• Women are not asking for protection of their vaginas – they are asking for the freedom to live their lives as equal citizens.

• The landlord’s son making out with a Dalit girl is a coming-of-age ritual.

These are just two of the many views that bludgeon you in Vinta Nanda’s thought-provoking and disquieting documentary, #Shout. In a little over 90 minutes, the film covers a huge ground, taking into its ambit not just the #MeToo movement, from which it originated, but also the deep-rooted patriarchy and misogyny that has been written into the DNA of our nation.

As a respondent in the film, a transgender, says: “We are not good enough to be regular citizens purely because a sexual harassment case filed by a woman could lead to a punishment of seven years whereas a transgender getting raped gets only six months.”

The matter-of-fact nature in which the interviewee puts this across only serves to highlight the agony that permeates every word. And the hopelessness of the situation.

You realise – yes, women have an uneven playing field, but the issues the film highlights are not circumscribed by that. And that there are nuances to the debate that we do not even think of. As Tara Kaushal, author of Why Men Rape, says, the discussion on rape has to account for the fact that there’s a whole different dynamic at play when we talk of it in the context of a marriage or when a sex worker is involved. How do you address the fact that ‘stalking’ is seen as a courting ritual than as an offence or as trespassing?

There’s also something intrinsically wrong with a society where a labourer is made to pay with both his arms and a leg for daring to speak up against the rape of his minor daughter in the way Bant Singh of Mansa was. One of the most harrowing and at the same time inspirational passages of the film tells his story – and that brings another dynamic into the dismal picture: that of caste. If there’s one thing as unfortunate as being a woman in this country, it’s being poor and a Dalit.

#Shout is not an exercise in agitprop

The range of respondents that the director has interviewed is striking. There are academics and writers like Urvashi Butalia and Nirupama Dutt, who bring their experience of the feminist movement in India to bear upon the narrative. There is journalist Namita Bhandare who argues cogently how the conversation in #MeToo tended to become a case of ‘she said/ he said’ – the woman’s word against the man’s. There’s Sabita Lahkar from Assam, a journalist who alleged sexual harassment at the hands of a leading journalist and a Sahitya Akademi award winner way back in 2003.

And there is Bhanwari Devi, whose ordeal led to the landmark Vishakha guidelines in 1997 and The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. It is with a sense of awe that you listen to Bhanwari Devi narrate not only the ignominy she was subjected to – imagine the accused in the case being acquitted on the ground that her husband couldn’t have passively watched his wife being gang-raped – but also the vast reserves of fortitude that comes through in her responses on camera.

What’s also commendable about #Shout is that it does not become an exercise in agitprop. It would be easy to approach the subject with anger. And much of what Vinta documents does leave you seething. However, the anger here is leavened by an intrinsic understanding of the fact that haranguing against or blaming any one section of society serves no purpose. And that there are no overnight solutions in a country that lives in many centuries at the same time. That lends #Shout an elegiac tone that’s impossible not to be moved by.

What also adds to the film’s ‘objective’ take is Vinta’s own history – she was one of the prominent voices in India’s #MeToo story. Against that background, her decision to leave herself out of the narrative is a brave one, and one that gives the film a rare distance too.

It must have been tough to condense such a vast spectrum of narratives – the filmmakers had to restrict the number of respondents to 55 – in the span of 90 minutes, and you wonder if the film runs the risk of paying lip service to the issues. The narrative does get somewhat diffused in the last quarter of an hour, when the background score, otherwise well-modulated, tends to sound a trifle at odds with the tone in the rest of the narrative. However, as Vinta argues, none of these issues can be seen in isolation, and each aspect flows into and is born of the others.

This is an important work. And a bleak one

To Vinta’s credit, #Shout does not lose sight of the little details even when being aware of the larger picture. Justice Sujata Manohar, who was part of the three-member bench which formulated the Vishakha guidelines, has two of the film’s rare amusing moments. Reminiscing on one of the first cases involving a women barrister in Indian jurisprudence, she narrates how the woman was handed a case that she could not possibly lose. When she expressed her surprise at being given the responsibility, something that the male lawyer could easily do, she was told that her client wanted her to take it up only to inflict on his adversary the humiliation of being defeated by a woman! Not much had changed decades later when Justice Manohar was asked if she was in the profession looking for a husband.

These off-the-cuff insights give the film its potency, coexisting with the fiery poetry of Amy Singh or the debate on how a woman’s body becomes a playground for scoring political and religious points.

This is an important work. And a bleak one. Watching #Shout brought to light the fact that there’s a whole world that we are simply not aware of or concerned about. And that in the era of social media everything comes with a 15-day sell-by date. Not a single region of the country emerges unscathed from the filmmaker’s scalpel.

If there’s Asifa Bano in Kashmir, there’s the rape victim in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, whose father died in judicial custody under suspicious circumstances. If Bhanwari Devi and Roop Kanwar are the shame of Rajasthan, Manorama Devi of Manipur remains a blot on our collective conscience. Dr Sister Jesme of Kerala (recounting her abuse at the hands of a priest) and Bilkis Bano of Gujarat – the malaise runs deep and wide.

After all, what do you say about a country where almost all the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes of sexual predation have been rehabilitated in major literary, cultural and political circles. #Shout is a film that puts the whole country in the dock.

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film and music buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer