– Sreepriya Ramesh
Bombay-based filmmaker, artist, and columnist Paromita Vohra boasts a fun, conversational style when it comes to her writing or her documentary filmmaking. “It is a chance to express myself in a way that shows that pleasure and seriousness can coexist,” she said. Talking to her showed that she embodies this fine balance – lounged casually with chocolates in hand, we discussed sexuality, art, writing, and everything in between.
Paromita is known for documentaries that deal with a range of topics, from urban life to pop culture, from desire and sexuality to gender, but her most prominent film – and the one that introduced me to her – is “UnLimited Girls”, released in 2002. A witty, stylistically innovative film, “UnLimited Girls” addresses discussions of feminism through a chatroom, where the character Fearless embarks on a journey of debate and discussion about the different interpretations of feminism, exploring the ways in which feminism plays out in real life.
“It was a chance to make a film I wanted to see,” Paromita told me, when I asked her about the making of the film, which she counts as one of the highlights of her career. As a film born from a specific moment in time, defined by her own desires and unique style, it is suffused with her characteristic touch of seriousness and pleasure.
Her column, “Paro-normal Activity” written for the Mumbai-based newspaper Mid-Day, has been running for fifteen years come this April, and all throughout this time, Paromita Vohra has used her own style of “Hinglish” – an English tinged with Hindi, that plays fast and loose with language, to make her column engaging and entertaining.
Her attitude towards the act of writing is fascinating; rather than seeing her writing as having some sort of power to influence, she sees it as an effort to understand herself. The development of her style emerged out of a search for a way of doing work, saying what you want to say about the world without being unkind to others and invalidating the self.
“Be like you,” she said. “Writing requires your voice, and what you are interested in talking about.”
Perhaps it is this investment in the self that made her art installations so personal yet wide-reaching in their scope.
A wild explosion of the senses, her projects deal with the way people interact with the world around them. So Near Yet So Far, for Project Cinema City, is an installation focussed on the intersection of telephones with desire. It aimed at exploring the liberation that comes with the tools of modernity, as she pointed out, they split the person and the voice, creating a sense of distance and unknowability. The sensuous quality of hearing a voice, leaving most else to imagination is a marker of the confusion of senses akin to the cinematic experience, which splits the senses based on sight, sound, and other senses. Of course, there’s so much more to this than just the senses, bringing to light the glamour of people like secretaries and call operators, along with the ideas of migration and the sense of leaving home without actually leaving home. The tangible connections between people remain a constant point of focus in this exploration of the desire that expresses itself through the phone. Honestly, it seems to me to be incredibly fun that a complex, multi-dimensional project like this was simply born out of her own fascination with the telephone when she first got one in her house – “I just found the idea of a phone really sexy,” she told me.
She didn’t stop here when it came to making the mundane and everyday something magical. Her second art installation – A Love Latika, for Five Million Incidents, was a multimedia installation featuring a creeper in a forest of animated flowers, each of which recited an erotic poem when a listener clicked on it. The viewers of the installation were encouraged to indulge in the sensuous pleasure of sound, and what made it truly participatory was the fact that they could produce their own erotic poetry at the end of it. “Some of them came up with really beautiful pieces of their own,” she said, and it made me think of the way we hide so much of ourselves, only to be found when we have a discreet, hidden opportunity.
This opportunity is exactly what Paromita’s brainchild – Agents of Ishq – produces. “The internet gave me a youth,” she said at her talk titled A Woman Thinking, “and the internet is the home of sex.” She is the Creative Director of Agents of Ishq, which was started as an attempt to create a little niche in the internet for herself. The internet forces all of us to put on a mask when we enter it – I’m definitely not the only one who got the Stranger Danger talk for online spaces – and Agents of Ishq was built to help people navigate this in-between space. By creating a space where people could talk about their own experiences, be it personal or sexual, or anything in between, it opened the grounds for discussions that we would otherwise not have, scared of the repercussions in a conservative society. Primarily, it tried to address two questions – What would you like to see? What questions would you like answered?
By making sure that the language was accessible and hip, but recognizing and not endorsing, Agents of Ishq allows people to participate in what Paromita called the “Creative commons of emotion” – where personal experiences are private enough that they’re not fodder for gossip, but public enough that you can always find someone with a similar experience, just to feel like you’re not alone. She spoke to me about how it was never meant to be the collaborative space that it is today. It was simply meant to be a space where she could express herself, but when so many people found it engaging and wanted to participate, all they could do was put in the effort to support and participate in the give-and-take relationship that blossomed.
“Agents of Ishq simply provides an artistic intervention. We take the stories that come, and make them into their own narratives, and we never make it sound like we’re endorsing it.” The framing of a narrative in itself is a freedom when it comes to being heard; people can know that a platform such as this exists, where you can learn through the act of play and whimsical posts about languages and styles, enjoy the pop art and find your own space on the internet.
Discussing her approach to Agents of Ishq naturally led into a discussion of her approach to filmmaking, considering the way that they function – “extracting” for the lack of a better word, personal narratives and stories and framing them to create or understand a larger picture.
“Documentary filmmaking is an inherently extractive process,” she told me, “And the camera controls the narrative. Despite speaking freely off the record, I’ve seen people cry on camera because they didn’t want to criticise their parents in front of it.” She also spoke candidly about her own experiences feeling uneasy and uncomfortable in front of a camera. This is where she found her own style, one that allows the subject their agency, and one that is less of a top-down process and more collaborative, where the subject is guided towards speaking without feeling forced to make confessions that leave them feeling uncomfortable.
The idea of cultivating a personal style and embracing the self is foremost in any creative individual’s mind. Paromita Vohra is a figure who has found that steady balance of being true to herself while expressing her styles and ideas to the world. So, I asked her how she navigated the public-facing world.
“It’s important to know that somebody will always be unhappy,” she said. “Moral policing happens all the time, but the act of writing for a tabloid creates a distinct style.”
Paromita went on to talk about the importance of finding the right tone of storytelling to make sure that you were telling the story in the way you wanted it to be told. Writing itself is primarily a political tool, as she sees it, since her position as a writer in a tabloid allows her to be more potent, more political. But above all, if you want the world to listen to what you have to say, you have to say it beautifully, and you have to say it in the way you want to be heard. Her advice to anyone following a creative path was no earth-shattering piece of wisdom. It’s something we’ve all heard at different points in our lives, but she put it poignantly when she said that being free or following your own path will not get you conventional success. It will be a long road, but if you stick to it, if you keep honing your craft, if you keep building your identity within a community that teaches you and helps you grow, you will gain so much that cannot be quantified with money.
Speaking to Paromita Vohra was like speaking to a personal superstar. Her writing inspired me to explore my own writing style, searching for a way to be free and fun, while being serious and participating in a larger world. Her films unlocked my own horizons, making me an UnLimited Girl in my own way, and I think it would only be fitting to end my account of my conversation with her with a quote she pointed out to me.
In the last scene of UnLimited Girls, she references Theodore Zeldin – “The conclusion I draw from the history of slavery is that freedom is not just a matter of rights to be enshrined in law. The right to express yourself also leaves you with the need to decide what to say, to find someone to listen, and to make your words sound beautiful.”
We all have the ability to speak. We all have people who listen. We can all learn to cement our places in the world, one story at a time.
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Edited by Yatin
Design by Vasuki
Article 19 