Holy Rights begins with a familiar motif from Islamic life worldwide: the azaan. What follows is less familiar. As the camera pans from a kite flying over Bhopal’s crowded skyline, to snapshots from everyday life in an evidently not-posh locality, and settles on a woman passionately addressing a group of women about their rights in Islam, it becomes obvious that this Hindustani documentary’s focus is a Muslim entity that Indian fiction feature films and news media have largely not sought to make a part of the mainstream public consciousness: the Muslim woman feminist.
The speaker on screen, Safia Akhtar, is exhorting her listeners to stand up against the unjustness of instant triple talaq, which was, at the time of shooting the film, legal in India due to its permissibility in the country’s Muslim Personal Law. Holy Rights – for which director Farha Khatun picks up her Best Film on Social Issues trophy at the National Awards function today on 25 October – is about Indian Muslim women’s decades-long struggle against the practice, an NGO defying patriarchal resistance in Indian Islam and training women to become qazis (experts and practitioners of Islamic law), and the battles fought both within and outside the community to secure women’s rights.
“We are Muslims but we do not know how we should spend our lives or what we should do,” Safia tells her listeners in that opening scene. “At the most we are taught how to tie a scarf, that our hair should not be visible, that we should stay veiled and confined within the four walls of our homes, that we should serve our husbands, give birth to children and take care of the house, and then be told that we do nothing. Those who teach us about our religion tell us only this much – they only tell us our duties, they do not tell us our rights. We are never told that Allah (God) has also given us rights. But who exercises their rights the most? Who does it?”
As she smiles and looks around, a chorus of voices replies: “The husband.”
Safia grins at the response and says: “Toh aadmiyon ke haq aur auraton ke sirf farz (So men’s rights and for women, only duties).”
Holy Rights busts multiple stereotypes, not just the widely prevailing stereotype of Muslim women as silent and helpless victims of their circumstances, but also of who a feminist might be. The NGO, Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), initiated the qazi training programme for women shown in the film and had vocally supported the petition in the Supreme Court by an individual Muslim woman, Shayaro Bano, that led to the Court declaring the practice unconstitutional in 2017. BMMA’s co-founders Zakia Soman and Noorjehan Niaz are present in Holy Rights, and it would not have been unfair at all on the part of the director to make them the centre of the story. Certainly that would have been an easier path than the one she has chosen since they are well-recognised activists who have been visible on English news TV. However, even while acknowledging them, Farha Khatun tells her story through Safia, an elderly activist living in a congested residential area in Bhopal who does not speak a word of English. These defining characteristics do not fit even the liberal stereotype of a progressive, yet as Holy Rights shows us, Safia is a fiery, defiant woman who even risks her safety and her place in her beloved religion to challenge patriarchy.
Farha also throws light on the heterogeneity in social rebellion through a charming moment between herself – she remains off screen throughout – and Safia in Holy Rights. The latter is deeply religious, performs namaz as prescribed by her faith, and gently chides the young documentary maker on discovering that she is irreligious in that scene.
Although the danger to Safia in her journey is only hinted at through a passage where the camera appears to stalk her on the lonely walk to her house, we see a concrete instance of potential hazards in another scene when Holy Rights covers a rally organised by the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board in Kolkata. On being approached for interviews, some women in the audience turn antagonistic towards the film’s team and demand that they stay quiet.
Meanwhile, the man on the mike at the meeting equates the hunger and thirst of poor Muslims with the legal challenge to triple talaq. Without saying a word, Holy Rights here offers a brilliant illustration of patriarchy’s universal strategy within marginalised and minority communities: the strategy of using genuine grievances – exploitation, poverty, government apathy – as a cover for the oppression of women within the community itself.
Farha was acutely aware of the other risk of making a film critiquing patriarchy in Islam at a time when Muslims are under attack in India. In an interview for this article, I ask her if she was not afraid that Holy Rights could be appropriated by majoritarian elements to further target the community.
“I was concerned about this of course, considering the situation the whole country is going through,” the Kolkata-based 33-year-old says. “But the thing is, it is important to talk about the issues of women too.”
She points to the death of a woman protestor earlier this year during the farmers’ protests in north India and how crucial it was that farmers’ supporters did not remain silent about that incident although it could have destroyed the movement’s credibility. “A larger movement will go on but we as women cannot sacrifice our concerns all the time for the benefit of that larger movement,” she says.
Women of minority groups are often told though that they should postpone publicly airing their objections to gender inequality within their communities to a later date “when the time is right”. Farha replies: “There will never be a perfect time for us. In the last so many years Babri Masjid happened, the Bombay riots happened, so many riots happened all over the country, so when will we (Muslim women) talk about our own problems?”
Nevertheless, while making Holy Rights, she was conscious of the potential for misuse, and one of the ways she guarded against it was by ensuring that “in the film I tried not to make any one person a villain because the societal practice is the villain for me, not a person.”
The portion that follows, however, is where Holy Rights slips up. After the Supreme Court verdict on triple talaq, many activists had strongly objected to the present government’s bid to appropriate the movement with the Triple Talaq Bill (now an Act). The new legislation goes beyond outlawing instant triple talaq and instead criminalises it such that Muslim men in India now face a jail term for this practice, which is not a punishment meted out to men of other religious groups who abandon their wives. Holy Rights shows clips for arguments that were made against this law in Parliament, but does not provide sufficient clarity on why a section of the Opposition stood against the Bhartiya Janata Party on this. This part of the documentary is confusing for anyone not closely following this news, conveying a mixed-up impression of who in this context was an actual ally of the Muslim community and who was being opportunistic. I ask Farha if this was so because she hesitated to outrightly condemn a political party still in government for their act of weaponising a justifiable fight by Muslim women. She says this was not her intention and that she believes she has made her point clearly.
Holy Rights then is not without its flaws. Apart from this problematic patch, it also does not offer a comprehensive understanding about the prevalence of triple talaq in India beyond the north. It is, all the same, a film to be celebrated for multiple reasons, not the least of them being the recognition it has rightfully received for throwing light on the difficulties of combating gender inequality within a community that is under siege from external elements.
Holy Rights has so far been screened at film festivals across the world and India, it won an award at the Regina International Film Festival in Canada just this August, was on the programme of this month’s Tasveer South Asian Film Festival in the US, and has been selected for the prestigious International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala.
“The (triple talaq) movement got hijacked so my entire team wanted to be careful that this film shouldn’t be hijacked,” says Farha, now a two-time National Award winner. “That is why we made sure that we mentioned the beginning of the movement, the Shah Bano case when the conversation around triple talaq started, that many organisations were part of it – we deliberately kept this information in the film so that people don’t think that this started four-five years back, that these people changed the entire scenario and rescued all women.” She laughs as she utters these words, a laugh that mirrors the delighted expressions of the women at the function shown in Holy Rights when they receive their qazi certificates and the unbridled joy on the faces of Safia Akhtar and others on the day the Supreme Court verdict was delivered.
Holy Rights reminds us that these are not women seeking knights on white stallions to save them – like women of all marginalised groups, these are leaders in their own right who may seek allies but never saviours on their path to justice and equality.
(Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad)
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