A state-supported social service designed to salvage failing marital relations? Sounds like an unlikely proposition, but that’s exactly where Marriage Cops aims its clear-eyed lens. In doing so, filmmakers Shashwati Talukdar and Cheryl Hess underscore Indian marriage values, the needs of women, and the way a country’s bureaucratic institution copes with a singularly challenging mandate. The film, which has its world premiere at Hot Docs this week, observes a progressive method in system resistant to change.
The two directors, who have been friends since they were in school and both have experience working on police-related projects, bonded around the time of the #MeToo movement’s surge and women’s rising rage regarding rape in India. They couldn’t resist looking into the Women’s Helpline at the Dehradun Police Headquarters, through which police, psychologists, lawyers, and counsellors listen to couples talking about their differences.
To North American activists committed to ending gender-based violence, almost everything about the service seems wholly counterintuitive. For one thing, it operates out of a cop shop. Police in North America have historically been useless when it comes to protecting women from their male partners. For another, the state including male representatives, and not independent women-led groups, spearhead the hotline process. And the mandate—trying to reconcile couples— seems strange to activists who know that in many cases, it’s time for women to get out.
But this combination is precisely what’s fascinating about a film that evokes these contradictions. The fly-on-the-wall doc records couples arguing and the hotline team talking together about their cases. The filmmakers are candid about the contradictions and are anxious to discuss the conditions in India that make the hotline valuable.
As Talukdar and Hess tell POV, they asked couples about filming as they were heading to their counselling sessions. Among those who agreed were a husband who was assaulting his wife. Another women complained that her husband worked nights and then spent all day drinking at their home with his friends. And another couldn’t get any financial help from her reprobate partner.
This film doesn’t work if the couples aren’t completely candid – and they are remarkably so, sometimes in front of their extended families.
“But that’s how community and society work in India,” explains Talukdar, “because those are the networks you have. In times of crisis, it’s the social network—your family and extended family that’s going to step in—because the state is weak in those areas. There’s no social security. You’re very much dependant on those family networks.”
The candour of the couples in conflict extends even to those they don’t know, but who happen to be around. Hess says she was caught off guard by their openness.
“I was surprised at how public it was. There would sometimes be two different parties who were interested in what was going on with the next couple, a kind of nosiness, as if the information belongs to everyone,” recalls Hess. “There was one busybody saying what she thinks to a complete stranger.”
Marriage Cops zooms in not only on the counselling sessions but on the staff’s lunch breaks and conversations in which the team talks openly about how they’re feeling about their cases and their jobs.
It’s difficult work. Sessions are loud and unruly as couples argue fiercely and family members sitting in (standing in, actually) interrupt constantly, forcing the police officer leading the meeting to shout.
“The staff are barely containing the chaos,” explains Talukdar. “That’s why the sole male cop is so very concerned about registers and getting things labelled correctly. I understood that he feels that drawing straight lines [literally] and having things put neatly on the page might contain the chaos.”
And there is a mountain of paperwork that has to be handled with not a computer in sight. Cinematographer Hess makes the most of what seem like endless shelves of file folders that the team is constantly rifling through.
“Yes, the paperwork is its own character,” she says. “We should have given the file folders their own credit.”
The Women’s Helpline does work that’s often demoralizing and the workers have restrictions on what they can and can’t say and how they have to behave.
“The key to understanding the film is that the police is a paramilitary organization,” says Talukdar, “so you’re never responding to a situation as an individual. You’re responding as the institution that is the police. [The constable’s] feelings come out in subtle ways. It’s not her place to say what she thinks.”
“And you can’t cry, especially as a woman,” adds Hess. “Then again, as a cameraperson I can’t cry. I’m surrounded by men all the time. So I understand that advice to women in any profession, especially one dominated by males.”
At one point, the police officer counsels a women to stay in a relationship for the sake of the child. That can be very problematic advice, but Talukdar understands why that’s the right call.
“[The client] Rupali, for example, needs child support and she’ll try to get it however she can. That’s the way she was exercising her agency. The officer understood that and what the reality of the situation was and how she could take care of her needs. Rupali couldn’t go out and work and needed to take care of the baby and this was the way to do it.”
That, according to Hess, is one of the central complexities that the movie evokes.
“Indian marriage is a topic that’s prevalent in the popular culture all over the world. There was even a Netflix film about an Indian matchmaker. People think they have an understanding of what the situation is in India as regards marriage and women’s position in in society.”
But, she says, people need to know that they will do what they can and reach out to whatever service is available to solve their problem. She says that, whether or not it looks like any other service for women in troubled relationships, this hotline is the weapon of the weak.
“If you don’t have any other way to get what you need in a particular situation, you take advantage of what’s available so you go to the Women’s Helpline and go to the police [instead of, say, a lawyer]. As Rupali puts it in the film, ‘It saves you money and it keeps the men in line,’ and that may be the only way to get that done.’
“I hope people see that nuance,” says Hess.
