All in a Day’s Work for the Marriage Cops

In one of the circumstantial quirks which abound in the continuum of life, I happened to see Shashwati Talukdar and Cheryl Hess’ intimate and observational documentary of an all-women police station in Dehradun, days after the police brutality on protestors asking for CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation in Delhi on 13th October.

The screening of Marriage Cops, on the 22nd of October at the Bangalore International Centre, would not have had too many in the audience with kind and sympathetic thoughts about the police. In the wake of the videos of brutality we had witnessed by personnel of both genders, our minds were full of images of woman Constable Chanchal Yadav pulling, pushing and beating NSUI activist Ritu Barala from Rajasthan, all the while taunting and asking her if her “neta” or leader would be able to save her now. Young people being carted away in buses and vans, and dropped at distant locations at night where they were vulnerable and without means of transport – all this had been reported by dozens of independent journalists with phone cameras, and made the police appear like violent zombie arms of the state, implacable enemies of the very people they were meant to protect.

At BIC, just before the screening, Shashwati Talukdar spoke about how and why she had decided to make a film about the all-women station that ran a police helpline for women in Dehradun, her home town. More than any other forms of exploitation and oppression that women were facing and reporting to the helpline, she found that the majority of women approaching the police were seeking solutions to their troubled marriages and the conflicts that arose in homes due to interfering in laws, financial stress, and custody battles over children.

The most visible and active part of the all-woman police station is the counselling room where couples come and register their complaints about each other. After this, they follow a process where they appear before a team that is present at the station every Thursday, consisting of a lawyer, a psychologist, a social worker, and Sub-Inspector Sandhya Rani, the station in charge. Shashwati Talukdar describes how, the initial preparation for the film was a process of discovery as the answer to the question – what is the state doing in our bedrooms?

The preparation also involved proving her credentials to the powers that be, in order to be given the permission to shoot inside the police station. Her mother was roped in, and had many cups of tea with senior police officers who gauged the family’s Dehradun roots and overall suitability. However, after this nearly year long relationship had been established with the administration, the filming crew were not disturbed or harassed in any way, and had a free hand to record what they felt was essential.

The result is a film with the grainy texture of close observation, and the tender, detailed nuances of true storytelling that draws us into the lives of women, their work, and their families in Uttarakhand. The sleepy looking compound that houses the women’s helpline at one end of a roundabout, the corridors full of anxious faces, women draped in shawls and clutching infants or toddlers, the uniformed women with neat hairdos who need to have and show immense patience, all start creeping closer to the heart of the audience with every minute of the film’s unfolding.

Marriage Cops lays bare the gamut of roles the helpline women have to perform – scolding, comforting, reminding, questioning, reassuring. A migrant women with no fixed address who is given an appointment to present herself with her husband, and wonders how he will even land up when he has been avoiding her, is told succinctly: “Don’t worry, he will either come, or get picked up.” A police team duly goes to his address with her, and she is accompanied by a woman constable. The long arm of the law is visible, even if it remains restricted to the domestic arena.

The camaraderie that the women enjoy as co-workers is a really heartening part of the film. As we begin to understand why Constable Pushpa Jha is crying because her transfer to another office has not come through, we feel more solidarity and admiration for her when, after a lunch that has revived her spirits, she declares, “Come on now, am ready for whoever’s next in the battlefield!”

For that’s what it is – a battlefield. The institution of marriage, threatened by mothers who would rather swallow poison than be separated from their more than 30 year old sons, by fathers who are happy to see their sons drive cars received as dowry, but cannot teach them to respect their wives, by crippling unemployment where young lovers who have been in an obsessive relationship from college days find they don’t have the resources to raise a child together. As the helpline police women struggle with their own responsibilities even as they face days full of the difficulties and despair of their sisters, it is clear they are fulfilling social needs far in excess of what can be described as a police person’s job.

As for the men, Marital Cops resists the temptation of making villains out of all the male characters. The narration leaves enough room for us to see how men are fellow humans who are also suffering, particularly from the constraints imposed by poverty. Of course, their individual faults are being given a much more lenient reception by society at large, outside the helpline, and they are quite aware of this.  This becomes clear even in the flirtatious wink that one of the characters offers to the camera a couple of times, doubtless because they are women filming and recording. Ah well, what else will he expect? All his life he has learnt society around him offer justifications, like “Boys will be boys.”

Whether it is women fighting to retain control of their lives, and care for their children, or men struggling with family expectations and unemployment, Marital Cops brings us a close look at that India that we may be hearing of only as numbers, when we are whizzing past in Vande Bharat trains or flying above. It’s the people who make up our country. And we would do well not to forget it.