FEATURE
years, acting work has allowed Shefali
to support herself – her husband has
another wife, and she has to cover her
own costs. She cares, too, for her disa-
bled brother, her widowed sisters-in-law,
her nieces and nephews, and her parents.
Working as an actor has also given Bulu
Bari the freedom to live as a single
woman and support her family in a con-
servative society where most women are
not financially independent. But the mag-
netism of the film industry pulled Bulu’s
marriage apart, just as it did her mother’s
before her. Her well-known actor mother,
Bilkis Bari, was looked down upon by her
husband for her profession – which was,
and still is to a lesser extent, associated
with ‘immodesty’ and ‘promiscuity’. She
went to auditions and rehearsals behind
his back – unable to tolerate her freedom,
Bilkis’ husband left her.
‘We struggled at the beginning,’ says
Bulu. ‘My mother only had one blouse
and a saree, which she would re-wash at
the end of each day and re-wear the next,
to go to rehearsals.’ Bilkis worked in film
up until the year of her death.
Bulu met her future husband on set:
he was playing ‘the villain’. After mar-
riage, her in-laws started expressing
disdain for her work as an actor, although
she says he himself didn’t mind much
because ‘he was lazy and did not work’.
Bulu’s husband would beat her and did
not support her financially. ‘I had to earn
money to feed the children, to pay the
rent.’ After her marriage ended, she went
to live with and care for her mother. Even
now, Bulu supports her adult children
and her grandchildren through acting.
Life in the shadows
‘As older women we have to fight for
our place in the industry. They see us as
glamourless,’ sighs Bulu, explaining how
much has changed since her younger
years when work was plentiful and
there was ‘a togetherness, a community,
among the actors’.
‘Women in the film industry [particu-
larly from the lower classes] face a lot of
challenges,’ says researcher Bithi. ‘Society
doesn’t take them seriously, many are
divorced and unemployed – some decide
to work outside of Dhaka in other kinds of
jobs, like dancing for men,’ she explains,
adding that some women don’t want
this kind of work, ‘but they have to do it
because it’s big money which is not pos-
sible to earn in film any more’.
For older women, though, such work
isn’t an option. Bithi says sometimes
women must beg to survive: ‘They’re
spending the whole day in the industry
waiting for work that often doesn’t come- and they have to eat something, they
have to pay their rent, and most are also
responsible for caring for others.’
Ratri, another extra, asks us to meet
her outside the FDC at a nearby café.
She has a small frame, jet-black hair and
is wearing dramatic make-up. ‘From
producer to production boy, everybody
needs women, everybody gets women,
and everybody uses women,’ she says
plainly. She explains how middlemen
in Dhallywood ‘manipulate’ younger
women and girls, who are often from
rural and working-class communities.
‘They are duped by men and brought
into the film industry from the village,
and then they are abandoned. These
women have no option but to go into
sex work,’ she says, explaining that
it is very common for acting roles to
be given in exchange for sexual rela-
tionships. ‘It’s a trade-off they have
to do, because they have to go on.’
Her own story is characterized not just
by a love affair with the film industry, but
with a now prominent actor whom she
met in her late teens. ‘I was very beauti-
ful when I came into the film industry.
We were working on the same set and
came together,’ she remembers, empha-
sizing that it was a ‘romantic relation-
ship’, lasting about three years.
But when Ratri fell pregnant, the
hero abandoned her. ‘He refused to
take any responsibility or give me any
support to help raise my child,’ she says,
tears running down her made-up face.
Though this was 16 years ago, Ratri says
that to this day he uses his power and
influence in Dhallywood to prevent her
from getting work in the industry. ‘If he
is there shooting, his people inform the
guards not to let me in. They humiliate
me and throw me out.’
Ratri has spoken publicly about her
story before, but says that most people do
not believe her because of the disparity
in class between her and the well-to-do
hero. She says she was ‘used and manipu-
lated’ by him, but in the same breath will
declare her love for him, describing him
as a ‘very good man’ and arguing that it is
others in the industry who have led him
astray.
‘Over the years he has gone to the top,
while I have struggled,’ she says. ‘I could
have been something much better, so I
feel like I have lost everything.’For the love of film
Turning up and waiting on the benches
beneath the tree used to be enough to
find work as a Dhallywood extra. Over
the past 10 years work has dried up – and
what’s left often goes to fresh, well-con-
nected faces.
‘Times are really tough,’ says Shefali,
adding that she had to take out a large
loan for her younger sister’s medical
treatment. She wishes she could find
stable work outside of acting, but still
holds the film industry close to her heart.
‘We come here to chat with friends,
to hang out and have fun,’ she says.
Sharing not only their devotion to film
and acting, but also their struggles in the
face of the industry’s decline, the women
extras have much to discuss.
‘We don’t want to stay at home, even if
there’s no work.’ OSOPHIE HEMERY IS AN INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST
AND WRITER, WITH A FOCUS ON FEMINISM AND
SOCIAL JUSTICE.
ALICE MCCOOL IS AN INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST
BASED BETWEEN THE UK AND EAST AFRICA.58 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
‘As older women we have to fight for our place
in the industry. They see us as glamourless’