When Arati Mazumdar’s family faces financial trouble, she decides to take a job in the big city. Arati leaves for work and her family life unravels. The pull of tradition struggles against the tug of modernity; Arati’s newfound mobility seems unpalatable to her family.

For us 'Mahanagar' is a study on Arati’s mobility, agency and autonomy. Arati’s experience of mobility is made up of everyday negotiations against a society that lives off women’s labour but also feels the need to subjugate them.

Arati and her mother-in-law keep up appearances despite dwindling finances. Arati worries over the quality of the tea leaves because her husband will not tolerate a weak chai. Her mother-in-law secretly saves money from the household budget to enable her husband’s gambling addiction. Children are entirely dependent on their mothers for well-being.

To help her family out, Arati takes up a job - a saleswoman at a company selling automated knitting machines. She develops workplace camaraderie and friendships outside her family perhaps for the first time. Women gather to share their workplace travails, triumphs, and concerns. All the salespersons are women selling products for the household to the ‘lady of the household’. But sometimes they encounter a lecherous bachelor or an overfamiliar gent of the household. They band together into a loose union to ask for better pay. Arati learns to recognise discrimination on the basis of difference and it does not take her long to stand up for her unfairly treated Anglo-indian colleague.

Arati puts on some lipstick and sunglasses to make more sales, while her husband fears that the job has changed her, his docile housewife. She is praised for her work, she negotiates successfully with her boss for a raise, she works late, she manages the household economy better - everything unsettles the husband. Her experience of mobility, agency and autonomy stokes the fears of a patriarchal society, symbolised by the household. She is met with anger and fear, not joy and encouragement.

We asked ourselves - what would Arati’s experience be in the Mahanagar of today? Would it be any different?