New film explores why Mumbai is no place for single women

A new film tells tales of difficulties single women face when house hunting in Mumbai

A still from the documentary, Bachelor Girls; (inset) Shikha Makan

Nine years ago, when filmmaker Shikha Makan had first come to stay in Mumbai, she had an experience she would have liked to forget but chose not to. One night, she was harassed for returning home late from work and was sent a notice to vacate the building in 24 hours. This experience made her explore if there are more people who have faced such trouble. The response was overwhelming.

Gradually, this formed the seed of the film, Bachelor Girls, which is also her voice of resistance against the social forces responsible for such harassment. The film will be screened at an event organised by Ministry of New, followed by a panel discussion featuring Kalki Koechlin, writers Aishwarya Subramanyam and Siddharth Bhatia on problems faced by independent, unmarried women.

"I worked on the film for two years, completing it early this year, and there was so much material that I had a tough time editing it. So many women had nightmarish tales to tell," she says. Given the taboo on professions like the media, she started to talk to people from different and relatively conventional fields like law, banking and even research to discover similar experiences.

"It is not just limited to one profession or area, there were cases in Mahim, Matunga, Powai, Andheri -- practically all over the city," she recounts. Makan agrees that single men too find it difficult to get a house, but with women, she points out, there is an extra level of morality and character assassination involved.

"Men have been migrating for a long time now. Women migrating for work is still a new concept for the urban middle class," she explains. Though nothing much explains the bizarre discrimination faced by women and alarmingly it is increasing, feels Makan. "I do not have numbers to compare. But I did speak to senior actresses like Deepti Naval, and she gave me a different picture.

It seems like things have changed from her time," she says. Ponderings of this kind — whether Mumbai, after all, is as free as we would like it to be; if things are changing for better or worse — will be the theme of the discussion that will follow the screening. .

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