Sona Mohapatra’s docu-film is her saying she won’t shut up, about her clothes, art, activism

Shut Up Sona will be the only Indian film to be screened as part of Hot Docs, the largest docu-film festival in North America.

A still from Shut Up Sona, a documentary on singer Sona Mohapatra

Sona Mohapatra doesn’t shut up.

Known for her full-throated voice that gave us much-loved Bollywood numbers like Bedardi Raja (Delhi Belly, 2011), Jiya Laage Na (Talaash, 2012) and Ambarsariya (Fukrey, 2013), the singer is just as well known for raising that voice when it counts.

Be it the allegations of sexual misconduct she levelled against musicians Kailash Kher and Anu Malik and her persistence in trying to ensure they didn’t get away with no repercussions, her views on fairness creams, calling out Salman Khan for his “I feel like a raped woman” comment or even, recently, her support for Rangoli Chandel’s Twitter account being restored, Mohapatra has, over the years, gained a reputation for being fiercely outspoken and unconstrained by convention. (She’s also gained constant attention from a regular army of trolls, and threats.)

And that same outspokenness became the subject of an entire movie.

Shut Up Sona (the name is the same as her Twitter ID), is a documentary film directed and shot by Deepti Gupta, produced by Mohapatra and scored by her and her musician husband Ram Sampath. It had an impressive premiere at Mumbai’s Jio MAMI film festival in 2019, where it won a Film Critics Guild Award.

Soon after, the film travelled to festivals in Delhi, Rotterdam and Gothenburg. And later this month, it will have the distinction of being the only Indian film to be screened as part of Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary film festival.

The city of Toronto was all set to host its annual celebration of docu-films, but now, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival will be held online.

On artistes as activists

The movie opens with Mohapatra in a green room, getting ready for her concert. Journalists want a quick quote from her, but, her assistant says, they won’t stay for the show. “F*** them,” she says, annoyed that the journalists have come to cover a concert but only care about getting their interview. She agrees to meet them for a few minutes, but all together and no one-on-ones. And, she adds, she will tell them what she thinks of them.

This sets the tone for the next 85-odd minutes, which take viewers through Mohapatra’s many battles — on a micro level, dealing with things like her right to wear what she wants while performing any kind of song, and on a macro level, her fight for equal representation of female artistes in the music industry, and everything in between.

There’s a lovely scene when, after a raging fight with IIT-Bombay for not inviting her to perform at its festival unless her husband performs as well, she and Sampath talk about whether she should take this issue forward. They’re holding each other, and he asks her if she wants to be known as an artiste or an activist.

“I don’t see any conflict between my activism and my artistry,” Mohapatra tells ThePrint. “I believe they inform each other. Nonetheless, I live in the real world. I have to earn a living and take care of a huge team of musicians and crew who depend on my commercial success. So those close to me do express concerns about my activism affecting my ability to be gainfully employed because this is a culture that doesn’t like its feathers ruffled. The film does capture the tension this creates, but I don’t think I can or intend to change who I am.”

“The film is a portrait of the politics of an artiste,” says Gupta, who directed the documentary. “I found in Sona’s story a universal story of women who are branded troublemakers and the gates are shut on them. It is a political piece about using one’s art to make a change.”

Return to India’s musical roots & an act of feminism

Mohapatra recalls that around four years ago, when she was laid up in hospital, for the first time in a decade, she had the time to think about what direction she wanted to move in, creatively and as a person.

At that time, she tells ThePrint, her conversations with young people, including her niece, made her realise that so many people knew so little about India’s [musical] roots and history. “One young journalist, while interviewing me about my heroes, actually asked me, ‘Who is Mira?’ That shook me up.”

That, coupled with the fact that she had been feeling professionally unsatisfied, led her to think of making a film with Deepti Gupta, who had directed two of Mohapatra’s earlier music videos and had become a close friend.

It started as an exploration of the lives and literature of Bhakti and Sufi poets like Jayadeva, Tulsidas, Mirabai, Baba Farid, Kabir and Amir Khusrau. “But Mirabai’s sensual works really stayed with me as did the subversive aspects of Khusrau’s work. Both have had those parts of their work wiped out of their repertoire in current times,” says Mohapatra.

It was more than just a desire to travel across India and make a film on music, though. It was an act of female solidarity, an act of feminism. If Mohapatra was looking for something new to sink her teeth into and express herself freely, Gupta had never made a movie before, despite, as Mohapatra says, being so talented.

“Women need to own their narratives instead of waiting around for others to tell their stories, and they need to create a sisterhood that backs each other,” the singer says.

“We need more of us behind the scenes, writing, producing, shooting, being in charge and not being just the pretty face. Waiting for often compromised opportunities was not an option anymore in my life, and that’s why I decided to make this film. I had to produce it — who else would?”

It wasn’t easy, she recalls, adding that India has no funding for documentaries and “even less understanding of the medium”. It was also an ambitious project, given that it took the team to 17 places across India, from the temples of Vrindavan to the forts of Chittorgarh, the Nizamuddin Dargah in Delhi and the Gotipua gurukul in Odisha.

They returned with 300 hours of footage, Mohapatra says, adding that she wiped out all her savings and then kept going on stage and putting it all back into the project, which got prolonged because of a complicated edit. “We changed multiple editors before the genius of Arjun Gourisaria came our way,” she says.

It also wasn’t easy being both protagonist and producer. Mohapatra says there was a clear understanding that she would not interfere, and that Gupta had the final say. But it still hurt when entire music videos they shot in Jaisalmer, Vrindavan and other places didn’t make the final edit.

And, of course, in the meantime, she had to deal with threats and complaints about her choice of attire while performing the songs of her beloved Mira and Khusrau, news footage of which plays at various points of the film to remind us that Mohapatra has bigger aims than just professional, creative satisfaction.

At a concert shown in the movie, she says, “Artistes who go beyond just entertainment are my kind of artistes. Who want to effect a change, who want to leave behind a better, better place than before they started.”

She’s a medium for a larger story

Given that the movie is meant to be a documentary about issues that are larger than one person, one wonders if Gupta and Mohapatra ever wanted to include the voices of more female musicians.

Mohapatra explains that using a single story, hers, was Gupta’s creative choice, but adds, “There really aren’t any other female singers/artistes I know of in India who are even standing up for gender equality as publicly as I am.” Plus the reaction from the audiences at every screening so far confirmed to her that the story is universally felt. “I was just a medium to tell that story.”

Gupta, for her part, defends her choice by saying, “It is not a journalistic piece where it may have been necessary to ‘prove’ something by having multiple voices. It is a cinematic piece that uses specificity to tell a universal story. It is about, but is not limited to, the issue of female artistes. It is the story of Sona, but also of every Indian woman, of women anywhere in the world who use everything in their power to protest, and the price they pay for it.”

Gupta points to a scene towards the end of the film, when Mohapatra is alone on a boat, while all around her are speech bubbles filled with real-life misogynistic comments [by Mulayam Singh Yadav, Abhijeet Mukherjee, Mohan Bhagwat and more], and the voiceover is of news anchors talking about Sabarimala and other flashpoints.

Gupta says, “Women feel the pain of being in this country where their very existence is so deeply resented. It was imperative to tell a story through ourselves, but make it larger than ourselves.”