Sisterhood acts

Illustration/Uday Mohite

In 2007, my friend Bishakha Datta and I both made documentaries about the media.

Hers, called Taaza Khabar, was about a grassroots newspaper called Khabar Lahariya, which emerged from an adult literacy program and was run by rural women, primarily Dalit. Mine, called Morality TV aur Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani, was about an event called Operation Majnoo, which inaugurated an era of news television as tabloid landscape, not only competing for eyeballs with "sting operations" but becoming a medium to manufacture consent for ideas like love jihad and the world view that surrounds it. In Taza Khabar, we watch the women reporters go to a DTP shop, to print out their hand-drawn newspaper, and sell it at two rupees a copy in the market. In Morality TV we watch stringers hound and bully people into being filmed for "breaking news".

Both films marked a significant moment in media time. Two decades later mainstream news has become a kind of mythic monster, soon to eat its own digital tale. And last week, I attended Khabar Lahariya's 21st anniversary event in Delhi. The newspaper has now grown into a digital platform that reaches a few million in rural India each month, with reporters across UP, MP and Bihar.

I had the pleasure of being the moderator on a panel about stories from field reporting, which needed no moderation. "A man kept propositioning me, until I told him, ‘Hullo, sir, it's the paper that's on sale, not me," laughed Sangeeta. "Some men punctured my scootie and tried to waylay me as I walked it back through the forest," recounted Shivdevi. "I don't know why men in government offices keep asking ‘why aren't you wearing sindoor?' If I wear a little will I be just a little married? Anyway, fine, if it helps you cover the news, cover your parting with a heap of it, how does it matter?" advised Shyamkali.

"We have learned," said Sahodra, at one point, "how to say what we think lightly. In the end we must return to the same place to cover the news."

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Many of the women who joined Khabar Lahariya in earlier years had early marriages and little or no schooling. "We learned by being together, helping each other." The collective as a place of growth, intertwined with individual wit, derring do, negotiation was the political and personal experience that emerged from this conversation about work. In an era of individual brands which promotes competitiveness over togetherness, the idea of a co-created engagement, not automated or templated solidarity, described feminism as something we arrive at anew very day, challenging ourselves while holding space for each other. Politics is not a fixed syllabus but a capacity for recognising meaning and value on our own terms.

The rural stories featured in Khabar Lahariya - and stories in other independent spaces - aren't found in the mainstream, despite its enormous resources. Yet we are schooled to believe that becoming mainstream, existing in its narrow possibilities, defines success and what is marginal to that mainstream, is insignificant. (Hence, critics never write about documentaries but become admirers when documentaries get nominated for Oscars).

But to nurture the so-called margin, nourish its diversities, transform ideas of what is possible, recognise the significance of what power ignores, to exist in a politics of hope - is there a deeper, sweeter success?

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com