Idi Katha Maatramena

Idi Katha Maatramena is an improvised fiction film, affectionately called Yugantar’s ‘hit’ film. In the midst of the very active autonomous women’s movement in India, Yugantar collaborated with the research and feminist activist collective Stree Shakhti Sanghatana, provoked by an urgency to broaden discourses and political practice on domestic violence that had focused extensively on dowry death. Through an intense period of a consciousness-raising style sharing of their own varied and multi-layered experiences of violence and domestic pressures, members of both collectives created a script which focuses on isolation and depression and develops a complex female character in the process of articulating her situation and finding support in female friendship. Given the prescribed screen presence of female characters in other Indian fiction films at the time, Idi Katha Maatramena radically expands the figure of woman as victim and subject. Lalita, the female protagonist, is a working woman who studies and runs a household, who is crushed by the many demands on her, including having a boy child. With Idi Katha Maatramena, Yugantar’s third film, the collective shifted to a fiction format and collaborated with another collective of mainly middle class women. Idi Katha Maatramena travelled extensively, spoke powerfully to diverse female audiences and sparked debates amongst feminist activists. Filmed within one week, with limited resources and enacted by members of the collectives, the film’s capacity to speak to multiple experiences appears equally strong today.