Bastis to big screen, how these mast mahilas tell their intimate stories

“Recording ka button kidhar hai, Madam?" Laughter erupts. This is how the documentaryMast Mahila Mandali (Cool Ladies Club) begins. With women having fun. In 2024, ten women from ten bastis in Mumbai’s eastern suburbs participated in an experiment in filmmaking—they were to document each other’s lives for a feature-length film, shot entirely on smartphones. What began tentatively in kitchens, terraces, maidans, and gullies has, two years later, found its way to a special screening—on April 28 at Regal Cinema. There's excitement, but also an undercurrent of apprehension in the group. “My family knew I was making a film, but they didn’t know I’ll be on screen. My scenes were shot when no one was home,” grins 35-year-old Vaishali Mane. She spilled the beans to her husband a day before the team came over with an invitation card to the premiere. He was shocked to learn about her secret enterprise. A week before the screening, the ten filmmakers, along with their Chief Facilitator and Co-Director Shilpi Gulati and producer Supriya Jan, gathered for their first media interview at the Chembur office of the nonprofit CORO India. “The idea, initially, was to document the learnings of CORO's Right to Pee campaign, a 15-year grassroots development programme built on sanitation rights and access to clean, safe toilets in the working-class neighbourhoods of M East Ward," says Jan, the Lead for CORO’s Grassroots Knowledge Building Initiatives. Adopting the organisation’s participatory model, an open call was issued to community women, inviting them to submit five photographs shot on their phones of anything that caught their eye. “We wanted to understand their artistic sensibilities, about how they look at everyday life,” says Gulati. Fifty entries were pared down to ten, with a mix of community toilet operators, community health volunteers, sanitation workers and homemakers. Every Saturday for 18 months, the women would assemble in the CORO office in Shell Colony, Chembur, for lessons in filmmaking, led by Gulati, a National Award- winning filmmaker and faculty member at the School of Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. They were paired up and each pair handed a smartphone. On the very first day, Gulati asked the team what film they wanted to make. While many initially wanted to keep toilets at the centre, the focus shifted over the course of the workshop. As they filmed one another and grew closer, they began to foreground themselves—as lynchpins of development in their communities and fulcrums of their families. “We didn’t want people to turn on their TVs to see toilets, toilets, toilets everywhere,” said Nazneen Siddiqui, one of the directors, as they began to workshop the film. “We wanted to show how the women themselves were living their lives,” says Gauri Rane. The vignettes they shot would reflect the individual, while also shaping a collage of the communal. The phones were provided by a research project titled ‘Gendered Access to Digital Technology’ currently active at TISS and led by Gulati. Funded by the American Jewish World Service, its aim was to study how digital technologies can be used by communities in articulating self-expression especially among women and young adults. “We didn’t realise that an entire film could be shot on a phone,” marvels Kavita Ghuge. Alongside lessons in the techniques of phone filmmaking were discussions on the art of interviewing, participatory storytelling, narrative building, and the feminist impulses shaping what they wanted to capture, and how. Two broad questions served as the film’s compass, guiding the course of its interviews: Who were you? And who are you today? “Initially, we were unsure about what we wanted the film to say, but we were certain of one thing—it shouldn’t be a rona-dhona film about how run-down the bastis are or how wretched our lives are,” says Anjum Shaikh. And so, the women are seen playing kabaddi, taking joyrides on their bikes, heading to the gym, and dancing. Rehana Shaikh, Anjum’s sister, was initially reluctant to be filmed. Encouraged by the others, she appears in several scenes, talking about her plans to go to Dubai for work and her love for dancing. In one winning scene, her hair wrapped in a towel, she dances with abandon in her kitchen to Aaj Ki Raat. “I dance when I’m stressed, I dance when I’m depressed… It helps me forget my problems. My husband says I shouldn’t dance because I’ve become fat. He says the ground shakes when I dance. But I won’t stop.” Darshana Mayekar says that without a script, they plotted scenes, visualised how to shoot them, mapped camera angles, and framed interview-style questions for each other. "How do you manage your day job and housework?” Rane asks Sheetal Navle. “It has to be done, so I do it. Sometimes, I ask my husband and kids to pitch in, but my husband complains, 'This is what you learn at your training?' I point out that if I can do his work, why can’t he do mine?" The film shines with small acts of routine rebellion. It occasionally lights up with love. When asked what love means, Kavita Khomne shyly responds, “To be there for each other. I am proud of my navra (husband).” And glows with homegrown wisdom. “Adjustment is an art only women know well,” says Navale wryly, working a masala grinder. In a telling scene, Nazneen Siddiqui rides a bike with Kadam and Khomne perched pillion—the latter in the middle, shooting themselves on a selfie stick. “If we meet with an accident, which of us four will you save?” she asks Siddiqui. “But there are only three of us,” Kadam points out. “The phone's the fourth. Jaan jaye, magar phone na jaye.” In their hands, the phone transforms to an all-access pass to their inner lives. Siddiqui says: "We didn't all know each other and were initially hesitant to share our lives with strangers. But we were all comfortable with the phone; we could speak freely to it, and through it to the person behind it.” Now that the film is complete, they are excited to see how it will be received. Some are curious about how BMC officials—with whom they interact regularly, and who have been invited to the premiere—will perceive them. “When filming in our communities, people wanted to know what we were filming and why," recalls Usha Deshmukh. They were filming themselves, says the team, to show that no matter where they live or what burdens they bear, there's room for every woman in the Mast Mahila Mandali.