‘Why can't you be serious and funny at the same time?' ’
- Independent Ink
- Jan 2
- 10 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
"You laugh, you are choked up, you're curious, you're leaning forward, you're sighing. All these things should happen to you when you watch the film. You should be intellectually stimulated. You should be physically stimulated. You should be emotionally stimulated."
By Baishali Chatterjee
Baishali: This brings me to this question about the stories that you have featured in the film. And I understand that the professions were guided by the research project. But the specific women that you spoke to, how did you decide that these women's stories would fit best into the documentary or align best with the vision that you had for the documentary?
Paromita: I mean, for me, I think in all my films, my process is really about chemistry. It's like you meet somebody and you just respond to them—and they also respond to you. They make you curious. You want to know how they think and see the world. And you follow that interest.
I don’t look for people to be in my films by checking boxes . I look for people who are articulate , who can speak about their own lives, from whom I'm learning something. Every single person we spoke to in Working Girls are all different from each other. You tell the tale from the point of view of the women. You're not telling the story from the point of view of lawmakers, researchers, scientists, medical practitioners.
You’re telling the stories from the point of view of the voices that are missing from the conversations.
Baishali: I really resonate with what you’re saying about creating space for women to speak for themselves. The question of sex work, for instance, has been quite divisive even within India. In that context, when sex workers tell their own stories, they not only speak powerfully to audiences, but also open up space for such narratives to be heard more widely. Was amplifying those voices something you were consciously aiming for through your work?
Paromita: There is a history of exploitation in sex work. Let's not pretend there isn’t. There is a history of caste oppression to sex work. Those things are true, but there are parallel truths, and we have to speak to the people in sex work and in other marginalized professions as they define what they need and what they have to say.
Baishali: Both sex work and surrogacy, as explored in your film, engage deeply with questions of bodily autonomy and control — essentially, who has the right to make decisions about one’s body. In the Indian context, the moral and legal dimensions of these issues also seem to challenge our conventional notions of what constitutes the public and the private, as well as the idea of choice, which often appears blurred between the two. Was this blurring of boundaries something you were consciously seeking to bring out in the film?
Paromita: The thing is what are the choices that you are enabling for people? The system only enables certain choices for people, right? Like when the system pushes people into the underground market because of moral reasons (such as on commercial surrogacy) and therefore leaves that space unregulated, it creates a ban, not a regulation. Then it doesn't enable people to have the best circumstances for making a choice.
But people still have to live. Taking away choices which people still need to make, and therefore stigmatizing those choices or criminalizing those choices is not an enabling situation. So, for me the question of choice is not the real thing. The question for me is what is it that you're enabling for people?
Again, you do not stigmatize the risks that men take in order to survive. Never. You don't stigmatize a man who goes on an illegal visa to Saudi Arabia. We empathize, right? You empathize with his oppression. This gap between empathy and morality is what doesn't allow gender and caste to be dislodged. And the way in which gender and caste are intimately intertwined, it becomes very visible to us when you start thinking about invisible labor.
Baishali: Your films often explore what might be considered ‘serious’ subjects, yet your approach feels refreshingly irreverent — you weave in animation, music, and playful devices like Yahoo chat rooms in Unlimited Girls. Would you say this reflects a distinctive filmmaking style or a philosophy of your own, where you consciously blend diverse elements?
Paromita: I'm an artist. That's who I am. So, I have a certain kind of artistic voice, and that's the voice in which I make my films. You may hate it; you may love it. You may be ambivalent about it. That's up to you.
And we seem to have a definition of art into which this does not fit. I see my own style as a challenge to that definition of art. This notion does exist that we should speak about certain subjects with a very serious face. That there should be solemnity and sobriety and asceticism in the way that we talk about certain subjects. It’s seen as an ‘authoritative’ tone, aka it makes you an authority.
This is a kind of control. It's a masculine way of thinking. It's an upper caste way of thinking. And it is a very stupid way of thinking. That you cannot be serious and funny at the same time.
This is a thought that governs so much of our cultural output, and this is a thought that governs who we think matters in this world and what art we think is important.
So, for example, if you connect this to the idea of care work, then the film which makes you laugh is not valuable. The politics which makes you care for each other is not real politics. I am totally against these mindsets. I find them ridiculous. It's all a form of creating hierarchies and keeping that hierarchy going.
So, I don't subscribe to it. And I believe that humor and seriousness, academic thought and popular culture should all be on the same plane. They are all equally important.
I mean, and I want to emphasize, I don't think that academic work is not beautiful, exciting and important. It is. But it's just as important as the insights that we get from popular culture. Both are same-same, but different. in my work, I would love to value everything equally. I would love to value your emotion and your intellect equally.
And I try to make a film which when you watch it, you are both feeling and thinking at the same time. You don't know which is your feeling, and what is your thought. They both become intertwined. And that you respond to the film with your body.
You laugh, you are choked up, you're curious, you're leaning forward, you're sighing. All these things should happen to you when you watch the film. You should be intellectually stimulated. You should be physically stimulated. You should be emotionally stimulated.
You should watch the film with the whole of you.
So yeah, the films are funny. The films are irreverent. The films are also very affectionate and compassionate. I feel that compassion is a central quality that allows us to make films which are funny, entertaining, and engaging.
Would you like the story of your life to be told in a highly boring fashion, or would you like it to be told with beautiful music in it?
For me art dignifies people and. experiences. As an artist what can I do for somebody who's struggling so much? Almost nothing. Yet, I hope that my film will make people think differently. I hope it will change their political imagination and therefore their political actions.
But, at heart, if somebody is giving us their story, the least I can do as an artist is to cherish it with beauty and music and poetry and laughter -- not flatten it with self-important solemnity.
Baishali: What you said about approaching your subjects with compassion and allowing them the space to speak for themselves really stood out to me. It feels quite distinct from many films made by filmmakers from the Global North about India, which, even today, often seem to frame their subjects through a lens of victimhood. Was it a conscious choice on your part to move away from that narrative and offer a different kind of gaze?
Paromita: There are a lot of narrative styles imposed by the Global North because documentaries usually come from the Global North or are funded by the Global North. So even if an Indian filmmaker is making a film with global North money, the style of storytelling enforces linearity. This is the fundamental thing -- that it has to be linear, it must only be about one thing or one person, and it must have a beginning, middle and end so that life is told in unitary terms.
So, the story is usually on the lines of how a person was a victim, and then she overcame her victimhood. But life is not linear, except for birth and death. Now between that line of birth and death, we take a million diversions and so many strands of life intersect.
So, if I were to tell the story of my own life, I would find it hard to encapsulate it into a linear narrative. I wouldn't want it to be focused on the difficulties alone. When I speak about my own life, I speak of it as an adventure. In any adventure tale, there are some challenges and there are some successes. So similarly, other people's lives are also adventure tales. They have so many adversities. Some of those adversities ground them down, some of those adversities they overcome or are still grappling with. And in all of that there is a lived wisdom that they have which holds insights for all of us.
We – Indian, South Asian, Asian, call it how you will, we come from very different storytelling traditions. Why should we erase these qualities in the service of some form of less-ness which is termed elegance or labeled art by a very particular institutional nexus of festivals, distributors and platforms?
We should revolt against it rambunctiously and wholeheartedly
So, to give you a concrete example, what attracted me to the Laws of Social Reproduction project is in fact the multiplicity of intersecting narratives, and intersecting professions. That it was more, not less, in which it sought to find connections. And I just feel like the global north keeps forcing you to make a linear tale which arrives at a conclusion as if the meaning has been understood in advance.
In life meaning is only over when we die. And so, meaning is continuously being made and by living, people keep changing the meaning of things. I think because the global north control storytelling to such an extent that we are seeing more and more stories around us becoming very linear and then all the forms which are not linear are stigmatized or at best patronized as quaint.
Baishali: if you reflect on your journey as a feminist filmmaker from Unlimited Girls in 2002 and now Working Girls in 2025, are you still the same person or has your journey as a feminist filmmaker evolved between the two films?
Paromita: I mean, how can I be the same person? That means I've never grown up in 23 years! I'm fatter. I'm older. I have more aches and pains. I think one does evolve, right?
Like when you're young, you're very, very keen to express yourself, and so much of the work that you do is very focused on self-expression. And then over time you begin to condense that.
At least for me, I feel my voice has become much more condensed. I want to give a very simple example. In my earlier films, I was always in the film where I'm playing a persona -- Fearless, or the goddess Annapurna. That was also part of the playfulness of youth, a very exuberant form of filmmaking, wanting to assert, wanting to experiment. Then over time that changed, and the film itself has become a kind of condensed form of presence, and therefore I'm able to more comfortably be less present in the films physically.
I feel a certainty about my own voice telling the story.
So, for example, in an earlier time, I would have struggled to find a way to make a film about rights and inequality and retain the playfulness. Now I have evolved a means or an artistic approach to doing that. And I would also say that in my earlier work, I was more willing to please people, whereas right now I'm not so bothered about pleasing people – though I always believe in respecting the audience’s right to pleasure.
Baishali: Maybe that's also something that happens with age.
Paromita: Yes, it does. See, the thing is that with feminist ideas, you're always being asked to make other people feel comfortable. But Working Girls is meant to discomfit at every level. Unlimited Girls is really trying to invite you in, and you know it's provocative in a very playful and non-threatening manner. Working Girls is less non-threatening. It's a much more direct kind of social and artistic questioning and it wants to take the viewer out of their comfort zone.
Baishali: Thank you Paromita for this very insightful conversation.
Editor’s Note: This is part two of this interview and the concluding part. This conversation is part of a series. Please also see the first interview of Paromita Vohra -- link below. It's on home page as part of the lead stories in independentink.in
'Can commercial surrogacy, sex work, or erotic dance be called as work?'
Also see: Dangerous sex, invisible lives
An insightful interview on sex work, domestic work, erotic dance, paid and unpaid housework, commercial surrogacy, egg donation, and other issue concerning women’s rights in society. Baishali Chatterjee in conversation with Dr Prabha Kotiswaran, a faculty at King’s College London, and also the Principal Investigator of the project, on the different dimensions of the Laws of Social Reproduction project.
Baishali Chatterjee is a senior development worker with over 20 years of experience advancing gender justice across the Global South. She has led transformative programmes on gender equality, SGBV, climate and gender, and women’s economic justice. She holds a postgraduate degree in social work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She's currently based in Bangalore.
Photos courtesy Paromita Vohra.