Hema Committee report: Kerala must provide women with a safe and equitable workspace

Among the many disturbing revelations cascading out of the recent breach in Malayalam cinema’s male dominance caused by the Justice K Hema Committee report, a poignant section stands out. Narrating her experience, a junior artist describes incidents of male actors harassing her. Apart from the acting parts, she lost out when she rejected sexual propositioning. She also mentions how she worked on a script for the big screen, pouring her heart into it every night after a long day’s work. When she is told that this, too, would happen only if she was willing to ‘adjust’ and ‘compromise’ – the despicable industry bro code for demands for sex – she gives up on her dream.

The 3-member Hema Committee was set up by the Kerala government in 2017 to ‘study and report’ issues faced by women in cinema, following persistent efforts of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) after the sexual assault of a prominent female actor. After the report’s court-ordered release recently, the Malayalam film industry is caught in an unprecedented churn.

Multiple women have drawn courage from the report’s release to publicly share their accounts about the sexual harassment. Some FIRs have been filed, and an SIT has been set up. But how will we measure the number of careers cut short and dreams turned to dust by men controlling the industry – whether opportunities denied to an award-winning actor like Parvathy Thiruvothu or a makeup artist?

The 235-page report by the committee mentions: ‘The men in cinema cannot imagine that it is because of the passion for art and acting that a woman comes to the movie.’ For too many of them, the women they worked with were prospective prey, not colleagues. In no sector are women completely safe from sexual harassment. But as the report says, in the film industry, it begins right from the time a woman is considered for a job, with conditions attached.

One of the many consequences is the strange practice of parents accompanying female actors to film sets. ‘We do not see the parents of teachers or doctors or clerks or journalists accompanying their daughters to work and wait there till their work is over and accompany them back home,’ the report observes. For those who lauded Kerala and its films for their progressiveness, but were otherwise not intimately familiar with the state, the dichotomy is startling. For others who have faced patriarchy there, it’s less so, though the extent of inequity is still galling.

When we discuss how to increase the share of women in India’s workforce, lack of safety is recognised as an important infrastructural barrier. This year’s budget took cognisance of this, through proposals to set up hostels for working women. It’s also a decade since the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act was passed.The film industry, in Kerala and every other part of the country, can’t be an exception to the need to provide women with a safe and equitable workspace. Only then will more women feel secure about working there. Only then will they think their dreams are not subject to the whims of men controlling the levers of power.The CPM-led state government has come under fire for not releasing the report over four years after submission, for redacting large chunks of it, and for its mixed messaging – sitting CPM MLA and actor Mukesh is among those facing complaints of rape. The committee’s findings – which go far beyond sexual abuse, from lack of proper facilities for women and disparity in pay, to the exploitation of everyone except those in power – should mark the beginning of a more equitable film industry.

Kerala has successfully turned other crises into opportunities to improve, such as its handling of the pandemic. It should now seize this chance to do right by its women. It owes them that.