The Hindu Business Line : `All my other work stems from feminism... '

For Ananya Chatterjee Chakraborti, nothing beats the joy of making documentaries on subjects close to her heart, without anyone peeping over her shoulder.

It takes the articulate Ananya Chatterjee Chakraborti a few seconds to sum herself up. "I've never given it much thought," she laughs.

"I'm a feminist, filmmaker, writer and a journalist, in that order," she analyses, "All my other work stems from feminism."

Ananya enjoyed a childhood unfettered by gender preconceptions. "I've always been liberal in my views, always questioned caste and religion," she says.

Her work is fuelled by the belief that feminism and patriarchy are not gender-specific, but value-specific. "As soon as patriarchy ceases, so will feminism," she says. But Ananya doesn't see herself as a man-baiter. Today's world, she believes, is not perfect for men either, whose position in society — taken for granted for thousands of years — is being questioned; or for women, who are questioning stereotypes.

Her first walk-in job was at the front office at the Oberoi, but soon she moved to marketing space for an English daily. Eighteen months later, Ananya found her calling and walked up to film director Inder Sen for work as his assistant. She recalls that back then the only women in the Tollygunge film industry were "hairdressers and actors, with the token exception of Aparna Sen."

Soon after, she landed the job of a lifetime; assisting veteran director Asit Sen as she could "read and write Hindi." The next three years, she learnt all that she values in filmmaking, from the man she considers the master of emotions.

Years of freelance and print journalism followed, till she took the decision to work in Delhi as an associate producer of Television Bazar. That's when she made Halfway Home, a moving account of women who were termed mentally unsound. Many mentally ill patients were lodged in State prisons. Released from a questionable imprisonment, many had nowhere to go, burdened by the double stigma of mental illness and imprisonment or simply because they were not wanted by their families.

She describes her stint as documentary producer for TVI as "the best job of my life."Ananya went on to become chief producer of news and current affairs programmes for Tara Bangla and eventually rose to the post of director. But nothing could beat the joy of making documentaries on subjects close to her heart, without anyone peeping over the director's shoulder.

The School that Karmi Soren Built came in 1996. The next year, she directed Uttaradhikar, a 56-minute documentary on the role and status of women in the Uttarakhand movement. Feminist and media study groups highlight this film for its vision in pointing out that the very women who fought for the statehood of Uttarakhand were subsequently nudged out by male politicians in the newly-formed State.

Najayaz drew attention to the children of sex workers while AIDS: Lies and Documentary addressed a burning issue. "For three years, I was paid to do what I wanted to," she laughs.

And then, it was time to move on again. Her first feature film, Dwitiya Paksha or Second Innings, is inspired by findings that were thrown up during the research for her documentary, Daughters of the 73rd Amendment.

The relevance of Dwitiya Paksha lies in an encounter she had with the people of Bawali village, near Budge Budge, where she was shooting. The locals identified completely with the film that was based on the true story of the legendary Gundiya Bai of Bundelkhand, in another part of the country.

It is the story of an unlettered woman, relegated to the kitchen, who finds her feet in the world of politics. The Amendment, introduced in 1993, reserves one-third of the country's gram panchayat seats for women. Many expected the women leaders to be mere rubber-stamps. But what they hadn't expected is what Dwitiya Paksha is all about.

In both Daughters of the 73rd Amendment and Dwitiya Paksha, Ananya shows why development ought to begin at the grassroots, rather than people waiting for the fruits of development to percolate down.

With a predominantly female crew that included cameraman Ranu Ghosh and editor Sharmistha Jha, and the costumes done by Bangladeshi designer Bibi Russell, the film was shot in 12 days on a Rs 8.5-lakh budget. It was screened at the Dhaka Film Festival, the French Embassy in Delhi, and for two weeks at Kolkata's Nandan, with occupancy hovering between 70 and 80 per cent.

Ananya joyfully recalls how her 30-minute documentary on the school started by Karmi Soren, an unlettered and impoverished tribal woman, led to the school being finally recognised by the government. The school caters to 13 remote villages in Tulibar. Six teachers, tribal farmers who had toiled without pay for 27 years, are finally being paid.

Her documentary for Doordarshan, Last Elections of the Millennium, is similarly touching. A runaway child she had interviewed on the platform of New Delhi railway station had told her that he hoped to return home some day. His father recognised him on television and travelled to Delhi to take the boy home to their village. "I felt that day, I had not worked in vain," says Ananya, her eyes moist. .

She is also the very woman whose courage, conviction and tenacity inspired, first, a novel and, later, a film on her by Rituparna Ghosh named Dahan. Author Suchitra Bhattacharya was inspired by Ananya's guts in standing by a young couple who were harassed in full view of a crowd at a Kolkata Metro station on a rainy evening in 1992... Advised repeatedly to "forget" the incident and look the other way, Ananya stayed the course in her fight for justice and even returned a bravery award from the police.

Currently she is working on a book on Kolkata with her husband, Manish Chakraborti, a conservation architect specialising in the restoration of period buildings.

Ananya credits her husband Manish as a person who "knows the city of Kolkata like few people I have ever known. He conducts heritage walks and has, in many ways, been instrumental in reviving a positive interest among visitors, away from the typical image of poverty and squalor," she says.

And although he is an "excellent amateur photographer," their primary concerns lie in different fields. What binds them is the "same passion and commitment towards work." Says Ananya, "I do not think I could have married someone who does not share my madness."

It also helps that he is the son of a woman who struggled to complete her graduation despite being displaced by the Partition and worked for several years... a woman "who recognises the importance of economic freedom for women without being part of the feminist movement," she says.

Also on the anvil is a woman-centric film with Konkona Sen Sharma in a triple role. If precedents are any indication, Ananya's best is yet to come. Daughter of an exceptional mother who earned her Master's in Sanskrit at the age of 52, Ananya has years to go in her striving for a more equitable world.

Picture by A. Roy Chowdhury

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