An Uphill Fight
Released on a streaming platform for the first time, Burqa Boxers tells a rare story of grit and hope
In Burqa Boxers, one of the protagonists rents a police uniform costume. She has realised that her dream of becoming a policewoman will remain just that, but she wants to live it out nevertheless. She gets photographs clicked in a studio while wearing the uniform. The scene delivers a punch to the gut as it establishes that the women in the documentary, like elsewhere, straddle multiple worlds that often collide with each other.
Alka Raghuram’s 2016 film, which is now out on Cinemapreneur, a pay-per-view OTT platform, follows the lives of three female Muslim boxers in Kidderpore, Kolkata. “It shows how a group of feisty women and girls from a deeply traditional community try to change things in a way that’s appropriate for them,” says Raghuram over the phone from California, where she is based. “I had gone there expecting a story of a star athlete and instead found a more nuanced story of how stepping outside your comfort zone transforms you. Which, in their case, is boxing.”
The boxers are Ajmira Khatoon, Taslima Khatoon and Parveen Shajda. The common thread that binds them is their fierce coach Razia Shabnam, India’s first woman international boxing referee. Ajmira is, what one might call, a raging bull, determined to beat all odds. Taslima—who, at the time of filming, lived at a home run by the NGO New Light, which provides care for at-risk children and youth—is a feminist and often discusses discrimination against women with her friends. In class, Shabnam instructs students to keep their eyes open when someone tries to land a punch on their face. “There is wisdom in those details,” says Raghuram. “It’s about looking your fear in the eye.”
Shajda, who has now quit boxing due to financial hardship, once saw it as a means to achieve her dream of getting into the police force. “In the abstract, it made no sense as to why the women would pick boxing. But boxing is one of the cheapest sports to pursue and they wanted to get into the government quota for athletes for jobs. It was a pragmatic step. To me, all this boxing towards financial independence, to assert their space in the society, was eye-opening,” says Raghuram. “But it didn’t play out for most of them because the system was not set up for them to succeed. In West Bengal, at least, they didn’t have enough resources and facilities to become competitive enough to qualify for public sector jobs.”
Raghuram spent four years shooting with the women. The filmmaker, who is currently working on a psychological thriller titled ‘Ayna’, about a boxer, declines to share details of the women’s current whereabouts out of respect for their privacy, but says she is in touch with a few of them. “For Ajmira and Taslima, at this point, boxing is more of a passion that is not going to become something more because of lack of jobs.”
WWriting in The New York Times in 2014, Dylan Farrow asked how it was possible to continue to be a fan of Woody Allen’s movies when confronted with the knowledge that he had sexually abused his adopted daughter when she was just seven years old. A new four-part documentary on the nearly 30-year-old scandal, Allen v. Farrow, asks essentially the same question. It puts the viewer of this documentary in the invidious position of having to either denounce and renounce Allen or be made to feel as if they are disbelieving a victim of sexual abuse because her father is privileged.
Despite the film’s title, which suggests a court case in which both sides have their say before an impartial judge, it is effectively a prosecutorial exercise. The filmmakers are uninterested in balance, in putting forward any view that contradicts or even slightly dissents from the position that Allen was spared a criminal trial and probably conviction only by dint of his fame and influence. No one can question Dylan Farrow’s right to tell her story, to speak of her alleged experience of abuse at the hands of her father. But Allen v. Farrow (available on Disney+ Hotstar) is manipulative precisely because it pretends to be something more objective than, say, Dylan’s open letters in various newspapers. It puts pressure on the viewer to concede that the only ethicallycorrect choice is to accept Dylan and Mia Farrow’s account of what happened one August day in 1992 without question. And that this same standard cannot be equally applied to the later claims by Moses, also an adopted son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, that Mia was an abusive parent from a troubled, dysfunctional family.
This is also the claim of Mia’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. Mia found nude polaroids of 21-year-old Soon-Yi in 57-year-old Woody’s apartment while Mia and Woody were still in a relationship and co-parents to several children, including Dylan. (Incidentally, Mia too was decades younger than her previous husbands, Frank Sinatra and Andre Previn, and Soon-Yi and Woody remain by all accounts happily married.) It was several months after Mia’s discovery of Woody’s infidelity with Soon-Yi that he was accused of sexually molesting Dylan. It is a sordid, ugly mess. But Allen was never charged with a crime. Official reports by state institutions argue both that ‘probable cause’ existed to charge Allen and that Dylan could have been either fantasising or coached by Mia to accuse her father.
In the wake of #MeToo, several actors have apologised for working with Allen, while others such as Cate Blanchett, Diane Keaton and Scarlett Johansson have been pilloried for not doing the same. In Allen v. Farrow, Blanchett’s mild observation that Dylan’s accusations are “a family matter” is offered up as a sort of acme of moral cowardice. But acknowledging that the truth is elusive, that sometimes we aren’t in a position to judge, is preferable to the preening outrage of the makers of Allen v. Farrow. ■
In early March, Netflix India announced its slate of over 41 titles for 2021. As with television shows, a marker of success for a web series is its renewal for subsequent seasons. On that note, two particular titles stood out. Not so much for their high profiles— Delhi Crime is India’s first International Emmy winner and She is created by Imtiaz Ali—as for their shared cultural theme. Both are long-form dramas spearheaded by women police officers. Another policewoman-led thriller, Kamathipura, was slated to drop on March 8, until Disney+Hotstar indefinitely postponed its release in a genuflection to the controversial new OTT guidelines issued by the ministry of information and broadcasting. The Netflix list also featured a supernatural series named Aranyak, starring Raveena Tandon as “a harried Himachali cop on a big-ticket case”.
A decade ago, when Hindi cinema was blowing up with masala male-cop franchises like Dabangg and Singham, a female cop-led story was virtually unimaginable—let alone a sequel to one. The evolutionary process was perhaps fated to begin with a film called Mardaani (loose translation: “machismo”), a slick, entertaining YashRaj Films production starring Rani Mukerji as a brash crime branch inspector. But the beginning was far from perfect.
Despite their popularity, the problem with mainstream movies like Mardaani is their stubborn simplification of female authority. The complications of being a woman—in a male-dominated field, a marriage, a household—are eschewed to service the visual sensationalism of smashing the patriarchy. The protagonists derive a sense of agency by pretending to be their male counterparts. For instance, Mukerji’s Shivani Shivaji Roy speaks a language—literally, figuratively—designed to compensate for the alleged limitations of the ‘weaker sex’. In essence, Shivani’s
feminism is a spiritual remake of the very masculinity she is paid to defeat. Ditto for Tabu’s IGI Meera Deshmukh in Drishyam and Priyanka Chopra’s SP Abha Mathur in Jai Gangaajal. The lens loftily frames them as superheroes, whose gender becomes more of a resolution than an ongoing conflict.
In comparison, the women of Delhi Crime and Soni are authentic for how they struggle to accept the contradictions of their identity. Their arcs reveal the futility of imitating male power in an environment notoriously hostile to females. Delhi Crime’s Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah)— the DCP investigating the 2012 Delhi gangrape—is consciously playing the ‘role’ of a no-nonsense boss leading a squad of men. She only lets her guard down on brief phone calls with a husband who isn’t emasculated to highlight her dominance. But the triumph of Delhi Crime lies in Vartika cracking beneath her veneer of performative stoicism. She often apologises for exhibiting emotions, wrestling with her inability to stay rational as she confronts the worst of male entitlement. Her young trainee (Rasika Dugal) refuses to acclimatise to this duality, opting out before it suppresses her natural being. Their equation is reflected in the award-winning Soni, where senior superintendent Kalpana (Saloni Batra) is torn between punishing and nurturing the primal impulsiveness—termed “recklessness” by male colleagues—of her hot-headed officer, Soni (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan).
But a subversive critique of old-school Bollywood’s red-blooded perspective emerges in She. The show is centred on the sexual awakening of a young constable named Bhumika (Aaditi Pohankar), hired by the Anti-Narcotics Squad to go undercover as a prostitute to honey-trap a mysterious drug lord.
She ends with Bhumika crossing over to the dark side— the implication being that the hypocrisy of an exploitative police force is far more toxic than the naked masochism of a gangster. Hers isn’t a morality tale so much as a coming-ofrage arc. This premise doubles up as a scathing indictment of the male gaze of an artistic medium that, like Bhumika’s employers, tends to objectify the body of the policewoman instead of wielding her mind.
It’s another matter that the poorly executed She eventually succumbs to its own metaphor. Yet, despite the bumps in recent years, the fetishisation of uniform has slowly made way for the humanisation of form. Perhaps the marriage of the female cop with the female filmmaker is only the logical next step—one maintains the order, the other calls the shots. One protects life, the other recreates it. All that separates them is a camera.