The Hindu Business Line : Bringing to light

Muslim women in India today are really at the bottom of the heap — both as Muslims and as women, they get the shorter end of the stick. Education is the only way to improve their lot,” says Yasmin Kidwai, a Mumbai-based documentary filmmaker.

But then there are a number of remarkable Muslim women in India who have defied stereotypes and odds stacked against them to make a difference to their own lives and of those around them. She has told their fascinating stories in Sehar, a 13-part serial that is nearing completion on the DD Urdu channel (Saturdays 12 noon and 8 p.m.).

It features not only icons like Shabana Azmi and Sania Mirza but also other “strong and visionary” women engaged in activities such as boxing and bowling, not normally perceived to be the domain of Muslim women. “These women have taken brave steps forward and their stories will offer new insights into the situation of Muslim women in India,” says Yasmin, adding that Sehar offers a dramatic contrast to the stereotypes of Muslim women “created mostly by the media which latches on to issues such as triple talaq or polygamy, or the recent case of Gudia (Imrana).”

It irritates her that the typical image of a Muslim woman in the media is of a burqa-clad or veiled woman. Take, for instance, Sania Mirza, she says: “I can’t understand why there is so much debate about her clothes. After all, she wears what she has to for the work she does.”

The idea for such a series had been germinating in her head thanks to the “very silly comment I’ve been hearing right from my college days: ‘You don’t look like a Muslim.’ I don’t know what a Muslim is supposed to look like,” she says.

Yasmin hails from a family of emancipated women; and one of the Sehar women is her grandmother Tajdar Babar, a five-time Congress MLA from Delhi. She got married at 13 and had her first child at 15. “She was burqa-clad when she was married, but her husband, a writer in Pashtu who worked for All India Radio, made her give up the burqa. She was a Kashmiri and a social worker, and later became a politician. She held many posts such as that of the Pradesh Congress chief and head of the women’s social service cell. She had studied only till Std VIII, but learnt English after marriage.”

Incidentally, Congress leader Mohsina Kidwai is her father’s sister, while her father heads the party’s Minorities cell.

Pan-Indian picture

Yasmin says she has tried to give a pan-Indian picture in the series and tell diverse stories. “While at one extreme we have a Shabana Azmi or a Sania Mirza, at the other we have a Sumera Abdullah in Mumbai fighting against noise pollution, or a Dawooda Fatima in Tamil Nadu who built a mosque where women could pray.”

Yasmin grew up in Delhi where she graduated in Sociology in 1995, after which she trained in journalism and PR and worked for a while with Star & Style magazine while also doing some PR work for filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt.

But her heart was really in filmmaking; “I was interested in the visual medium right from the beginning but didn’t have the guts to apply for that course because I thought my family wouldn’t appreciate this medium. At that time, films were a taboo subject and anybody worth his/her while didn’t have anything to do with films.”

But gradually, she did pick up courage, and one year into her career she did a filmmaking course from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. After completing it in 1997 she returned to Delhi, where she worked a bit for TV channels but didn’t enjoy it. “Then I got an offer from Simi Garewal to work on her Rendezvous series that was just starting.”

When there was a break in between, she used the time to do her own documentaries. The first was Destination MP, which won an award for the best travel film of the year. Next came Her own Sky, which attempted to break many myths about the Indian woman. In this Yasmin looked at the “new avatar of the Indian woman — the pilot, the panchayat chief, the Parliamentarian, the welder, the policewoman and the banker."

Spring Box Films, her independent television production company ( www.springboxfilms.com), has also produced for Helpage India Where Do I Go from Here, a poignant documentary on ageing. She says she wanted to provide a glimpse into “the cheerless lives of most of our grey population. As the number of our elderly increases, and more and more people have their sons and daughters living abroad, they are facing several issues related to security, loneliness, etc. That so many old people in India are living alone is a harsh reality of our times.”

As for future plans, Yasmin says she hopes to get an extension for her Sehar series, as she has come across many fascinating stories while researching for the project. “The choice was very difficult; I had to choose only 13 women, whereas I can go on with another 52 episodes for this series. There are so many women doing so many more interesting things,” she says.

Story of the stuntwomen

Film star Tabu is on her list as also many Muslim women in villages who are making achievements despite tremendous odds. “Each such woman who goes out and does something has such a huge struggle behind her; every story is interesting in its own way.”

Also, she adds, most of the stuntwomen in Bollywood are Muslim. “They are barely 20-21, risk their lives for the kind of shots they give and make next to nothing. I couldn’t get them for the ongoing series because their dates did not match. There is also one woman biker who does the maut ka kua stunt. I would love to tell her story too.”

So, after a while will it be Bollywood?

“Well, for me this is the real thing. I’m not waiting in the wings to do anything else. Actually, my friend Priya (Dutt) and I were planning to foray into films, but she went ahead and became an MP and the project got shelved. And since then my focus has been on different things.”

The money that her work gets her is not great; “it meets my expenses, but that’s about all. But then it’s a choice that you make — money or doing what you really want to do.”

Asked if the mother of two has a supplementary income, Yasmin says, “I’m married, but my husband is in the army, so there is definitely no supplementary income from there!”

Returning to the plight of Muslim women in India, Yasmin says giving them good education is the only way forward. Asked about the stranglehold of the Mullahs on their lives, she says: “Education will take care of that; instead of the Mullah telling you what’s in the Koran, you can pick it up and read for yourself that the Koran doesn’t discriminate between men and women.”

Response can be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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