Oscar Nomination for Film on India’s Marginalized Women Writing with Fire

An all-women team of reporters from marginalized communities who record India’s barren heartland may give the cinema-crazy country its first Oscar-winning film after their own story became a critically lauded documentary.

The journalists of Khabar Lahariya (Waves of News) have built a huge following across Uttar Pradesh, a northern state with a population more than that of Brazil, covering a beat that runs from cow thefts to sexual violence and corruption.

According to AFP, these women have earned the respect of their village communities by covering local stories often overlooked by the country’s established media outlets, but only after a persistent battle to be taken seriously by authorities – and even their own families.

In fact, even stepping outside the household was a big challenge, said reporter Geeta Devi, adding, “I had to fight many battles.” Her father was dead against her venturing out. He said, ‘You can’t do this work, this is not something that women are supposed to do.’”

As with some of her colleagues, Devi is a member of the Dalit community, the lowest rung in India’s rigid caste system, and victims of an entrenched culture of prejudice and humiliation for centuries. Formal discrimination against Dalits was abolished a long time ago, but they are still often barred from entering temples or houses belonging to privileged castes, and remain targets of discrimination and violence.

1 Giving Hope

Some time ago, Devi interviewed a woman rendered destitute after she was abandoned by her husband in In Banda, a riverside town a few hours’ drive from the Taj Mahal. As word got around that a Khabar Lahariya reporter was nearby, others approached her to implore coverage of their own woes – municipal neglect leading to a lack of clean drinking water and dirty, overflowing drains.

Some women even took her aside to privately share their stories as victims of sexual harassment and violence – issues often hushed up under the weight of small-town stigma. As members of a marginalized community and women in the deeply patriarchal villages of the Hindi-speaking heartland, Khabar Lahariya’s correspondents have a unique insight into local affairs, and Devi says she is proud to be part of a team working with a “feminist lens”.

“The men here are not used to seeing powerful women, especially in a field like journalism. But we are changing that outlook,” she said. “We have proved that if women are given the right opportunities, we can achieve anything. Once you give women the freedom they deserve, you simply cannot stop them.”

2 Writing With Fire

Their endeavors are the subject of ‘Writing With Fire’, an Oscar-nominated documentary that has taken the film festival circuit by storm and already won the Special Jury Award at Sundance. The fly-on-the-wall narrative shows dedicated journalists preparing to transition from their legacy newspaper operations to digital production, unbowed by their encounters with dismissive police and fearsome local strongmen.

“It’s a very inspiring story. It’s a story about women who give hope,” Rintu Thomas, the film’s director, said at an Academy Awards preview event in Los Angeles. “I think that is very strong and powerful, especially in the world that we are in right now where there is so much mistrust of the media,” she added.

Incidentally, India is home to the world’s most prolific film industry and cinema holds a rarefied place in national culture, with stars enjoying the almost divine status and people often queuing to watch the same movie multiple times.