STAR-GAZING IN A DEEP STATE OF FEAR

Rather than just focusing on sensational cases involving actors, the Hema Committee report should be used to improve the lot of all women working in the film industry

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ARE our stars really the stuff that dreams are made of? Was the love peddled to millions of cine lovers built on the humiliation of many women who struggled alongside men to build this palace of illusions? Was the magic of cinema just a sham that covered the megalomania of men who used the economy of cinema to traffic in patriarchal dividends? Do the raptures of agony and ecstasy engendered by cinema that touch our cores make us complicit in the oppressively feudal artistic economies? Among the many film industries in India, Malayalam cinema is considered a cut apart for its progressive politics and innovativeness around plot and style.

But its ramparts were razed through a single stroke, as Justice Hema Committee's report filed the epochal voices of a handful of women who questioned the misogynist foundations of this grand castle of deception.

Triggered by the inhuman assault on a female actor in a moving car in broad daylight in 2018 and the subsequent resistance by the Women in Cinema Collective, the Kerala government appointed a three-member committee in 2017 under Justice Hema to study the workplace issues experienced by women in the Malayalam film industry. Yet, the very same government sat on the report for four and half years, citing technicalities and fear of violating the confidentiality of the people who testified. It took many information requests and public outrage for the government to finally make a heavily-redacted document available for public perusal, where the nature and extent of redactions have drawn further flak.