Hasina Pasina: Examining Work and Its Imbrications Using Three Films as Catalysts

The idea of work takes many notions and is often implicated in the question of choice, or choicelessness. In certain modes of work, the question of choice is complicated through the possibilities of pleasure, violence, precarity, and play. In this essay, using Paromita Vohra's Working Girls (2025), Saim Sadiq's Joyland (2022) and Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022) as starting points, we hope to explore the questions of legitimacy, invisibility, pleasure, and stigma, surrounding certain kinds of work such as sex-work, erotic-dancing, etc. In the sample considered, the mix of fiction and documentary films, their notional separation, we think, will throw interesting light on the heart of the questions. We hope to look, not so much at the cinematic medium, its choices, and their implications, or, for that matter, those of the filmmakers, but at the questions of the notions of work evoked in these films. We want to perform an exploratory exercise of putting together the questions around labour, the absent/present State, and gender that move us, and these films that we are moved by, to see the possibilities that emerge when these questions are put in conversation.