Four Decades Later, No City for Women Echoes the Enduring Impact of Yugantar Film Collective’s Path-Breaking Documentaries

No City for Women poster, echoing the impact of Yugantar Film Collective.
The poster of No City for Women (2023).

At the end of Dr. Rangan Chakravarty’s documentary film No City for Women—a piercing look at modern day Gurgaon, its beginnings, and its growth into an unsafe concrete jungle—we see three women around a table. In the middle is the upper-class homeowner and employer living in one of the city’s ubiquitous gated communities. Two domestic workers, both women, are at her side. The interviewer behind the camera asks, “Is there a new mindset in Gurgaon?”  The woman on the right nods and explains how there is an expectation and demand for domestic workers who dress well (“pant-shirt wale”) and are smart and light-skinned. Their employer has a horrified look on her face. “To work?!” she exclaims. The woman on the right tells her, only half-jokingly, that one of her employer’s friends is among them. “Are you serious?” the employer responds. “Whisper her name to me!” The woman bursts into laughter…


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Aditya Shrikrishna is an independent writer and film critic based in India. He is also the co-founder of The Other Banana, a podcast on South Indian cinema.