Back in 1962, KA Abbas made a film called Gyarah Hazaar Ladkian about the problems of working women in Mumbai. The leading lady is in the dock for murder, and when the judge asks her lawyer who he will get as witnesses for her defence, he replies, ”Gyarah Hazaar Ladkian.” The film was, in a roundabout way, about sexual harassment of working women. At the time, there were reportedly 11000 women in the city’s workforce. Abbas and his other collaborators on this film, Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi and Majrooh Sultanpuri were known to be progressives and all for equality for women. Over the opening credits, there are visuals of women doing the kind of work that was open to females over half a century ago— teachers, receptionists, telephone operators, clerks, typists, air hostesses, nurses. Nobody imagined women in top management roles; female doctors, engineers, journalists or lawyers were few enough in number to be seen as exceptions in a male-dominated world. More often than not, women were expected to work till they got married; if they continued after marriage, it was to add to the family income. It was a matter of some shame for the husband that his wife had to go out to work. A woman choosing not just a bread-winning job but a career was still rare.
The title track, written by Majrooh Sultanpuri– Kaam ki dhun mein hain rawaan, mast haseen jawaan, gyarah hazar ladkian—played over women at work. The verse that portrayed nurses looking after male patients had the following words:
Ye jo kareeb aa gayeen, dur dilon ka ghum gaya,
pyaar se haath rakh diya, dard ka jor tham gaya
pahro wafa ki deviyaan sharmo haya ki putaliyaan
gyarah hazar ladkiya gyarah hazar ladkiya
That just their proximity was healing, their loving touch cured pain. In Hindi cinema, in a few films that have the leading ladies playing nurses, they have been tragic (Khamoshi – 1969) or impossibly angelic (Guzaarish – 2010) women.
These thoughts came to mind on watching Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (the Cannes Grand Prix Award winner) about two Malayali nurses working in a Mumbai hospital. Anyone who has ever entered a hospital in Mumbai (or in almost any other city in India), would have come across the ubiquitous Malayali nurse, who is working away from home in Kerala, either supporting her family or putting aside money for her own dowry. They are usually underpaid and overworked but still manage to smile through the days of dealing with misery and pain. The Kerala nurse actually raised the profile of the profession with her brisk efficiency.
In Kerala now, nurses are being trained and being sent out to other countries in the world, where there are shortages of support staff in hospitals. They are usually competent and caring towards patients. It is not at all an easy line of work, and for many years, women who did this job were looked down on, because they had to be in close proximity with men. When women in Kerala had access to education—it was India’s first fully literate state—but not many career opportunities, they took to nursing as a possible profession. At some point, there was a massive migration of workers from Kerala to the Gulf countries. Men provided skilled and unskilled labour, women went to work in nursing jobs not just in the Gulf but also Europe and the United states. These women, upsetting the patriarchy, become Kerala’s largest human export.
Patients constantly making demands on the nurses’ attention and compassion, somehow treat them more like untiring robots than human beings. Kapadia’s film portrays their lonely lives in tiny dingy apartments, in a city that offers outsiders a kind of freedom—of being lost in a crowd—but also invisibilises them. And not just the immigrant from another state; a widowed hospital cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), belongs to a coastal village in Maharashtra, and loses her home to a builder, because she does not have the documents required to prove that she has lived in the tenement for 22 years.
In the film, the two nurses have very different hopes and aspirations. The older, sad-eyed Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is stoic after suffering a huge betrayal. Without her consent her family got her married to a man who worked in Germany. He left after the wedding, never returned and barely communicates over the phone. Prabha either holds on to hope of his return or is too conditioned to be virtuous—she turns down the timidly expressed love of a Malayali doctor, who has far more trouble adjusting to big city life than Prabha.
Her roommate Anu (Divya Prabha) had wanted to be an air hostess, but did not have the courage to defy her father. Away from her hometown, she goes for a ‘forbidden’ romance with a Muslim man. She is uninhibited in her desire for him, but while looking at photos of prospective grooms sent by her mother, worries about the future of the inter-religious relationship.
The two go along with Parvaty to help her settle in her village, and find the open air and sunshine almost therapeutic. It is naïve to imagine that rural life is any easier on the woman—if it were the preferable choice, women would not go to cities to get drowned in a tough life of thankless jobs and carrying the domestic burden. Still, in the film, it is the village that allows these women to find a possible way forward. The women in the film work in a hospital, but life is not too different for any other female in low or mid-level jobs—you see them cutting vegetables in trains, to save time making dinner; they get up early to do the housework, care for children and elders and are caught in an endless cycle of responsibilities.
The trio in the film are real women, commuting in trains and buses, walking in the harsh Mumbai rain, looking for dark spaces for quick intimacy, trying to fit into the “city of illusions,” (as Parvaty calls it) transforming into a different species once they wear the uniform—the trousers or saris more suitable and dignified than the white dresses and bonnets of the British era. They erase their personalities, and become the universal ‘sister.’ It is only after a hospital stint does one appreciate how much the nurses help in healing, simply by being there at the touch of a button. They are seldom thanked enough, so All We Imagine As Light could be seen as a tribute to them.
