Yugantar

Composed as an ode to Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy, ARIA(S) unfolds across three events that create spaces to reflect on violence experienced by women and queer people, their acts of political resistance, and explore grief through ghostly presence. 

This screening spotlights three films by Yugantar, India's first feminist film collective, founded by Abha Bhaiya, Deepa Dhanraj, Meera Rao and Navroze Contractor in 1980. Part of a distinct feminist Third Cinema, Yugantar’s films spark reflections on political friendship, solidarity, demanding labour rights, defying violence against women and collective filmmaking.

The programme starts with Yugantar’s first film, Molkarin (1981), which narrates the process of unionisation among women domestic workers and activists in Pune. It is followed by Idi Katha Maatramena (1983), which centres on its main protagonist, Lalita, as she navigates the isolation of marriage and finds support in female friendship. The film was the result of a collaboration between Yugantar and the feminist research and activist collective Stree Shakhti Sanghatana, provoked by an urgency to broaden discourses and political practice surrounding domestic violence that had previously focused on dowry deaths. Sudesha (1983), Yugantar’s fourth and final film work, concludes this screening in a village in the Chipko forest through a portrait of Sudesha Devi, a feminist and environmental activist. The film focuses on eco-feminist concerns, oscillating between re-enactments of political meetings of the Chipko movement and the daily routines and complexities of securing a livelihood in the Himalayas. 

Weaving together a multitude of voices across region, class and caste, these works accent the crucial role working-class women have played in building feminist consciousness and organising revolutionary action.

This screening is a continuation of ARIA(S), and encourages its audience to reflect on entanglements between the personal and the political. Yugantar’s films propose solidarity, political action, and friendship as antidotes to oppression.