Why don't you do a film about us, the domestic workers? A film about our lives and what we have to deal with both in the city and the village.' Pratima Baa, a domestic worker working at the house of a friend in Delhi, posed this question while serving me and my friend tea, as I talked about my latest documentary project involving rural women in Haryana. The fact that I made films on women's issues, yet had overlooked a group of women whose poverty had forced them to migrate and work in the city as domestic workers – and without whose help the lives of many working women would have difficulty functioning – was not lost on me. Pratima had run away at age 14 from a village in Orissa to earn a living as a domestic worker in Delhi; she subsequently became my assistant cameraperson and sound recordist for the very same documentary she had suggested – Delhi Bound for Work.
For migrant women, the live-in aspect of domestic work, coupled with the fact that they rarely have familial or community support to rely on in the city, makes them particularly vulnerable to poor pay, long hours at work, exploitation, and physical and sexual abuse at their workplace. No wonder that the UN Human Rights Commission, in 2000, declared domestic work to be a form of contemporary slavery. In India alone, according to official sources, there are an estimated 4.5 million domestic workers, though NGOs working in this area estimate the number to be as high as 90 million, of which over 85 percent are women and young girls. However, such statistics do not reveal the complex reality of women eking out a living alone in cities. Most research on domestic workers, whether journalistic or activist, typically focuses on trafficking. Consequently, the 'woman as a victim' discourse has a silencing effect on the personal agency of migrant women, often ignoring the complexities involved in their migration.
This documentary, a collaborative venture between me as a filmmaker and the women workers, was an effort to provide both a platform through which they could articulate their feelings and desires. Over my two decades of filmmaking, I had pondered on and resolved some of the dilemmas about the filmmaker's role, the constant negotiations that we, working on development-themed films, have to make to tell people's stories: How to enable their voices to be heard without biases creeping in, and how to work in a non-hierarchical manner. I realised that participatory or collaborative works were better in this regard, since these had less inherent biases than traditional forms of storytelling.
Deciding to make a collaborative film with and about domestic workers was easier said than done. The fact that I belonged to the same class as their employers, was friends with their employers and was also a 'Punjabi', an ethnic group considered most exploitative, initially made it hard for me to win their confidence. It is here that Pratima's initial offer to introduce me to other women like her, and to families back home, proved invaluable. Persistence in wanting to hear their stories, respecting their silences and not pressing them to divulge what was painful, coupled with a helpful introduction by Pratima, gradually allowed many of them to shed their mistrust and reticence and begin speaking to me. This trust-building process alone took over a year.