Film on Dehradun's women helpline goes to Hot Docs Canada: Docu traces helpline's unusual marriage counselling service

Hindustan Times

26-04-2025

Launched two decades ago, the Women Helpline in Dehradun is a well-staffed special office inside a police station in the hill state of Uttarakhand. Now, thanks to an intercontinental collaboration between two Indian and American filmmakers, Dehradun's helpline has also become the subject of a new documentary. (Also read: Films chronicling Indian farmers' protests, CAA to feature at Hot Docs festival)
Marriage Cops, directed by Dehradun-born Shashwati Talukdar and Philadelphia-based Cheryl Hess, tells the story of an unlikely service provided by the police in Uttarakhand: marriage counselling to feuding couples. The 80-minute film will premiere at the Hot Docs Festival in Canada, the world's biggest documentary film festival, on Sunday.
First started in 2004, the Women's Helpline receives over 1,000 cases every year from women whose marriages are on the rocks. The reasons behind the cases of domestic discord in the mostly arranged marriages that arrive at the helpline are dowry, adultery, physical abuse, property disputes and interference by in-laws.
Every Thursday, a counselling team of women police officers and a team of volunteers, including a psychologist, lawyer and social activist, gather in the police station to meet and counsel couples, trying to help them reach a reconciliation.
Most of the time, it is a messy meeting, with wives and husbands shouting at each other and accusing each other of broken promises. But in many cases, it works to give the women an opportunity to manage their lives slightly better than the complicated place it already is.
"What was compelling for us to explore was how ordinary people were using the police to solve their personal problems. Which is not how we are used to seeing the police or even thinking about them," says Talukdar, who, along with Hess, wanted to look at the impact of policing and violence against women, after the nationwide protests against the gang-rape of a young student in Delhi in 2012.
At that time, the two filmmakers were planning their next work on a project together after having met in a film school in Philadelphia many years before. Talukdar had just completed her first documentary, Please Don't Beat Me Sir, about the Chhara tribe in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, a community condemned by the British as criminals and de-notified after independence. Hess was a field producer and cameraperson for the ABC News series, NYPD 24/7.
The Women Helpline was not unique to Uttarakhand, with several states having their own to aid those in abusive relationships. The first women's helpline in the country was started in Tamil Nadu. Mumbai had a helpline that involved an NGO fighting crimes against women. There wasn't, however, one where the police provided counselling to couples.
The big difference between the Dehradun women helpline and others across the country gave Talukdar and Hess just the kind of inspiration they needed. It also helped that Talukdar was born in Dehradun and lived there. Armed with permissions for shooting inside a police station, the filmmakers -- Hess was also a trained cinematographer -- placed themselves in the Dehradun Women Helpline office for three months, capturing the tension, and on a rare occasion a ray of hope.
"This was before the coronavirus pandemic," says Talukdar, a post-graduate in mass communication from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, who also studied filmmaking at the Temple University, Philadelphia where Hess was a student. "What was really interesting for us was how the state sort of regulates personal lives," she adds.
The approach of the filmmakers to the documentary was closely linked to the high rate of domestic violence in India and the alarming attitude of the society to it. "There are men who believe it is sort of right to hit your wife," says Talukdar.
"Because there's so much pressure from society, from family, you can't really prosecute the perpetrators of domestic violence. So the prosecution of domestic violence is absolutely abysmal in India," explains Talukdar.
In such a system, the Women Helpline in Dehradun gave a small window to the women in abusive relationships. In the film, one woman seeks the help of the police to get money for baby's milk from her estranged husband. Another wants a kitchen separate from their extended family.
"I think you can't put it on them (police) to solve the societal problem. That's something beyond the scope of the women's helpline," says Hess, who last year directed a short documentary, She Got Balls!, about a vegan recipe at a meatball contest. "So I feel these women come in, and they, you know, want money for child support," she adds.
"Maybe they really don't want to prosecute, which can be quite shocking, especially for a Western audience without understanding the context of how marriage works and how the family is involved in the marital relationships and that the woman may not be able to go back home and there's not an extensive shelter system for her," says Hess.
"Nobody wants to go to the police, you know? Like, people avoid the police. That's universal. But we found that the helpline had thousands of cases. It was really popular. So there was something that was appealing, like, to leverage the power of the state for your own ends, and that's what the women were attempting to do," says Hess.
Produced by Diana Chiawen Lee, an independent Taiwanese producer known for the documentaries The Priestess Walks Alone (2016) and The Catch (2021), Marriage Cops focuses on three couples as they receive counselling from the police at the Women's Helpline. Headed by a sub-inspector, the helpline has eight constables who take turns interrogating the couples and doing the massive paperwork. Almost all the helpline staff are women.
The documentary also shows how the police are working hard to protect the institution of marriage. "There's such a huge interest in making people stay together," says Hess. "It's just not two people getting married. It's like the entire village has an interest in a couple staying together because a break-up disturbs the entire political and social economy," adds Talukdar.
The curious case of police as counsellors dominates the production. "The cops are doing the counselling, you know, it's so different. They're not trained as relationship counsellors. And they shouldn't be. Peculiarly, it is somehow effective at some point," says Hess. Adds Talukdar, "At the end of the day, it's not the police's job to provide marriage counselling."