State of Southasia #09: Anna M M Vetticad on the gender reckoning in Malayalam cinema

Film journalist Anna M M Vetticad explains the landmark Hema Committee report and how it has sparked a reckoning over the discrimination and abuse facing women in the Malayalam film industry.
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On 19 August, the government of the Indian state of Kerala released 233 pages of a report on gender discrimination in the Malayalam language film industry based in the state. The government released the report six years after it was commissioned and more than four years after it was first submitted. The report has come to be called the Hema Committee report, named for the chairperson, the former judge K Hema. The other two members of the committee were the veteran actor T Sharada and the retired civil services officer K B Vasalakumari. The committee was constituted after a group of actors and artists called the Women in Cinema Collective petitioned the government to look into conditions in which women in the industry were made to work. Film journalist Anna M M Vetticad, who has followed the story for years, says that only the persistence of this collective has ensured the report’s release.
The report contains depositions from several senior and junior artists and workers, both women and men. Based on these depositions and their own inquiries, the authors of the report found rampant abuse - sexual harassment and assault, demands of sexual favours for entry into the industry, the lack of facilities like toilets and changing rooms on sets, the lack of security measures in transport and accommodation, gender discrimination in renumeration, silencing women with threats of bans and much more.
Since the report was released, a number of women have made allegations of sexual misconduct against men in the industry, triggering another #Metoo wave. The government has constituted a special investigation team to look into the allegations. But Vetticad points out that the sexual abuse, while horrific, is only a symptom of larger systemic problems in an industry that needs structural change from the ground up. She speaks to Himal’s Nayantara Narayanan in this episode of State of Southasia about the findings and flaws of the report, institutionalised misogyny in Malayalam cinema on-screen and on set, and why this is a moment of reckoning for all of India’s film industries.
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