MUMBAI: When Indian actress Divya Unny flew into the southern state of Kerala in 2015, she thought it was for a business meeting with an award-winning director about a role in his upcoming film.
Instead, she was called to the director’s hotel room at 9 pm, where the man propositioned her for sex and told her she would have to make compromises if she wanted to succeed in the film industry.
“You always hear of actresses getting called by directors to hotel rooms at night, but I didn’t think twice because I was going in with a reference,” she told Reuters.
Unny said she rejected the advances of the director, whom she declined to name, and left without a role in the movie. Reuters was unable to confirm her accusations.
Three other women involved in India’s film industry, the world’s largest, told Reuters that Unny’s experience isn’t unique. But even after allegations of sexual assault and harassment levelled at Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein prompted a wave of similar complaints, Bollywood has been reluctant to name and shame perpetrators.
“The way men are being called out in Hollywood right now, I don’t know if it can happen in India,” said Alankrita Shrivastava, a director whose last film, “Lipstick Under my Burkha” was acclaimed for its examination of women and sexuality.
“In terms of how our psychology is, how patriarchy functions, it is much more entrenched,” she said.
The vast majority of Bollywood’s biggest producers and film-makers are men, many from prominent film families who until recently controlled most of the industry.
Mukesh Bhatt, who co-heads production house Vishesh Films, said India’s film industry should not be singled out and was limited in what more it could do to prevent harassment.
“What can we do? We cannot do any moral policing,” Bhatt, told Reuters in a telephone interview. “We cannot keep moral cops outside every film office to see that no girl is being exploited.”
The industry also had to be cautious about false allegations, said Bhatt, who was previously the chairman of apex industry body, the Film and Television Producers Guild of India.
“I am not saying men have not been exploitative. They have been for centuries. But today’s woman is also not as simple as she pretends to be,” he said. “But just as there are good men and bad men, so also there are women who are exploitative and very cunning. Also blatantly shameless to offer themselves.” He declined to provide any examples.
Despite laws requiring Indian companies to form internal committees to investigate sexual harassment at the workplace, very few of cases are reported to the police, said women’s rights activist and lawyer, Flavia Agnes.
“They (companies) may have a committee or they may not have one. They may do an investigation or they may not do one. And they may or may not file a complaint. It could go wrong at every stage,” she said.
Reports of sexual assault, while rare, are not unheard of in India’s film industry.
Earlier this year, Gopalakrishnan Padmanabhan Pillai, a popular actor in the Malayalam film industry best known by his stage name Dileep, was arrested by police who accused him and several others of kidnapping and molesting an actress. Dileep denies the accusations.
“He says it is a completely false case. He was framed by the police and some enemies,” B Raman Pillai, a lawyer for Dileep, told Reuters.
Fans cheered and distributed sweets as he walked out on bail last month after more than 80 days in prison. The police haven’t filed formal charges in court, after which a date for the trial would be set.
“We will file a charge sheet in the next two weeks. Maybe next week,” Biju Paulose, an inspector of police in charge of the case, told Reuters by phone.
Kangana Ranaut is one of the few Bollywood actresses who has publicly spoken out about the sexual assault and harassment. Ranaut, who has appeared in 30 films in the past decade, told Reuters she had faced “severe sexual exploitation and harassment at the work place,” without elaborating.
“I’ve read some stories (about harassment) shared by few prominent people, but most people find it hard to open up about such experiences,” she said. “Victim shaming is very common in our society, it’s done brutally and openly.”
According to a survey conducted by The Indian National Bar Association this year, around 70 percent of Indian women said they would not report sexual harassment at the workplace because they weren’t confident about the complaint mechanism and because of the stigma attached to victims.
Shrivastava, the director, said the kind of cinema Bollywood often produces demonstrates its attitude toward sexual harassment and assault.
For example, two of this year’s hit movies — “Toilet – Ek Prem Katha” and “Badrinath Ki Dulhaniya” — showed the hero stalking the leading lady, taking pictures of her without her knowledge.
“For decades, we have created cinema where harassment is depicted as love,” Shrivastava said. “And that reflects the mentality of the creators – that they keep portraying it, and excusing it in the name of commerce.”
In the wake of Weinstein scandal, some women say Bollywood failing to address harassment
In the wake of Weinstein scandal, some women say Bollywood failing to address harassment
Saudi stars on show at third Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale
- Selected works from some of the local artists participating in this year’s exhibition
Nouf Al-Harthi
‘On the Red Sea’
Al-Harthi, who was born in Asir, is, according to the exhibition catalogue, “an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and storyteller whose practice moves between sound, poetry, and music.” In a new commission for the biennale, she contributes this performance and poetry recital, which “focuses on sea sawdust, a type of marine bacteria that forms blooms during the hottest months.” As they decay, they turn from green to a reddish-brown, and it’s believed that the sighting of slicks of these bacteria is why the Red Sea is so named. In her piece, Al-Harthi uses sea sawdust “as a lens for deconstructing the relationship between human and non-human,” the catalogue states. “Reading the sea and the waves as sites of knowledge production, ‘On the Red Sea’ shifts our perspective through the biological and the mythical, weaving a network of envirionmental, historical, and linguistic relations.”
Ahaad Alamoudi
‘The Run’
The Jeddah-born multidisciplinary artist’s 2025 video features in the exhibition’s “Disjointed Choreographies” gallery, in which, the catalogue says, “artists grapple with their relationships to the past, celebrate the legacy of historical and cultural figures, and tells the stories that shape their world.” Alamoudi’s film shows a solitary runner “traversing printed banners that display static images of the very ground they occupy. As she runs through them, the land itself remains immutable and silent. The only sound is the steady rhythm of footsteps … amplifying both the futility and persistence of forward motion.” The video was shot in NEOM and “invites us to interrogate the narratives embedded in shifting lands — how symbols, screens, silences, and the cadence of sound shape our collective imagination.”
Leen Aljan
‘Takki’
The Jeddah-born architectural designer’s installation for the biennale is a giant takki board (takki is a card game similar to Uno) consisting of “modular, inhabitable forms made out of reclaimed wood from the tracks of the Hejaz Railway, which connected Damascus and Madinah. On the benches and tables are traditional folk games that are no longer played — or modernized versions of them.” The piece’s composition “echoes classical Hejazi courtyards and tiled interiors.” All of this ties into Aljan’s wider practice, in which she “investigates the intersection of cultural memory with sensory experience and spatial design.”
Mohammad Al-Ghamdi
‘Untitled’
This is one of three of Al-Ghamdi’s pieces on display in the biennale’s “A Hall of Chants” gallery, in which the works “map our complicated relationships to place and language.” The works are all mixed media on wood, and the catalogue describes them as “simultaneously contemporary and archaeological.” They are, it continues, “composed of reclaimed fragments carrying traces of social life, including a cable spool, decorative motifs, and a drawing on wood.” The artist is quoted as saying: “My work is not a nostalgic attempt to relive the past, but is rather an endorsement of the power of the past to create the future.” The works “invite viewers to witness the upheaval of matter and consider the enduring possibilities that reside within what is often overlooked, discarded, or deemed obsolete.”
Ramy Alqthami
‘Al Bitra’
The Jeddah-based artist’s work at the biennale is a collection of three photographs and a sculpture, created in 2014. Alqthami has “reconfigured a numbered concrete post — originally issued as a traditional marker of land ownership — into both sculpture and image” in the piece, which “originates in a personal history tied to (his) tribal roots in Saudi Arabia’s Taif region, where his family was assigned such a post to demarcate their land.” The post is the sculpture, while the photographs “point at its original location, shifting the marking stone from a local gesture of governance into a visual symbol.” It is a work that is supposed to invite a variety of interpretations, the catalogue states, “including as an instrument of power residing in the liminal space between ancestral knowledge and legal contracts.”
