Leena Manimekalai

In July 2022, Indian filmmaker Leena Manimekalai uploaded the poster for her new short film to Twitter. It depicted the filmmaker herself dressed up as a the Hindu goddess Kali, a tradition celebrated in her village of Tamil Nadu during festivals—but with a twist. In the poster, as in the film, Kaali, Manimekalai is holding aloft an LGBTQ pride flag and smoking a cigarette.

The next morning, Leena woke up to more than 250,000 tweets about the poster with the hashtag #ArrestLeenaManimekalai. Her portrayal of Kali, the goddess of time and change, sparked a furious uproar from far-right Hindu nationalist groups, spewing a maelstrom of vicious threats, insults, and shaming across India. “My life changed overnight,” she recalls. “I’ve experienced censorship before. . . but what happened for Kaali was over the top. They were tweeting that they will gang rape me, mutilate my organs, and broadcast it. They’ll kill my mother, they’ll kill my grandmother, they’ll kill my family and my crew. . . . They were creating a public opinion that I insulted Hinduism [and] Hindu gods and goddesses.”

Long before her face was plastered on screens and newspapers across India, Leena spent her days painting and writing poetry as a child growing up in a remote village in southern India. Her mother was a farmer and her father a language professor who later completed a Ph.D. in cinema. He instilled in his daughter a deep appreciation for language and the power of words. Throughout her childhood, she trained in several disciplines, including classical Bharatanatyam dance and Carnatic music. But as Leena reached her teenage years, her family expected her to step back from art and pursue a more “honorable” profession, like teaching or banking. “There is still the whole notion that women choosing art is not good for the family,” she says. “That taboo is strongly rooted in the psyche of our society, especially within the middle class. . . . You are supposed to marry, and you are only supposed to do certain professions.”

When Leena was 18, she was betrothed to her mother’s brother, per community customs. Unwilling to marry her uncle, she ran away from home and went on to pursue an engineering degree in college. But art remained a central part of her life—particularly street theater, which became her tool for change as a student activist. Along with her peers, she would go to local villages and work with their people to stage plays about issues impacting their community, such as lack of water and poor road conditions, and think about potential ways to address them.

Leena’s entry into filmmaking came a few years later, when her father passed away suddenly at age 48 and she became determined to publish his film thesis as a book to honor his work and memory. Through that process, she met a film director who was the first person to take her artistic aspirations seriously. He cast her in one of his projects—leading to backlash from her mother, who went so far as to go on a hunger strike. “I told my mother, ‘So sorry, but I want to work in the media, and I’m not going to pursue engineering,’” Manimekalai says. And “my father was not there, so my mother couldn’t do much!”

After a few years as an anchor and producer for broadcast television, where she began to make a name for herself, Leena began filming documentaries. From her earliest projects, she sought to shine a light on social and political issues. As a self-professed “utopian feminist” who devoured progressive texts and films throughout her childhood—and chafed at the limitations that her family and her community placed on her as a woman—becoming a filmmaker provided an opportunity to fight for her rights and her existence, on her own terms. “My politics is my starting point,” she says. “My activism defines my art and my art defines my activism—they are one and the same. I started using art to amplify my voice and bring out the issues politically.” 

“My politics is my starting point. My activism defines my art and my art defines my activism, they are one and the same. I started using art to amplify my voice and bring out the issues politically.”

Leena is self-taught. “I just got on my scooter with my microphone and started shooting,” she says. But she found success quickly. Her first film, the documentary Mathamma, explores the Dalit practice of offering female children to the deity Mathamma. They are forced to enter into a ritual akin to marrying the deity and are often exploited and vulernable to sex work. For the documentary, Leena conducted intimate interviews with women who had been sexually violated as a result of the practice. The film was screened at several festivals, including Chicago’s Women in the Director’s Chair in 2004. This acclaim helped launch an advocacy campaign that earned over 3,000 signatures and led several human rights commissions to travel to the villages where the documentary was filmed. Witnessing the direct impact of her film was a profound experience. “I could see interventions happening in front of my eyes,” Leena says, “and like any utopian 20-year-old feminist, I started believing I can make films independently like my own political pamphlets.”

Gender disparity, caste cruelty, class struggles, and resistance have remained mainstays of her filmography and poetry ever since. “I am constantly inclined towards the voiceless, people who are nowhere seen or who are nowhere heard,” she says. In 2007, she started a blog, First Most Beautiful Women in the World, where she found mainstream popularity for her writing on diverse themes, from female sexuality and desire to critiques of the patriarchy in the communist party. She came out as bisexual in one of her poetry collections, prompting a wave of outrage from Hindu fundamentalists, who literally burned her work. One of her poems about the communist party, which explored the relationship between toxic masculinity and ideology, drew the wrath of far-left parties. “It was the first time I received a lot of hate,” she says. People “were character-assassinating me and calling me a whore.”

Throughout her career, Leena has found that being a woman and being proudly, openly queer have led to rampant sexism. She has faced sexual harassment within the film industry, including from a Tamil director who tried to abduct her—a case that Leena spoke out against during the #MeToo movement in 2018, only to be retaliated against with a defamation case, which is still pending. “Being a woman itself is a big obstacle, because you have to work 10 times more to prove yourself good in whatever you do,” she says. “It also defines what you can speak, what you can write, what you can do, what you can wear, and how you can express yourself. . . . It took me a long time to just give zero fucks to people who ask you to be this way or that way.” Homophobia has only exacerbated the harassment. “You are already targeted as a woman,” she says, “and then you come out as queer, and then you make political films, and then you write on sexuality, and then you’re against the fascist government. . . . You’re fighting, and most of the time you don’t even see the enemies, but you are always fighting an industry that wants to see you destroyed.”

Read the rest of Leena’s profile in Art is Power.