Let's Talk About Women | Shut Up Sona tells the story of every woman

In the column Let’s Talk About Women, Sneha Bengani looks at films, the world of entertainment, and popular media through the feminist lens. Because it’s important. Because it’s needed. And because we’re not doing it enough. No space, however public or private, has ever been safe for women. Why, then, the digital space would have been any different? So, it’s as dangerous as an unlit street in Haryana after 7 PM or a girl commuting on a public bus in Kolkata. Sometimes, it’s even worse. For in a country where an abominable few of all the reported rapes result in a conviction, what hope there is for “insignificant” cybercrimes such as relentless trolling and threats of varying degrees by nameless, faceless accounts? You need to scroll through only briefly the pages of women with public careers who dare to use social media to amplify the issues they care about to see the kind of filth and harassment that comes their way each day. Swara Bhasker, Rana Ayyub, Sona Mohapatr a, the list is long and vitriol shameful. _Shut Up Sona_ opens the doors and lets you into the life of Mohapatra, a singer and performer who has famously, conveniently been labeled troublemaker for trying to use her powerful voice off the stage too. The documentary that released on Zee5 on July 1, is Mohapatra’s answer to the question she’s been asked countless times in innumerable ways all her life—how dare you? Shot and directed by Deepti Gupta, Shut Up Sona packs in a lot in its 85-minute runtime. It’s constantly on the go, much like the woman it is centered on. We see Mohapatra rehearsing, her easy camaraderie with her band members. This is where she creates. We also see her in the dressing room, sitting restlessly on the make-up chair, trying to get the notes right backstage as her crew transforms her into a force ready to stir up a storm. We then see her on stage, channeling her internal rage through high-octane performances. This is where she demolishes, conquers, reigns supreme. However, Shut Up Sona is as much about what her life is like when she is not performing or rehearsing. From naming Anu Malik and Kailash Kher during the #MeToo movement to calling out IIT Bombay’s cultural festival Mood Indigo for not including female headliners in its lineup, taking on Vishal Dadlani and Salman Khan for using their star power to further the skewed status quo in the film and music industries, and angering a Sufi brotherhood with her clothes, Mohapatra has a full roster at any given moment. To a point where her husband, singer-composer Ram Sampath, has to remind her that all her activism can shift the focus of her music. But that’s exactly what forms Shut Up Sona’s core. Its real win is in how it fuses the various facets of an explosive personality in a way that’s meditative. It’s in how it focuses on the inconvenient, the uncomfortable, and the seemingly unnecessary without reducing it to a rant. And finally, it’s in how by telling the story of one woman, it tells the story of every woman. Mohapatra has always been a misfit. And yet, she’s always wanted to belong, longed for sisterhood, a girl’s club, if you will. Since she has found none so far in her time and age, she looked everywhere she could for “artists who go beyond just entertainment, want to affect a change, and want to leave behind a better place than what was before they started.” Her search ended in Meera Bai, Amir Khusro, and TM Krishna. Tracing Meera’s life, she takes us to her martial palace in Chittorgarh and then to Vrindavan where the misrepresented ascetic spent her last few years, devoting all her time quietly rebelling through music and hymns against a society deeply disturbed by her all-consuming love for Krishna. Mohapatra next takes us to the Dargah of Amir Khusro in Delhi’s Nizamuddin. She is barred from offering flowers to the revered saint and singing with other qawwals there because of her gender. Tough it irks her at first, she gets the better of the situation and ends up jamming with the men there who tell her how their women, no matter how gifted, are not allowed to sing in public. She also visits her hostel in Bhubaneshwar where she lived during college. Though it was modest and strict—girls were locked in after 7 PM, she says it was markedly better compared to where she came from. Mohapatra is her unfiltered self in the entire documentary, a fierce, feisty woman wading through everyday sexism and misogyny. But this is one of the few sequences in which she allows herself to be vulnerable. It is parts like these and her dining-table interactions at her home with Sampath, where the two discuss how to best address the unrelenting controversies and various lawsuits against her, that make Shut Up Sona real, raw, and therefore, rare. The documentary is also a stinging critique of how the media loves to whip up a circus, drowning all possibilities of critique and conversation in its deafening noise. The debates are so loud and the interviews so gimmicky, that it’s laughable. No, it’s deplorable. Cringy. Shut Up Sona also takes into account the personal cost of standing up to ideals. Mohapatra’s disagreements with Sampath, her being canceled by various institutions after she called out IIT Bombay, her being dropped as the judge of SaReGaMaPa after she accused Kher and Malik during #MeToo, and her oscillating between cases and controversies make up just the surface of the turmoil. The waters run deep. They run turbulent. [caption id=“attachment_10876601” align=“alignnone” width=“300”]  Shut Up Sona![/caption] In one particularly poignant short, she reveals how her parents have not tuned in to her new radio show even once. This, despite her repeatedly telling them to do it and sharing photos of hoardings and other promotional material on the family WhatsApp group. She reasons it could be because they fear what they might hear on the show. “I don’t blame them,” she says ruefully with a smile, one of the saddest I’ve ever seen. The documentary premiered at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in 2019 and is now streaming on Zee5. You should watch it. It’s every bit worth its 1.25-hour runtime and the subscription fee, even if you don’t watch anything else on the streaming platform ever again. When not reading books or watching films, Sneha Bengani writes about them. She tweets at @benganiwrites. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.