Asanghadithar : Spotlighting Women's Community and Labor Rights Protest in Malayalam Cinema

since the 1960s, women's collectivization in the Indian state of Kerala has been closely linked to labor exploitation dynamics, with women's workforce concerns being ignored in order to firmly establish the status of male (socialist) workers. This article examines the semi-fictional portrayal of the working women's rights movement in the Malayalam-language anthology film Freedom Fight (2022), produced by filmmaker Jeo Baby. It focuses specifically on the Asanghadithar segment by Kunjila Mascillamani, which features Penkoottu, a group of women in Kozhikode (formerly Calicut), Kerala's unorganized labor sector. The analysis aims to illustrate how women's collectivization—a movement that would have otherwise gone unnoticed—was made visible and how male conceptions of labor were rewritten to include female perspectives and histories. Asanghadithar and work by Kerala's Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) can be considered together as paradigm-shifting interventions in the treatment and representation of women. The comparative analysis illuminates the precarious existence of female workers in unorganized labor sectors and highlights the necessity of women's collectivized existence in Kerala's social and political domains. The patriarchal ideas deployed in venues of oppression (the workplace for Penkoottu and cinema for WCC) are challenged by the feminist experimental docu-fictional representation of activist-filmmaker Kunjila Mascillamani.Five to six women are shown climbing a gate and stealthily walking inside a shopping complex at night. They must have planned something out of the ordinary because one of the women asks why they have to do this in the store where she works. The scene is unique because it begins with a group of women who are determined to work together to accomplish a goal on their own. When they attempt to break the shop's lock, two men sleeping in the complex threaten to call the police. The woman who appears to be the group's leader responds vehemently: “We are not here to steal. We have come to build a toilet” (33:01–33:22).This is the first scene of Mascillamani's Asanghadithar: The Unorganized Sector. It features Viji Palithodi, who founded the women's union Penkoottu, along with actors and women workers from S. M. Street (Sweetmeat Street), a shopping area in Kozhikode, resulting in a docu-fiction in which Mascillamani uses the political present to revive the historical struggles of women workers. Asanghadithar narrates the story of a group of women who work in the busy commercial street in Kozhikode known as “Mittayitheruvu” or “S. M. Street.” The group includes women from the lower class who are working in different shops as saleswomen, and the film explores their struggle to access their right to pee in proper toilets and work in a safe environment. Their struggle is juxtaposed with the general apathy of the patriarchal society, which includes shop owners, labor union representatives, and government officials, all of whom try to alienate the women from their identity as laborers.The film stands out through its inclusion of the active feminist labor organization called Penkoottu. Moreover, by fictionalizing and subjectivizing the history of feminist politics ushered in by Penkoottu, the film contributes a regionalized discourse to global labor dynamics and its representations.1 Penkoottu, formed under the leadership of activist and tailor Viji Palithodi in 2009, mobilized women workers of S. M. Street (saleswomen, sweepers, and tailors) and staged protests to demand the right to access toilets during working hours. Their “toilet strike” was a largely successful campaign, even though they had to face multifarious attacks on personal and professional levels.Textual analysis of the film segment illuminates labor's gendered aspects within and outside the film's mise-en-scène. Focusing on the narrative in Asanghadithar as a semi-fictional representation of Penkoottu's 2010 strikes, this article relates female labor debates in Kerala to the Women in Cinema Collective to explore questions about labor and women in cinema spaces. Director Kunjila Mascillamani anchors the analysis of the two gender-based organizations, as her association with WCC and her decision to feature Penkoottu in Asanghadithar open up female labor's complicated relationship with patriarchal unorganized working sectors. The article is divided into three sections. The first situates the docu-fiction in the larger corpus of documentaries and activism in India and argues for Asanghadithar as an archival historical document. The second highlights the political significance of cinema in the context of gendered oppressions by analyzing scenes of Asanghadithar against the backdrop of women workers’ collectivization and protests. The third explores female labor in cinema through a case study involving the WCC and Penkoottu as shown in Asanghadithar.Studies of Kerala's labor demographics have considered issues such as wages, conditions at work, state intervention in industrial relations, social development indicators, and economic production (Heller; Kannan, “Kerala Economy” and “Political Economy”). Historical movements such as the 1946 Punnapra-Vayalar uprising and the 1963 Land Reforms Act have paved the way for worker's rights and later unionization in a generally socialist political environment. There have been discussions in the public domain on the safety and security of workers in Kerala both within and outside the region, especially after the migration of Keralites to Gulf regions. Left-leaning politics and the socialist idealism of the state have led to a utopian vision of labor (Afzal). This quixotic view of labor conditions in Kerala is highly illusionary and lopsided, especially when considered from a gendered perspective. The Kerala Model of Development, which was celebrated due to the relatively empowered status of Malayalee women over other Indian women, paved the way to a misleading silence on female laborers’ contributions and general safety. The complex identity of women in Kerala's public sphere remained largely absent from the social discourses (Jeffrey; Biju; Devika, “The ‘Kudumbashree Woman’”). One of the significant anthropological studies on women workers in the cashew industry by Anna Lindberg argues against the erasure of women's role in protesting against exploitative working conditions and collectivization (155). Lindberg found that although women constituted more than 90 percent of the cashew workforce, men participating in demonstrations (who were relatives of the women workers, students, or labor union members) were more readily recognized. By comparison, the women's role was not highlighted unless an unusual display disrupted the society's codes of morality, as when a woman worker in a 1960 Kollam factory protest tore off her blouse to challenge the violent state authorities to stop her. Lindberg's scholarship on the women cashew workers documents the tendency of Kerala society to frame women workers’ public display of protest as unnatural or an anomaly (156). It is against this backdrop of ever-present anxiety about female collectivization and the deliberate removal of public articulation by female laborers that the protests by Penkoottu and their cinematic documentation have gained such significance. Placing the film's representation of Penkoottu within the larger context of female labor complexities, historian J. Devika argues that “Penkoottu . . . allows us to ‘be for’ all those who struggle against the violence of naturalized gender, invisibilized class, and secularized caste in Kerala, and all women who grapple with the pleasures and dangers of entry into the public through governmental routes” (“Longing for the Future”).Asanghadithar can be seen as a cultural product that resembles a visual archive for the 2010 protest by Penkoottu in S. M. Street, Kozhikode, Kerala. Here, Carolyn Steedman's idea of the archive as functional memorabilia that document a particular moment in history provides a useful theoretical background. Steedman's view of archives’ ability to preserve material “about loss, the search for what has been lost, the dream of finding it, and of plenitude” (“Archival Methods” 22) is aptly complemented by an intervention of fiction in Asanghadithar, which bridges the gap between history and the present. The dynamics of archives are such that although they exist as receptacles of what occurred, the process of fictionalizing events creates a relationship between expression and truth to contextualize history. Fictionalizing the past in a documentary mode gives the filmmaker a historical, ethnographic, and creative outlet to represent history, thereby approaching authenticity in representation (Sikand). In a discussion of Payal Kapadia's much-acclaimed political protest documentary film A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021),2 Debashree Mukherjee theorizes the significance of positioning the past as a testament for the future: “Archives for the future are counterhegemonic meta-interventions into the political status quo,” says Hochberg, and these must be crafted through acts of creative intervention and speculation. The past is not a stable place that can be unearthed once and for all but is what Stuart Hall termed a “positioning” to urge new generations to forge ahead. 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