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IN a patriarchal world, women often find themselves labelled as mental patients trapped within institutions without their illness having been diagnosed before institutionalising them. Come with Me is a revealing 52-minute documentary that celebrates the triumph and hope of women who were once thought of being patients with mental disorders. The film has been screened across Delhi, Chennai, Bangladesh, WHO in Geneva and recently, in Kolkata in collaboration with Swayam, a noted NGO that works with marginalised and oppressed girls and women. This documentary, produced by Anjali, has been directed Gautam Bose. Come with Me narrates the story of four women who are located in different geographical, social and economic spaces but tied by a common string. While they belong to different strata of society, caste, educational background, and have access to different resources, the common string that binds them is that they are all survivors of domestic violence, have experienced mental illness, and were incarcerated in government mental hospitals at some point in their lives. The four women who feature in the film are Golaap Khatun from Howrah in West Bengal, Renu Tiwari from Benaras, Uttar Pradesh, Jayanti Karmakar from Hooghly, West Bengal and Jhilmil Brekenridge from New Delhi. Except Jhilmil, the three other women have been reintegrated in the community by Anjali as part of its hospital-based capacity building and training initiative in government mental hospitals in West Bengal. Anjali is a rights-based organisation committed to mental health services, policy and advocacy through a gender lens. Anjali believes in partnership and works with the West Bengal Government, municipal authorities, media and civil society across India to establish mental health as a critical development agenda across India. Gautam Bose, the director, has been making documentaries for 30 years. As a development communication professional, Gautam has used the film to help people from diverse backgrounds communicate effectively with one another. His creative output ranges from biotechnology-learning videos for farmers to critical social documentaries on women, migration and mental health. Gautam’s audience is equally varied — his work has been screened along the coastal villages of Kerala, in National Geographic channel as well as at the UN. Asked how and when this unusual and courageous film happened, Bose says, "In March last year, I went with my team to do a small video documentation of MaD Summit organised by Anjali in Sevakendra in Kolkata. We interviewed three women, who were helped by Anjali. After I edited the rushes and showed it to Ratnaboli Ray who heads Anjali, she said we should make a longer documentary. After meetings and discussions with Ratnaboli, we came up with an idea that this video should be the narrative of a few women who were incarcerated in mental hospitals and are now out. I asked for some money. Anjali went to several organisations and people for sponsorship and we started shooting the video. It took us eight to nine months to complete the shooting because we needed to travel to talk to these women." Three of the four women, namely Golaap, Jayanti and Renu were known to the team personally and they readily agreed to become subjects of the film. But the team did not know Jhilmil, who currently lives and works in Delhi, is highly educated, independent and works from home. She did not refuse to become one of the subjects when Anjali approached her. The film neither clearly states nor shows what mental illnesses these women were suffering from or whether they were even ill at all. They were caught by the police when they seemed to be in a desperate state. One was caught and incarcerated by the police when they found her loitering aimlessly on the streets. Jhilmil created a major scene screaming at the top of her voice in the hospital ward where her husband was undergoing treatment. Are these signs of mental illness? It shows how tragically judgmental the family, police, medical fraternity, mental institutions and the law are when the victims are women who act ‘differently’. The universality and democratic nature of domestic violence and the resilience of these women to survive the trauma of having been incarcerated in badly maintained mental homes for long spans of time comes across strongly. Golaap Khatun with a little daughter stays with her mother. She is learning tailoring and embroidery to become independent and educate her daughter. Jayanti Karmakar cooks and cleans for an organisation to make both ends meet and has her daughter with her. Renu Tiwari has married again and lives a reasonable life of content with her husband. Jhilmil’s is perhaps the saddest story. She lives alone because her husband took away her three kids, migrated to the US, and cut off all contact. Her parental family refused to support her. If you are a woman, and you laugh loudly, you are eccentric. If you are very quiet, you are depressed. If you talk too much, you are uncontrollable. If you do not talk at all, you are abnormal. This is how the society stands on judgment. In this scenario, is mainstreaming possible?
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