“Apna Chashma Badal, Mein Hu Working Girl”: Working, Filmmaking and Form with Paromita Vohra

“I wanted the possibility of co-creating a conversation between the film and the audience,” says Paromita Vohra, filmmaker, writer and founder of Agents of Ishq, a multimedia project on love, sex and sexual politics in India. Vohra—also known as Bombay Rosie—is a lauded documentary filmmaker whose work is deeply rooted in the Indian feminist movement, and the sociopolitical environment around her. Her roster includes Unlimited Girls (2002), Q2P (2006), Where’s Sandra? (2006) and Partners in Crime (2011). Unlimited Girls, a film on conversations around feminism in an online chatroom, has since become permanent on the syllabi of several Gender Studies classrooms in India and around the world, as has Q2P, a documentary on public toilets in Mumbai. 

In July 2025, Vohra released her newest film Working Girls (2025), made in collaboration with the Laws of Social Reproduction at King’s College. This latest documentary chronicles the various forms of invisible labour and carework women undertake, and has been filmed with women in locations across India including Thiruvananthapuram, Mumbai, Madurai, Kolkata, Shillong, Latur and Pune. In November, 2025, Vohra screened the film at Ashoka University, accompanied by a talk on her practice of form and the interdisciplinary, poetic politics of love in the age of content.

Working Girls 

Working Girls begins with an invitation, a question Vohra asks the audience: Close your eyes. Who do you see when you think of a working girl? Now open them. As the black screen lights up, the apparition of the typical working girl—an upper middle-class “office-wali madam” —is shattered. Instead, we spend the next two-and-a-half hours with women in red-light areas, ASHA workers protesting for higher wages, Aadal Padal dancers at temple festivals in South India, sex-workers organizing against HIV-AIDS, surrogates in Mumbai, farmers, housewives, domestic workers and women enrolling in the police academy. Interspersed between the footage are animations, narrated by Vohra, that chronicle the little known histories of these professions and their continued diminution by the law. 

What the film immediately brings to the forefront is not only the underpaid and unrecognized labour of temple dancers, surrogates, sex-workers but the relationship women have with their professions. One particular moment is in Pune, when Vohra asks Vanita if she has considered giving up sex-work now that she has a steady job at Saheli Sangha, a female sex-workers collective. Locking eyes with the camera, Vanita’s reply is a firm no— “I will never give up sex-work, because when I had nothing, I had sex work. Sex work is work.” 

This same statement is echoed by Aadal Padal dancers in Madurai, women in their mid to late twenties, who say that the absolute “high energy” dancing gives them is irreplaceable. No other profession allows them to express their love of dancing, or explore different cities every week. For women who earn for their families, they say a desk job in IT can never give them what they earn dancing in one night. 

The solidarity that women express with their work is what Vohra wants the audience to experience as well. Right from its opening line, the audience is brought into conversation with women on screen as they move around the city, working, organizing with other women and demanding a recognition of rights historically denied to them. While Vohra is interviewing them, each person speaks unflinchingly with the camera, about their struggles, joys, daily lives and personal histories. Rita, a surrogate herself who now connects potential surrogates to prospective families, tells us about her move to Mumbai after she was married at 16. As she walks us through the lanes of the basti where she used to live, she says that it was when her husband’s business faced financial difficulties that she stepped in, and donated her eggs, to help with the household income. Laughing, she admits that the basti feels cramped now that her family has been able to move into an apartment. Rita’s conversation with the camera is one of understanding and clarity—of her circumstances, but more importantly of what it means to be a working woman. 

Working on Working Girls

In a conversation with The Edict, Vohra describes the experience of working on the movie as a race to the finish, a record year and a half, from conceptualization to its first screening in July. Working Girls, undoubtedly a feminist film, comes over a decade after Unlimited Girls, her first film that tackled issues surrounding feminism. In between the two, her understanding of her work, her form and her feminism have all become profoundly deeper. 

The process of making Unlimited Girls was guided simply by Vohra’s desire to make films pleasurable. She describes the traditional documentary form as a political quest for enlightenment, “something that lifts you up from ordinary thought to extraordinary contemplation of other people’s suffering.” However, she strongly felt that films could be funny, sexy, colorful and also think seriously about questions concerning women, love, romance and pleasure; these topics were often overlooked in Indian feminist conversations at the time. The form Vohra has since developed is distinctly polyphonic—it is loud and in-your-face—it demands that you pay attention to its concerns and enjoy yourself while you do so. Working Girls has deep reds and pinks, cabaret music and animations with exaggerated sound effects, all while crisply explaining a history of syphilis in India and the sanitization of erotic temple dancing into Bharatnatyam. 

Working Girls is also part of her attempt at unsettling some of the settled meaning that has crept into popular feminism and renewing her relationship with her own understanding of it. “Feminism is just women thinking, not five books on an Instagram listicle,” she says while adding that she does not make films to add to the viewers canon of politically correct material. With this film she knew she wanted to think about working class questions and shake up the self involvement of elite young women who often have a limited knowledge of the world around them. 

As her articulation of this aim, Working Girls portrays a reality that muddles the so-called theoretical complexity often spouted by upper-middle class feminists. The link that is often assumed between sex-work and trafficking, for example—banning sex-work will reduce young girls being trafficked, or vice-versa—is questioned by sex-workers in Pune, who say that even if they have been trafficked into sex-work, their livelihood is now provided by this profession. It is their source of income and dignity and if it is banned, they will have no way to live. “If somebody had accepted us at that time, given us a job, why would we stay here? They don’t give us jobs because they say you haven’t finished your education, you haven’t completed your masters, you’re too old, you don’t know how to speak properly. We are also citizens of this country. We also vote in the election. Why shouldn’t we ask for these things?” says the gharwali, of a home which takes care of several sex-workers. 

The process of crafting a movie with complicated contexts and realities, for Vohra, required sticking to the simple idea she started out with and refusing to simplify people in service of her own theoretical complexity. This is something she says emerged only in the editing process; sentences uttered by people which sounded like cliches while shooting, took on a heavier weight when examined in the context they were uttered in. Vohra is reminded of Vishaka Di, a sex-worker from Kolkata who tells the camera, “This is a fight for our rights.” While at first glance the sentence seems like a cliche, Vohra points out that these sentences have lost their meaning because they are constantly being proclaimed by those who are not really fighting for their rights or do not really need rights in order to exist. Choosing to keep these utterances, was a recognition that they are deeply layered in their context, something that required letting go of the ego that deems them as simplistic. “It is not simplistic when that person says it,” she says. 

Mele Mein Ladki 

Vohra chose documentary as her medium to play with simple and complex ideas, when she attended the first edition of the Mumbai International Film Festival as a college student. “I watched everything I could watch and I think what I instinctively reached towards was that documentary was not a very rigid form, it could really be anything,” she says. Documentaries offered a fluidity that combined two things she cared about: creativity and a certain kind of politics. 

Documentary film-making, Agents of Ishq, her weekly column at the Mid-Day, are all also different ways she has fun; her approach to her work she likens to playing Antakshari, a back and forth game where nobody wins but everybody has a good time. Antakshari is also a relay with an inclusive frame, where all participants can play a part as they move from song A to song B. Vohra’s work too, is a political relay with no fixed start or end point as she weaves together popular culture, contemporary issues, feminism, Bollywood movies, issues surrounding sex, love, dating. 

Her form is therefore, as she describes it, “a place of joinage, a way to join what is being said and contribute to the repository.” She is not interested in making something definitive, something that has the final say on what feminism is. Instead her engagement with feminist issues is prismatic, a frame through which she wants to understand the world. Vohra’s ideas are informed by this frame but her work is also a process of expanding it and resisting its confinement, as she finds new ways to renew her relationship with feminism. 

This is the same relationship Vohra wants to co-create with the audience, to get them thinking and also experiencing. In a short Q&A after the film, she mentions the raucous reception at Working Girls screenings so far from audience members. The magic of sitting in a dark room with strangers for two hours is a collective experience like no other, calling up a “shared interiority” with those around you and those on screen, an interiority that keeps the conversation going much after the lights come on. (Edited by Giya Sood.)