India is the world’s largest source of international migrants. The number of Indians seeking work abroad has more than doubled since the early 1990s, reaching 15.6 million in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center in Washington DC. More workers are also moving within India. The 2001 census recorded that 30% of the population were not living where they were born, a figure that rose to 37% in 2011. This migration typically involves young adults who leave their parents behind, making it harder for older people to be cared for at home.The 2020 Longitudinal Ageing Study in India — a report on the consequences of India’s ageing population, produced every three years by the International Institute for Population Sciences and others — suggests this is already a problem. Some 26% of people over the age of 60 already live either completely alone or with just their spouse. For now, however, family living is still relatively common in India, with 41% of over-60s living with both their spouse and adult children, and 28% living with adult children but no spouse.
More than 1.5 million children in 21 countries, including 119,000 from India, lost their primary and secondary caregivers to Covid-19 during the first 14 months of the pandemic, according to Lancet
Recently, the premiere of a Docu-Fiction titled ‘Mira’s Minder” by Dr.Tanni Chaudhuri, Associate Professor of Sociology, Rhode Island College, USA took place at the Kolkata Press Club.
Mira’s Minder is a visual narrative on India’s emergent caregivers(aayas) from Kolkata, West Bengal. Many caregivers, from rural or semi urban geographic spaces travel to the cities to work in domestic settings to look after children and the elderly. This research examines this domain of work embedded in intriguing gendered narratives, within the context of developing nations (different from unorganized domestic-help labor market of the past).
The personal context of the documentary comes from the first-generation immigrant experience of the filmmaker in the United States. Immigrants from urban India often rely on hired help to take care of their families back home—specifically aging parents, as they can rarely be there, to take care of them.
Employing techniques typical to visual ethnography (from within the broader domain of Visual Sociology), intertwined with the fictional accounts of three caregivers (Kumoti/The Cunning, Shantomoti/ The Compliant, and Shumoti/The Enlightened), this film investigates the quality of life among the aayas.
In an attempt to provide a voice to the caregivers, Mira’s Minders humanizes their personal accounts. Shot in the fall of 2019, this film has two versions-(i) a longer duration of one hour to be shared with the academic community, and (ii) the current shorter version for festivals and other select screenings. It starts its journey here in Kolkata in the spring of 2022, prior to embarking on its global round of film festival submissions.
CAST: Debleena Sen, Soma Chattopadhay, Debarun Swaraj, Priyankaa De, Sagnik Mukherjee, Aripriya Basu, Soma Banerjee, Chandan, Aparajita Yolmo and Neil Nawaz.
Director of Photography – Susnato Chatterjee Editing -Arijit Bose
Background Music -Niladri Banerjee Assistant Direction–Neil Nawaz and Shinjan Basu
Concept and Direction -Tanni Chaudhuri
