A recent report, which details poor working conditions and rampant sexual harassment faced by women in Malayalam-language cinema, is causing seismic upheavals in the entertainment industry in India.
But the messages of solidarity and support have come largely from women – and critics say the silence of powerful men, including India’s biggest and most loved stars, is deafening.
Based on testimonies from 51 people from the Kerala-based film industry, the Hema Committee report lays bare decades of exploitation and says that “women have been asked to make themselves available for sex on demand” and that they were constantly told to make “compromise and adjustments” if they wanted work.
The panel was set up in 2017 after Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), formed by a group of women working in the Malayalam cinema, petitioned the government after a top actress was sexually assaulted by a group of men allegedly at the behest of a top male actor.
Their 290-page report was released last month, with chunks redacted to hide the identities of the survivors and those accused of harassment.
But since its release on 19 August, several women have publicly spoken up about their ordeal and more than a dozen police complaints have been lodged against male stars, producers, directors and other influential men.
The state government has set up a special investigation team (SIT) to look into the allegations and the Kerala high court has asked the SIT to investigate the instances mentioned in the report, raising hopes that the survivors may after all get justice.
Women in all Indian film industries, including in the biggest and hugely popular Bollywood, have repeatedly spoken about the casting couch – the practice of men asking for sexual favours in return for roles – and rampant sexual harassment they face.
“The rot is as deep as the ocean across all Indian film industries,” film critic and author Shubhra Gupta told the BBC. “We won’t find a single female performer anywhere in the country who has not suffered. If everyone came out to complain, it will take us many decades to deal with all those complaints.”
The sordid revelations about the extent of the rot in Malayalam cinema have made headlines and the findings have been debated on primetime TV. Deedi Damodaran, a WCC member, told the BBC that the response has been “overwhelming”.
“Some women have now talked about how they had to flee the industry because of the terrible things that happened to them. They have no evidence, but they’ve got some sort of closure by talking about their experiences.”
Many of them, she says, have spoken out despite being trolled and abused on social media.
The report has also created ripples in other film industries, with calls for reform being heard in regional industries based in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka.
In Telangana, pressure has grown on the government to publish a report on the Telugu film industry that’s been waiting to see the light of the day for two years. An inquiry was instituted after an upcoming actress, Sri Reddy, protested by stripping down to her undergarments in public in 2018 “to draw attention to the sexual exploitation of women in the industry”.
West Bengal has set up a committee to investigate allegations of sexual abuse in the Bengali film industry, actress Ritabhari Chakraborty has said. This, she added, would “cleanse the industry from predators”.
Women in Tamil and Kannada cinema have also petitioned their state governments to improve working conditions for them.
Veteran Tamil actress Radhika Sarathkumar told the BBC that the Hema committee report has created a lot of awareness and that “men will be scared now”.
