A woman’s worth: Paromita Vohra’s new documentary ‘Working Girls’

By Neha Kirpal

The value of a woman’s work can never be overestimated. After becoming a mother eight years ago, I particularly marvel at just how much a mother packs in in a day – and how much of it is thankless, often goes unnoticed, or is taken for granted.

Mumbai-based documentary filmmaker, screenwriter, installation artist, curator, actor, teacher and writer Paromita Vohra’s new longform documentary film, Working Girls (2025), is about labour, identity, sex, history and law.

The film is based on research by the Laws of Social Reproduction project, which studies women’s reproductive labour across the marriage-market continuum, from unpaid domestic / care work and paid domestic labour, to sex work, erotic dancing, surrogacy and egg donation.

The project demonstrates the law’s role in producing and entrenching the invisibility of women’s reproductive labour in these sectors, while also offering a comparison of the law’s highly differential regulation of these apparently disparate forms of female reproductive labour.

In her research for the film, Vohra traverses through the red-light districts of Madurai, Trivandrum, Hyderabad, Shillong, Latur, Pune, Mumbai as well as Sonagachi in Kolkata. She captures her time spent with dancers, sex workers, farmers, ASHA workers, egg donors and job aspirants, who are worldly, politically articulate and incredibly poetic in their resilience.

The two-hour, 15-minute-long film – which is available in English, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam – has been produced along with many collaborators, including Nishant Radhakrishnan Mukul Kishore, Tanushree, Achuth S, Gissy Michael and others.

One of the featured women is P Kausalya Devi, an old Karagattam dancer in Madurai, who does all-night shows of the art form, which is known to be performed for the gods. Coming from a family of dancers, she began dancing while in school, and has been performing for 15 years. Apart from dancing, the art form involves making jokes on stage in front of an audience and even performing dangerous acts like dancing with fire on glass bottles.

The performances have become more glamorous and sexier over the years, says Kausalya, who incurs an expenditure of ₹40,000 on costume and jewellery. When she started, she would earn a meagre ₹1,500 per show. Over the years, the amount has doubled. Moreover, it’s not always easy for her to get her money, she says.

We kicked off Labouring Bodies, Unjust Laws with a full house for Paromita Vohra’s @parodevi groundbreaking documentary capturing the lived experiences of ‘Working Girls’ in India, followed by a riveting discussion with Shrayana Bhattacharya @BShrayana and Prof. Sanjay Srivastava pic.twitter.com/jrb8fWUcGQ

— Laws of Social Reproduction ⚖️♀️ (@LawsOfSocialRep) July 22, 2025

The documentary also features Aadal Paadal events in Tamil Nadu, in which women dance on stage to an applauding audience, comprising mostly men. In 2010, there were reportedly 10,000 women dancers in the state. They earn between ₹4,000 and 5,000 a day. The women depend on the income for their livelihood and to run their families. Unskilled to do any other work, most of them also love their job and the excitement they feel while on stage.

In Pune, a sex worker wants to become financially independent of her partner. Though it challenges traditional values of marriage and family, she believes that it reduces chances of exploitation and violence for her. Sex work, though not illegal, is not legalised in India. Under such circumstances, much work of this kind becomes ‘invisible’. But what Vohra highlights in the film is the fact that these women are also equal citizens of the country who vote in the elections like others; their voices need to be heard.

In village Takli in Maharashtra’s Latur, Vohra meets a housewife and mother who slogs through the day. Like all unpaid care work, hers too is hard to quantify. She can never afford time off or a holiday. Despite all of this, it is unfortunate that the Court has fixed a mother’s contribution at a mere ₹4,000 a month.

Whether in offices, fields or at home (there are reportedly 30 million domestic workers in India), the plight of women workers is the same everywhere. But as the film proves, they relentlessly go on – whether due to lack of choice or because they’d much rather continue than be dependent on anyone else.

The film goes on to talk about related aspects, such as surrogacy as well as HIV and AIDS awareness in the nation. The film also highlights the work of Pune-based community-based female sex workers collective Saheli Sangh, which is committed towards resolving the issues and concerns of women in sex work.

Some of Vohra’s previous documentaries on subjects such as urban life, desire, pop culture and gender include Q2P (2006), Where’s Sandra? (2005), Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City (2004) and Unlimited Girls (2002).

She co-founded Agents of Ishq, an award-winning online platform for positively representing sex in India through various media forms. Over seven years, the platform has reached over 24 million people online and has been showcased as one of 10 global sexuality projects of excellence by UNESCO.

After screenings in Delhi, Working Girls will next be screened at Max Mueller Bhavan, Bengaluru, on 2 August 2025 at 5 pm, and at Alliance Francaise, Chennai, on 5 August 2025 at 6 pm.