consensual, safe, and pleasurable.”
At the session, which witnessed people of different ages in attendance, Leeza busted myths around sex that are especially popular amongst youngsters. She also elaborated on how concepts like colonialism and capitalism have left their mark in the way we think about sex — and how most of us fail to realise that.
When we asked Leeza about the most challenging part of her job, she said, “When I started six years ago, most people didn’t quite seem to understand what I was doing. Globally, there’s this prevalent idea that ‘respectable women’ shouldn’t like, want, or discuss sex. I think initially I had to take my audience on a journey with me to unlearn that stereotype, to establish the fact that sex education is fundamental and important, and that it’s central to greater gender equality, better health outcomes, and a safer world. She further noted how digital platforms too have a lot of sex-negative rules and regulations, which ends up discouraging her work.
Recently, Leeza’s podcast has also been declared the most streamed podcast on Spotify. But as much as she has received love and appreciation for her work, she must have also faced trolls and criticism for it. How does she deal with that?
“I do, occasionally, get comments that try to slut-shame me There are some people who think that women shouldn’t talk about sex. I also sometimes receive unsolicited advances from people who clearly have no sense of boundaries. So, I have profanity filters on in the comments and I use the 'Block' and 'Restrict' features when it’s clear that someone is commenting only to derail, insult, or harass me or others in the comments section. I simply cannot keep up with the volume of DMs I receive at this point, so I rarely have the bandwidth to sift through all of them. It’s usually pretty easy to tell the genuine gems from the trolls and I am careful with whom I give attention,” Leeza told.