A memory project by FTII’s women alumni recounts how tough it was to make it in the Indian film industry

Paul’s room at the FTII hostel had a window that opened onto a garden and a bench that always looked like it had been recently sat on. It was the first room on the ground floor, pressed up against the hostel’s common telephone, catching heartbreak and homesickness as it passed through the wires. She arrived on campus during one of those tumbling rainy afternoons, and for a few days lived in a nearly empty hostel, waiting for her batchmates and seniors to trickle in. Electrified, lonely and empowered are the three words she uses to describe how she felt in those very first days.

Filmmaker and writer Batul Mukhtiar on campus, 1992

Decades later, when she held the FTII’s diamond jubilee coffee-table book in her hands, Paul experienced the same triad of emotions again, but now with a fourth note added: disappointment. The book featured roughly four or five women, the already seen, the always included names. “As you get older, you think of turning points, and FTII was a huge one in my life. To see women represented so sparingly, so narrowly, felt disappointing. Belittling, even. It made me question how success is measured and how women are always made to feel they have to work twice as hard, just to be seen,” Paul says.