Returning To Its Own: 'Laapata Ladies' Is Finding A Resonant Audience In Local Communities

When Heena, an artisan working with the Aftertaste Foundation in Mumbai, was asked along with her co-workers to come to a different venue on 24 May post their lunch, she didn’t have any inkling of the evening that would follow. Heena had enjoyed watching movies in the theatres in the past, but not in any space meant for her and her teammates alone—this community screening was going to be a first. Sanobar Sheikh, her manager, said that they had planned for it to be a surprise. She herself hadn’t seen the movie, owing to the insistence of her founder to watch it with the group, together.

That evening, Laapata Ladies would draw a very intimate response from the audience. Far removed from the silos of social media—where the movie had already struck a chord and riveted viewers—the women would reflect on their lives in the conversation following the screening, discuss takeaways for themselves and their families. Watching the movie then was akin to a class one would learn something almost unseemingly, where the teacher would share what they knew without trying to preach. Learning occurring consciously, and enjoyably too. “The ladies laughed a lot during the screening. They were being entertained and were learning as well,” Sheikh said.

In the run-up to the screening by Aftertaste Foundation, Laapata Ladies had been released on Netflix, and sustained months-long run in the theatres. The shows in cinema halls, largely confined to multiplexes in bigger towns and metros, ran at quarter to half capacity up till two months after its release—indicating an impressive word of mouth, and a continued interest in the story of our villages. The urban viewer was intrigued, humoured, delighted even. Laapata Ladies had given us an easily resolvable portrait of the village, a taut story laden with jest, characters who firmly belonged to their respective worlds, and an afterglow of hope. We felt good, albeit about a world to which our access was limited. Our singular sentiment of delight perhaps stemmed from this romantic distance.

Heena and Sheikh didn’t get a chance to think of Laapata Ladies until the screening that evening. Sheikh even said that the movie hadn’t been marketed well. As much as the movie had pleased the urban milieu then, it had remained out of imagination of those whose stories it mirrored. The women in the villages and mofussil towns had not met Phool and Jaya and Manju Mai of Nirmal Pradesh. This is where social sector organisations of the like of Aftertaste, working with communities in villages on issues ranging from ecology to education to enterprise took the mantle. Incidentally, Kiran Rao, the director of the movie, had wanted to be in the development space, and work in the social sector before she started her tryst with the camera. In an interview to PTI, she said that “she’ll reach out to people in the social space” to take the movie to the nooks and crannies of the country. Her wishes would be slowly fulfilled, one screening at a time.

Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), a non-profit working for land, forest, and water conservation screened the movie for its group of women in Gogunda village in Rajasthan. Shreya Sharma, the facilitator from FES, said that they didn’t have any agenda in mind for the screening, and just hoped that it will resonate with the women. The screening caused a stir.

“We had to pause the movie every fifteen minutes to make way for the conversations of the women present. They kept talking about the different scenes and themes they related to,” she said. Sharma and the organising team made a note of the topics that emerged in these conversations piecemeal. These included: identity, marriage, dowry, education, support of law, awareness of males, domestic violence, financial independence; topics that could make a syllabus unto itself. Post the screening, Sharma lead a conversation around each of these themes, prompting debate on what was right—an older women said the veil was acceptable as an younger one objected to it. Then there was cognition of their own realities as seen in the movie—like Jaya, the women knew the farm practices very well too but were dismissed in favour of their male counterparts.

The movie’s relatable aesthetic and foregrounding of a women’s autonomous identity made it exemplary, allowing organisations to showcase it as a roster of possibilities that could open up for rural women in their own context. Pratham, an education NGO, intended their screenings of the movie to nudge the women to think about life after education, or without it too. It was shown primarily to women who had dropped out of school at an early age, and were taking a second chance at completing it.

An organiser from Pratham said that they wanted to encourage learners to use their talents to earn a livelihood, akin to Phool. The movie would in turn lead them to their pasts and futures. For their daughters in particular, most of the women drew inspiration from Jaya. From their own lives, they recounted the likes of Manju Mai, who had supported them in times of need. Here as in the other screenings: the movie prompted reflections, and very gently and loosely, an education too.

The profoundness of Laapata Ladies lay in its lucidity, in the astutely clear critique of the social codes that curb lives of women in the rural spaces. These critiques unveiled themselves in the educational arcs of its female characters. Lead by a Manju Mai who very feistily taught a fearful Phool the necessity of working for herself, and a Jaya who nudged the women in the home to rediscover their individual selves and a friendship they could tether to. Gentle and authoritative at once, Manju Mai and Jaya’s ways accounted for the realities they had remained vulnerable to themselves, their advice coming from an innate self-belief that a different, happier, and just life was possible, and not a myth. The subtle shifts in Phool and the women in the home cemented this possibility—the movie showing the change it hoped to see.

Apropos its frame, Laapata Ladies was underscoring crucial social processes: that ideas of an equal better world need not subvert the reality they sought to improve, and could be imparted and absorbed most successfully from one of community’s own. These were also vital elements of the approach social sector organisations depended on, in partnering with the communities and taking their help to empower them. In the movie they found an aide, a mirror of their method—that could enable reflections, and guide the viewer to a conscious conclusion.

A feminist training organisation, based out of Delhi, screened Laapata Ladies amongst women in several villages in the Hindi heartland. One of their facilitators, speaking of the pertinence of the movie to their work on gender and sexuality, said, “You have three characters who come from their realities, they have three different positions on marriage: one of them wants to be with a husband, one of them wants to run away and study, and one of them says that marriage is a fraud. In one screen it allows us to talk about marriage in three different ways, and the aim of our screenings is to not give a solution. The aim is to just say that you can’t judge anyone for the choices they’re making because they’re negotiating with something larger.”

Heena from Aftertaste seemed to have discerned a similarly nuanced wisdom from the surprise screening. She said the movie stood out not just for the triumph of an educated women, but for the woman who could stand on her own feet despite a lack of education, using her talents alone. She rewatched the movie at her home, with her three daughters.

At its heart then, Laapata Ladies carried an ubiquitous hope. It made us believe in a world that could change with individual agency, both inside and outside the home. As optimistic it may be, this depiction remained agnostic, ignorant even, to the politics of the village itself, sidestepping questions of caste, violence, power. Writer and poet Sumana Roy dubbed the movie “a fantasy,” and its village “utopian”. Even as it became a parable paving conversations, the movie’s morality was elusive —particularly for those whom its universe had forgotten.