by Sam PC

The Mobile Girls Koottam is a six-year project, which aims to be a dialogue of women and work on wheels, dipped in the aromas of chai and biryani. 

How did this begin?

I am a multi-disciplinary storyteller who has worked across theatre, film, television, research and new media for the last 12 years. Whatever the job, I have always enjoyed trying to see the enquiry at hand as platforms for dialogue and story-making. I started my career as a theatre director and found joy in creating stories that mattered to the group of people we were workshopping with. Beginning with Shakespeare sagas adapted as contemporary satires, my work traveled across forms becoming immersive, surreal, introspective and satirical as my actors informed me through their life journeys. Over the years, I jumped from one production to the other, while surviving on Tamil-to-English translation and transcription gigs. 

In 2013, I was called to direct a non-fiction series for a Tamil television channel, where we narrated the stories of everyday things. I had been reading thinkers like Henri Lefebvre, exploring the idea of the everyday in my theatre work, and scripting this show on everyday things like salt, water and cancer… The television channel was trying to do something that could have transformed how we looked into the idiot box, my box of white noise that helped me live a life of neuro-divergence. However, an impatient corporate management and the inability of artists to streamline converged in a tussle and the channel chickened out of trying to do anything new. It went back to its comfortable business model of piggybacking on celebrities’ secrets. 

A large group of us lost our jobs, the collaborative space we had so carefully created, and more importantly, our voices as collectives. With a few colleagues, we began questioning how to create a free and accessible space for collaboration. In November 2013, we launched Radio Potti, an experimental Tamil and English podcast channel, with free streaming.

I spent the first few months learning to use the technology to run such a website. An era of no Anchor or Spotify. I curated theatre plays and interesting interviews I found from the public domain, but was still on the lookout for real stories.

The Thesis

I found my audio recorder’s home while working with Madhumita Dutta, an activist I knew from the Vettiver Collective in Chennai, who was doing her PhD research on labour geography with the University of Durham, UK. She was documenting the lives of women workers in a mobile phone factory in Sriperumbudur, Chennai. Though she had been active in this field work for over a decade, she preferred a native Tamil speaker as her interpreter. In February 2014, I began travelling with her to a small rented house in Kanchipuram where a group of these women workers lived together in Muthu’s room (as everyone called it). Abhinaya, Pooja, Satya, Muthu/Lakshmi, and Kalpana were all around my age, 23 to 27 years old. The conversations were natural, noisy and fun.

The Mobile Girls

Abhinaya comes from a small town in Salem district and belongs to the Nadar caste. After her father became ill, as the eldest sibling she had to take on the responsibility of earning for the family. Vaazhndhu Kaatuvom Thittam, a government scheme on poverty alleviation funded by the World Bank, had organised recruitments for Nokia. Despite her mother’s fear of a young woman surviving alone in the city, Abhinaya moved to the city and joined Nokia in 2007. While she worked at the factory, she was also very proud of finishing her degree in correspondence. When I had met her, she had already applied for the next course. 

Lakshmi comes from Paramakudi in Ramanathapuram district and belongs to the politically powerful Thevar caste. She finished her twelfth standard and briefly pursued studies in college, when her mother’s illness had become grave and she began understanding about the financial difficulties in her family. In 2008, her mother suggested that she attend a job fair conducted by the same government scheme and got a placement in Nokia. She was quite weary about the new things this work and life was to bring her. She dreamed of settling down in a peaceful family life back in her town as a homemaker. She was saving up for gold to place a decent dowry for herself. 

Pooja is from Salem and belongs to the Adi Dravidar (Scheduled Caste) community. She had been supporting her family working in various small jobs, when she saw a newspaper advertisement about Nokia’s job recruitment in 2007. She got placed without any idea of what factory it was and what they made. She just wanted a job to keep her family running. When her father died in 2010, her mother and younger sister moved to Kanchipuram to stay with her. When they went back to Salem she moved into Muthu’s room. Her family depended on her salary.

Satya was the youngest woman in Muthu’s room. She is the daughter of a weaver from Tiruvannamalai district. She wanted to be a policewoman, but failed her physical fitness test. Her parents’ earnings from weaving wasn’t enough to support a family of five. So, both Satya and her elder sister started waged work after finishing high school. In 2010, she joined Nokia. However, her heart was always set in a government job. She was very keen on being financially independent. 

Kalpana comes from Ariyalur District and belongs to the Adi Dravidar community. She is the eldest of nine children and learned very early in her life to take on family responsibilities. Her relationship with her father was traumatic as she had witnessed and subjected to emotional and physical abuse. He had abandoned them to pay off his debts. Kalpana started work as a daily wage worker. As enterprising and sharp as she is, in 2008, she was selected by a Christian charitable organization, Velicham Trust, to do a ‘women’s leadership training’, where she met a Dalit social activist, Santhana Mary who deeply inspired her and initiated her into Dalit identity politics. A few years later in 2011, Kalpana quietly decided to convert to Buddhism (without the knowledge of her family), a religion which Dalit leader Babasaheb Ambedkar encouraged Dalits to embrace to exit the discriminatory caste practices in Hinduism. Some years later her father came back promising to get her a job as a clerk in the Tahsildar’s office in Trichy. Unfortunately, when she moved in with him she realised that he had taken her to cook meal for contract workers who worked in a coconut grove. The physical and emotional abuse continued, until a particularly violent episode gave her the anger to leave. At this time Nokia was recruiting workers in her village, and she aced the written test and interview. She felt like a caged parrot being set free. Kalpana was very actively engaged with the worker’s union and the Dalit activism around the city. 

I had at first taken up this ‘translation and transcription gig’ as just that, a job. I come from an inter-caste family with roots in the theatre and cinema industry, with a history of transgression and activism. My parents had moved to Hyderabad to set up a film school with Ramanaidu Studios. I lived with three other men, an actor, a marine biologist and a designer. All three of them were ‘freelancers’ and the money at home was meagrely waiting for one of us to get a good payment. My life and its daily ideas of work was very different from the girls in Muthu’s room. After I lost my job at the TV channel, there was hardly any money in the house. Madhumita was paying out of her pocket for these visits and I looked forward to them, for both meeting these women who made me forget my worries, and for the Rs. 500 and Rs. 2000 (for transcripts). My mother calls this the artist/activist’s ‘kottankuchi’ earnings, coconut shell earnings. The art of jumping from project to project was a skill she taught me, when as a young kid I used to travel out with her as she worked as an interpreter and freelance artist. I worked on several projects along with Madhumita’s project trying to make rent and all other expenses this lifestyle came with. But still, I came with the great advantage of a family with three generations of education, a network that spanned beyond the city and an education at a fairly off-beat privileged school, which had all set me on an advantage of what jobs I chose to survive through this period of my life. However, as I mentioned before, I am not that great at treating a job as just that ‘a job’, which in itself comes from a space of privilege. My mind is always asking what else can we do. The friendships I forged in this room made me stronger at dealing with what it meant to be a young woman back in my world, just 80 kilometres away from Kanchipuram, but vastly far away as a way of life.

The Podcast

On our bus rides to and fro, Madhumita talked a lot about her research and what she was trying to understand. She was attempting to use the participatory action research model, which began in the 1940s. The PAR model switches the ‘subjects’ into ‘participants’. Academics started to sound a lot like theatre to me. In very simple language, this meant to me – ask together, collect together, build together, share together. Through our conversations, Madhumita and I realised that we could start involving some of the work I do with theatre and podcasts along with her research and hence was born the 10 episode podcast ‘The Mobile Girls Koottam’.

The first radio conversation was triggered by Lakshmi’s frustration with not being able to stop for a cup of tea at the tea stall on the corner of her street, when she walked back home from the bus stop where the company bus dropped her off. We began talking about needing tea stalls that made us, women, feel safe. This discussion led us to talk about everyday encounters on the streets in towns and villages, how we were treated at home, our bodies, how we related to work, rules around menstruation and mobility. Over a four-month period, through a dialogic process, we created ten episodes of radio podcasts on a range of topics that were of interest to us. 

I found beautiful similarities in our world of obvious differences, while dialoguing with each one of them. Much like Lakshmi, I have spent days wondering and dreaming of a “simple” life as a homemaker with that “perfect” husband. Much like Kalpana, activism is second nature to me, or rather the brash way in which both of us can bombard into an argument with “strong” opinions is second nature to us.  Much like Abhinaya, I find great joy in studying. Much like Satya, I completely believe that financial independence is paramount for women. Much like Pooja, I have often just done any job at all to keep the month running for the people I am responsible for. Much like Madhumita, at that time, I was trying to kick a smoking habit (still haven’t managed to, while she has) while staring out of the bus window asking what more we can do with what she was studying. Much like all of them, having a body of a woman – the experiences we go through trying to get a chai in a shop or buying a pad in the store or having to use cramps as a reason to get a break from work were starkly similar realities. 

We came up with a title for the radio podcasts – The Mobile Girls Koottam, playing on the idea that the women worked in a mobile phone assembly factory, but more essentially to convey a sense of location as rural migrant women leading fairly autonomous lives in town where they felt they had more control over their time, bodies, thoughts, daily routines and mobility. The title attempted to capture these multiple movements experienced by the women. It also encompassed the social and physical travels we were making to be a part of their lives. 

The Factory Shutdown & The Play 

Unfortunately, within that span of four months, the mobile phone company went through an overhaul and suddenly decided to shut down the factory in Sriperumbudur. Overnight, the podcasts turned into both a protest platform and a space of grieving the loss of a significant part of their identity. The space, not just the factory, but this room where the women came into themselves and created a life of independence was soon to be a memory to be held on to. In trying to understand how to hold on to this memory and share a part of it to understand other women across Tamil Nadu, we got together and wrote a play.

The play is set over one day in this room in Kanchipuram, where they all have a surprise holiday from their shifts. Following their usual ritual, over tea and coffee, they decide to cook biryani and share a fun day together. However, as the food gets made the sudden news of the factory shutdown shocks them and what follows is a tale of chaotic, funny and deep conversations where the women grapple with their idea of themselves, home, love, society and more. In the background of an emotional love story, the chaos burns the biryani, but bands together the girls. It is one day of their lives where they decide whatever happens to them, their life and their body  is theirs. 

The Book

After we wrote this play, the women and I scattered away from Madhumita for quite a while. She wrote her thesis, got her doctorate and is now Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography at The Ohio State University, USA. She is the reason we stuck together at least once in a while with curiosity of what was happening in each other’s lives. The young women we were, today, we are all young mothers, each grappling with what these new relationships have made us think about our bodies and how it relates to the spaces it populates.  Meanwhile, Madhumita worked along with dancer and illustrator Madhushree Basu, to create a beautiful little monograph on the podcasts, using the transcripts and imaginative illustrations. This book has been published by Zubaan, Delhi, in 2021. The book has now given the group an energy to re-band and revisit the play. 

The Mobile Girls Truck

As scattered as the pandemic, our life situations and our work makes us, the initial process of this play has been one-off meetings, Whatsapp group discussions and Zoom calls to understand the route in which we can stay true to what the Mobile Girls would want us to do with this story. 

I realised food is as central a character as any of them in the play and this related back to their dream of beginning a tea shop together. We wanted to use forum theatre techniques to bring in dialogue, but somehow the way these women invited Madhumita and me into their houses got skewed in trying to use a technique that was alien to them. The days we spent in this room in Kanchipuram was filled with a laughter that knew pain and confusion. Humour led us to explore. Tea kept us together. Biryani became a collective obsession. All of this, while the TV blared serials, songs and comedy scenes at us. 

This is how the idea of wanting to construct a food/tea-truck that will travel and invite in customers to sit with us and listen to parts of the story was born. The invitation is to listen… the invitation is to share… the invitation is to participate. 

The Mobile Girls cast and crew are planning to transform a small truck from a scrapyard into a ‘mobile’ tea-shop, which they will drive to different places in Tamil Nadu to sit along with different communities and dialogue what it means to work, to be woman, to have these bodies and relate to the spaces we populate. It is being scripted, in such a manner, that all scenes can go beyond the fourth wall and act as invitations for dialogue. Moreover, the crew will travel with a camera and an audio recorder to document the different dialogues that this triggers. This, hopefully, will give birth to new editions of our podcast. Madhumita’s entire research journey, the creation of all its different artistic and media manifestations with our Mobile Girls is carefully being crafted into a digital museum on women and work. 

This production is a part of this whole. A traveling part. There are parts of this production that can only be developed once we hit the road and understand from the learnings it brings us. 

This is a memory infused in tea, the feeling of sharing existence, a validation of voices and a process that is trying to bring alive the idea of mobility as a theatrical production. It is a homage to our friendship and an expression of gratitude to what Madhumita Dutta and the Mobile Girls have brought to my practice.