The League of Extra-Patriarchal Gentlemen

By Sajana J on Thursday, September 29, 2011 - 23:28

‘Tis a ‘Ban Her’! season in Indian film industry. Small but powerful coteries of film producers are holding lives and careers of female actors to ransom. Behave or be banned, and don’t question our logic seems to be the diktat says Sajana Jayaraj

On Tuesday, September 27, Malayalam film actor Nithya Menon was banned from acting because she refused to meet a few “senior” producers, and instead asked them to meet her manager. Ouch! That pricked the fragile egos of the producers at the Kerala Film Producers’ Association. A girl who chose not to meet them in the middle of a shoot.  A girl who disrespected such senior members of the film fraternity by directing them to her manager. A girl? A girl? A girl??? One can just imagine their rage at this upstart. She had to be shown her place.

So our papa producers - the ones that hold the strings of one of the most accessible artistic medium, the ones who make films - got together their coterie of fellow producers, directors and actors (men only please!). They decided not to offer her any films. Stop her from acting. Ban her. Ruin her career. Girls should know to behave, or there will be consequences.

Last weekend, again, activists in Bengaluru staged a protest against the Kannada Film Association’s “manhandling” of the Darshan saga. The protestors, from Bangalore had two demands - one that Darshan should apologise publicly, and second that the film industry should set up a committee to look into violence against women within the industry (Citizen Matters). Members of the Kannada Film Chamber of Commerce came and began pushing and threatening them. They could not tolerate a questioning of their stand against actor Nikita Thukral, their blind siding with wife-beater actor Darshan, and the pressurising of his wife to put up with it all in the name of domestic bliss.

Clearly, modernity in Indian cinema is restricted only to buying Arriflex D-21 cameras, hiring western actors for bit parts, or displaying films in theatres with the latest digital cinema projection technology.

The fate the vulnerable in the industry - the technicians and workers, ‘junior’ actors and women across the ranks, the cogs that run the wheel - are not worth a second’s thought. And they are certainly seen as small enough to be crushed underfoot, if they dare raise a voice. There seems no place for individual freedom of thought and expression. This from those working in a medium that is all about expression!

What a terrible tragedy it is to see a wonderfully liberal medium as cinema entrenched in the hands of a few who continue to handle things in a feudal and patriarchal manner.