From floods to no stenographer: The journey of Hema committee on Malayalam cinema

To keep its contents a secret — several women had deposed before it with their stories of sexual assault and harassment — the committee members, retired High Court Judge Justice K Hema, former bureaucrat K B Valsalakumari and yesteryear actor T Sarada, ended up typing out the lengthy report themselves in the end.

“Unfortunately, we did not get one (a stenographer) to our satisfaction. Therefore, we are forced to type this report by ourselves, though none of us know professional typing. This, we find a tedious task…We wanted to prevent any information which was disclosed to the committee from being leaked out,” the committee report states.

The committee started out by issuing a “public notice” in a Malayalam daily in 2017, inviting people associated with cinema to depose before its members. The notice barely elicited any response, forcing the committee to contact people personally to invite them for meetings. The task proved to be easier said than done.

Justice Hema writes in the report, “We had to spend considerable time to collect correct details and contact various individuals from cinema. When attempts were made to contact them…mostly they were not available on the phone numbers given to us or they would not answer the calls.”

Then, the committee decided to hire an office assistant to deliver notices to the individuals concerned. Since the post was not sanctioned, the committee ended up hiring a daily-wage office assistant to serve notices — only to discover that the film personalities concerned were unavailable at their home addresses. “There was no guarantee that the individuals would appear before the committee on the date and time required…” the committee report reads.

The 2018 floods in Kerala made moving around difficult for both the committee members and those who were to depose before it. The committee chairperson was based in Kochi, one member in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, and the other in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

The committee still worked day and night in their “anxiety to complete the report at the earliest”. On several occasions, meetings were held late into the night to suit the convenience of those deposing before it, the report notes. “There are days when the sitting commenced at 10 am and concluded only at 9 in the night,” the report says.

Since the Kerala government had set a seven-point “terms of reference” for the committee, the three members were to “study issues faced by women in cinema, service condition and remuneration of women in cinema, measures to enhance the participation of women in all fields connected to cinema, how to bring more women into the technical side of cinema, how to help women in cinema when they have to remain out of work for delivery and childcare, how to ensure gender equality in the content of cinema, (and) how to encourage cinemas in which 30% women are engaged in production activities”.

To ensure effective coverage of these terms of references, the committee decided to interview not just stars and leading film industry personalities, but also junior artists seeing as they form the bulk of the industry. Women junior artistes, however, were scared to appear before the committee in person “fearing that they would lose their jobs”, the report notes. Finally, their problems were reported to the committee via e-mails, which are part of an exhibit in the report.

The Indian Express reached out to Justice Hema for a comment on the report. However, she was unavailable for a comment.

The report states that despite all these teething troubles, the committee was able to get questionnaires filled, group discussions held and individual depositions done to collect statements and evidence. The report was submitted to the Kerala government in 2019. Following the intervention of the Kerala High Court, a redacted version of the report was released five years later in 2024.