Abstract
Menstruation is having an unprecedented moment in the spotlight. Never before in the history of India has the subject of menstruation, its taboos and its implications on women’s health, had such a thorough airing in media. Never before has there been such reformist zeal. Unsurprisingly, at least a part of the inspiration for this new zeal springs from a mainstream Hindi film released in February 2018, which features Akshay Kumar along with Radhika Apte and Sonam Kapoor.
Padman is based on the life and work of Arunachalam Muruganantham, a Tamil Nadu-based school dropout, who invented a low-cost machine to make sanitary napkins that women in rural India could afford to use.Muruganantham’s story was already known. He had been written about in the media, including Time magazine, which named him amongst the world’s 100 most influential people of 2014. He had received awards for his innovation of a low-cost sanitary napkin-making machine. What Padman, one of the top three grossing movies in early 2018, has done is to mainstream his story further and wider. And in the process, spark a conversation on menstruation, long a forbidden topic in India.
To briefly recapitulate Muruganantham’s story: Born to handloom weavers in Coimbatore, Muruganantham dropped out of school in the ninth standard after the death of his father. In 1998, he married Shanthi and discovered for the first time that she, like the other woman in the village, used rags ‘not fit enough to clean my two-wheeler’ when she menstruated. Why not sanitary napkins, he asked Shanthi? If she and the other women in the house were to switch to commercial sanitary napkins, she retorted, they would not be able to afford to buy milk for the household.
Why did a product that used simple, low-cost raw materials cost so much in the market? It was puzzling. But the prohibitive cost of store-bought pads left women with no option but to use dirty rags, which often didn’t get so much as an airing in the sun since they were washed and dried out of sight. Expectedly, this had disastrous implications for women’s health. And so began Muruganantham’s journey to produce a low-cost sanitary napkin.
The early innovations were failures. He had not yet discovered that sanitary napkins are made of cellulose fibre and not cotton. Moreover, he simply didn’t have a large-enough sample pool of women who would try them out and give him feedback. A sample of one, his wife, was too small and it would take decades to develop a viable pad if he had to wait for her feedback once a month. Asking his neighbours and village women was to cross all bounds of social propriety. At one point, he approached women students at a medical college but found them fudging the feedback sheet.
Left with very few options, he then decided to experiment on himself, creating an artificial uterus from an old football bladder with holes punched in it. This ‘uterus’ was then filled with animal blood procured from the butcher to which decoagulant was added. With the football bladder worn under his clothes, Muruganantham became his own test case.
This couldn’t remain secret for long. To start with, he smelled awful. When villagers saw him washing his bloodstained clothes in the village well, they concluded that he had contracted a sexual disease. He was a pervert, ruled a village panchayat. Eighteen months after his marriage, his wife left him.
Undeterred, Muruganantham plodded on, this time convincing medical students to use the pads made by him and return them used so that he could study their absorbency. When his mother found him riffling through these pads, she too packed up and left.
It was time for Muruganantham himself to leave the village.
Working as a domestic worker for a college professor who helped him write letters to multinational companies, Muruganantham discovered that it was cellulose fibre not cotton wool that went into the making of sanitary napkins. The cellulose came in the form of hard boards that had to be broken down into fluffy absorbent material by a machine, much like a blender in the kitchen. This absorbent material was then compacted into a rectangular shape, wrapped in non-woven fibre, sterilized by ultraviolet light and sealed in packets for sale.
The key, then, was not to make napkins; the key was to make the machine that made the napkins.
Muruganantham’s prototype consisted not of one giant, expensive machine that did all the functions, but four smaller components that performed each stage of production. A manually operated unit cost as little as ₹75,000 and could make up to 250 sanitary napkins a day.
The innovation continued with the marketing plan. He was not interested, he would say later, in selling the patent for a large sum of money. The idea was to use the machine to empower India’s marginalized women.
Muruganantham’s machine was bought by groups of women, self-help groups and non-governmental organisations who would take a loan, and run and sell their own production unit with a small profit to recover the initial investment. This way, the groups would promote both the use of sanitary napkins as well as provide employment and empowerment to poor rural women.
In 2006, Muruganantham’s sanitary napkin machine won the best innovation for the betterment of society award from IIT Chennai. In the same year, he also received a presidential award from the then president Pratibha Patil. Today, according to his start-up company Jayashree Industries’ website, more than 1,300 machines have been installed across 27 states in India as well as in seven other countries. Each machine converts 3,000 women to become users of sanitary napkins and provides employment to 10 women.
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In November 2016, Juggernaut Books published The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad, a collection of four stories on feminism written by Twinkle Khanna, former actor, producer and columnist. Amongst those stories was The Sanitary Man of Sacred Land based on the real life story of Muruganantham. It was this short story that became the foundation of a full-fledged film directed by R. Balki whose earlier works include Cheeni Kum and English Vinglish.
Produced by Twinkle Khanna, the script co-written by Balki and Swanand Kirkire sticks pretty close to real life. There are some dramatic flourishes, presumably done as a nod to mainstream mass entertainment. For instance, the inclusion of a character named Pari (literally, fairy) who is instrumental in implementing the project and who also adds a bit of romantic tension to the plot.
The opening sequence begins with the marriage of Lakshmikant Chauhan—the name of the character based on Muruganantham (Akshay Kumar)—and quickly establishes two facts. The first, Chauhan is extremely considerate to his wife (called Gayatri in the film) and the second that he is an innovator. So, very early on, when he sees Gayatri (Radhika Apte) weeping because of her chopping onions, Chauhan buys a cheap toy from the market and adapts it to become an onion chopper.
Once this fact is established, we get to know that, like most men, Chauhan seems to be blissfully unaware about why his wife and two sisters are banished from the house for five days every month, eating, sleeping and staying out of all physical contact during a period that the village boys refer to as their five-day ‘test match’.
Although the focus is the story of Chauhan, Padman does look at the rituals and superstitions associated with menstruation. Interestingly, the chief custodians of these rituals are women themselves. For instance, it is Chauhan’s mother who castigates him for speaking to his wife outside the house at a time when it is prohibited for him to have any contact with her. During a Raksha Bandhan lunch, when the eldest married sister and the two younger, unmarried ones sit down to eat, Gayatri suddenly realizes that she, in fact, has to get up and leave at once. Her thali is later brought to her outside the house by one of the sisters.
It is the women who observe the rituals that celebrate the coming of age of a young girl after her first period. There is care and love as they anoint her with oil, drape her with a new sari, and tend to her on a flower-bedecked swing. But at night, she is put out to sleep. As her mother covers her with a sheet, she advises her that she might experience some discomfort, but not to worry. Then she turns and leaves her alone outside.
Again it is the women who seem to fall prey to gimmicky religious tricks run by local charlatans. For instance, Gayatri, like many of the women in the village, is impressed by a Hanuman idol that accepts coconuts into its mouth from devotees. Lo and behold, the coconut then emerges in the idol’s hand, broken into pieces as prasad. Chauhan sees through this gimmick. But Gayatri insists that he shell out ₹51 for the privilege of this prasad. Left unstated is the comparison with the packet of sanitary napkins that Chauhan buys from the chemist for ₹55 and which she considers a luxury and too expensive for use.
Chauhan’s story pretty much follows Muruganantham’s timeline and he ends up making his machine. It’s at this point that Pari (Sonam Kapoor), the daughter of an IIT Delhi professor, enters the plot. Pari is visiting Chauhan’s town for a youth festival where she plays the tabla, solo. Late at night, she discovers that she’s started her period, has forgotten to pack sanitary napkins (as have her friends), and is in search of a medical store that will be open at that hour. Racing around in their rented car, the women come across Chauhan and miraculously he fishes out just what they need from his pocket.
It is Pari who is Chauhan’s first customer. It is Pari again who finds an entry for Chauhan’s machine in an innovation contest where he eventually wins a prize and gets written about in the newspapers. And it is Pari who, as a woman, is able to reach Chauhan’s core market—other women.
Chauhan’s fame spreads to the United Nations and he is invited to speak in New York, where he, like Muruganantham, speaks in his broken but perfectly understandable English. Pari accompanies him, and what could have been an indiscretion is averted by the timely ringing of Chauhan’s phone: It is his long lost wife Gayatri.
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A year before the February 2018 release of Padman, there was Phullu directed by Abhishek Saxena. Like Padman, it is based on the life and work of Muruganantham. But unlike Chauhan who is both industrious and innovative, Phullu is a good-for-nothing who hangs around the village doing odd chores while his mother makes a living selling home-made quilts.
The film lacks the gloss of big-budget cinema. Where it succeeds is in breaking taboos and talking about a subject that has almost never been mentioned in mainstream Indian cinema.
Once again, it is the women who are mired in tradition, sticking to cloth because that’s how it has always been done. It’s the women, in fact, who are the worst characters in the film—the foul-mouthed, overworked mother and the silly sister who is upset that her brother spends the money saved for the last installment for a pair of gold earrings for her dowry, on sanitary napkins.
The closest to Muruganantham’s story is a 2013 one-hour long documentary, Menstrual Man directed by Amit Virmani. As a documentary, this is the film that comes closest to explaining his vision through a series of interviews and excerpts from his public talks.
For instance, there is his ‘butterfly’ model of business. The butterfly, explains Muruganantham, ‘Will suck the honey from the flower, but no harm comes to the flower.’
The documentary begins with a classroom of young girls. Their male teacher is telling them about pads, even holding one up aloft. The girls break into embarrassed giggles. At the end, the teacher introduces a slight, dark-haired, smiling man standing behind the classroom. It is Arunachalam Muruganantham.
Told largely in his own words—‘I saw a problem in my country. The women are not using sanitary pads. It is shameful for me that finally India needed a school dropout to make sanitary pads for women,’—the film also covers issues of menstrual hygiene. We are told that 70 per cent of all reproductive diseases in India are caused by poor menstrual hygiene.
Unlike the biopics, the documentary also telescopes out into the lives of the women who are impacted by Muruganantham’s sanitary napkin machine. There’s Gudiya who runs away from an abusive, violent marriage to an alcoholic man. Back at her mother’s house, she has found employment at the sanitary napkin-making unit. ‘I used to hesitate to speak earlier,’ she says. ‘It’s like I never existed. Now, even if I’m not asked, I will give my opinion.’
And then there is Muruganantham’s mission of providing sustainable livelihood activity to India’s poorest women. Starting with the Bimaru states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, he talks of taking this model to not just other states in India but to other underdeveloped nations too. Beyond the inspirational life of Muruganantham, there are several short films that talk about menstruation itself.
Amongst these are those that dwell on the first day of a child’s period.
First Period (available on YouTube), a ten-minute short film directed by Mozez Singh, begins with an alarm clock going off. The child who wakes up, walks into the bathroom, starts the tap, puts toothpaste onto a toothbrush, sits on the toilet and sees…a drop of blood.
The child comes downstairs, looking worried. The family members, all male, are busy doing household chores, sewing, preparing the lunch tiffin, and peeling peas. The child runs back upstairs. He now has a name, Ayush. The father follows and sees the bloodstained sheets. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ smiles the father at his son.
What First Period does is explore the premise of what the experience of menstruation would be if boys and men, rather than girls and women, bled, bringing to mind Gloria Steinem’s 1978 essay for Ms. magazine, If men could menstruate. (Incidentally, Chauhan too makes this allusion in his broken English in Padman: ‘Bloody men,’ he says in his United Nations address. ‘Half hour bleeding like women…they straight dying.’)
Certainly, a first period would be a matter-of-fact occasion, one that is celebrated and dealt with rather than hushed up and hidden away.
When Ayush’s father realizes that his son has got his first period, the men take matters in their hands. No, there is no question of missing school, says the father. ‘There’s no need to panic. It happens to everyone,’ adds the grandfather, telling him to finish his glass of milk since he needs that extra nutrition. An uncle takes Ayush down to the chemist to buy the ‘best quality pads’—biodegradable of course—for our hero, because it’s his first day.
Later in school, the boys tell the teacher it’s Ayush’s first day and he is shown how to properly dispose of his used sanitary napkin. He plays football, scores a goal and is embraced and lifted by his teammates.
The film ends with a repeat of the opening sequence: An alarm clock goes off, a child gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom, toothpaste is squeezed on a brush, the child sits on the toilet and sees a drop of blood. But we now see that the child is female.
The film ends with some statistics: 70 per cent of mothers think menstruation is dirty and polluting; 88 per cent of menstruating women in India use home-grown alternatives like old fabric, rags, sand, ash, wood shavings, newspapers, dried leaves, hay and plastic; 63 million adolescent girls live in homes without toilet facilities; girls typically are absent for 20 per cent of the school-year due to menstruation.
Her First Time, the debut film by Malayalam actor Divya Unny (available on YouTube), also looks at a first period. When a young girl, Kittu gets her first period, her mother, a gynaecologist, is attending to a complicated delivery and is not at home. It’s up to the father to deal with it. There is concern and love as he holds a hot water bottle. Then the mother messages, asking them to look for a blue box in the cupboard. On it is a note, ‘congratulations’ and in it a sanitary napkin with detailed instructions on ‘how to do this’. Meanwhile, the father is googling, ‘your daughter’s first period’.
A flashback shows how the mother has been preparing her child for this day. By the time the mother comes home after a successful delivery, Kittu has gone to bed and the father has fallen off to sleep on the couch, clutching the hot water bottle to his chest. The mother gets into bed, cuddling her daughter and holding her close.
The short film attempts not only to de-stigmatise menstruation, treating it as a normal occurrence but also breaks gender stereotypes about a father’s role in this rite of passage.
A third short film on a first period, Alert Condition: Red is directed by Xahid Khan and is about a young girl who gets her first period in a public space. The girl walks on, passing by a couple and groups of smirking men. Finally, it’s a good Samaritan, a man, who finds her weeping, convinces another, older woman to help, buys a packet of sanitary napkins and puts the girl in a taxi. The message is confusing. Is it to assert humanity—help a fellow human in need or tackle menstruation stigma?
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These recent films on menstruation lead to an obvious and perhaps inevitable question: Whose perspective are we seeing? There has been some criticism that the menstruation films are being seen from a male perspective. ‘Pivoting the tale on a masculine viewpoint tends to also position men as saviours,’ writes Anahita Panicker in The Hindu. And thus, ‘While this moment offers a chance to have nuanced discussions of class, gender and sex, these dialogues are often wrung out to fit into a predictable frame that oversimplifies a complex problem.’
Panicker’s point is well taken, but, in my opinion, misses two crucial aspects. The first is that three of the above films, one documentary and two features, are about the life of a man whose life and work centres around menstruation. Cinematically, thus, and thematically we are seeing menstruation through the eyes of a male reformer.
Is this about positioning men as saviours, and what if men are saviours? Interestingly, some of menstruation’s great crusaders have been men, including Goonj founder, Anshu Gupta who won the Ramon Magsaysay award in 2015 for his ‘enterprising leadership in treating cloth as a sustainable development resource for the poor’ (see in his profile at
I think we are past the point where feminism is a function of biology. Yes, men can be evil, but they can also be saviours, and I say hurrah to them. We need all the allies, all the champions, all the saviours, even if we are to confront patriarchy and demolish it.
The second is the treatment of women characters. I have written above on the gratuitous introduction of Pari in Padman. Yet would the film have succeeded without its concessions (including some songs thrown in) to mainstream entertainment cinema? If the aim of the film is to engage with as wide an audience as possible, then perhaps one can be forgiving of these digressions.
The issue is not a superfluous love angle or a nod to the popular demands of mainstream cinema. The issue is the vilification of female characters. In Phullu, who is himself a character of buffoonish proportion, there is needless vilification of practically all the female characters, with the exception of Phullu’s wife who is nothing but sweet cooperation. By stripping Phullu of dignity, the film does a disservice to the man it seeks to honour. And by caricaturing the film’s main characters, the film comes across as flawed. In the end, it fails as entertainment cinema and its only redeeming value is the fact that it breaches a formerly taboo topic.
In Padman, it is the women themselves who resist Chauhan’s efforts. The film is not afraid to confront an unpalatable truth: Who uphold social custom and tradition? Menstruation does have many champions, men and women, but many of its traditional restrictions come from women who have internalized patriarchy’s message of ritual purity.
When it comes to menstruation, whose story do we need to hear, and who should be the storytellers? In the conversations of the past few years, I think we have established that gender can transcend the boundaries of biological difference. A feminist tale needs a feminist teller. The questions we must ask—for there is nothing known as ‘perfect’ art—is the perspective sympathetic? Is the message clear? And are we now having a conversation that we have never had before?
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In a country that worships mothers and elevates them to near sacred status, menstruation—a biological process without which motherhood would not be possible—remains shrouded in a culture of silence and shame.
In the belief that menstrual blood is impure and dirty, women are placed under severe restrictions. These include being compelled to sleep separately while menstruating, banned from entering kitchens, touching the pickle jar and attending religious and social functions. In some villages, women continue to be segregated in animal sheds.
Apart from an obvious violation of human rights and dignity, this culture of silence ensures that any conversation about menstruation, including menstrual hygiene and its implications on women’s health, is nearly absent from the public sphere. Only 48 per cent of girls are aware of menstruation before menarche, only 55 per cent consider it to be normal and 54 per cent get their knowledge about menstruation from their mothers (van Eijk et al., 2016).
This lack of knowledge extends to knowledge about menstrual hygiene and the implications on women’s health by using rags, straw, and even ash as blotters. As Padman and the other movies show, very few women, only 36 per cent or 121 million girls and women of the 336 million who menstruate use locally or commercially produced sanitary napkins. (Pushing the Boundaries on the MHM Dialogue in India, 2017)
Increasing the usage of sanitary napkins is only one of the challenges. Development activists and those working in the area of menstrual hygiene are aware of a new frontier of challenges, as a new generation of aspirational girls and women are more aware than their mothers ever were. Enabled by government schemes and the free distribution of pads in some schools and Anganwadi centres, these girls are more likely to use pads.
This increasing usage is, however, creating its own problems. Most commercially available pads are non-compostable and the country is at present looking at a billion used pads being dumped every month in landfills, water bodies, rural fields and urban sewerage systems. These sanitary napkins with a plastic lining and super absorbent polymers can take up to 250 years, if not more, to fully decompose.
The menstruation challenge is wide and far-reaching. From battling stigma to normalizing conversation, from increasing acceptance of hygienic and sustainable alternatives (menstrual cups and cloth pads) to creating awareness of disposal issues and from health issues to preventing early school dropout at the onset of puberty. The challenges are enormous.
Luckily, menstruation activists are already in the fray. The year-long campaign to exempt sanitary napkins from the goods and services tax (GST) has brought menstruation, or at least the words ‘sanitary napkin’, on primetime television.
In the Supreme Court, activists are questioning a ban on the entry of so-called impure women of menstruating age into the Sabarimala Temple. Elsewhere in 2015, #HappyToBleed was a social media campaign designed to break the stigma and silence. Anonymous student campaigners for Pads Against Sexism went about Delhi University and Jamia Millia Islamia sticking sanitary napkins on trees and walls. Each came with a social message, for instance, ‘Menstruation is natural. Rape is not.’ And, ‘Period blood is not impure. Your thoughts are.’
The pre-publicity release of Padman involved a ‘Padman challenge’ designed to break the traditional silence. Actors like Aamir Khan posted photographs of himself on social media holding aloft a sanitary napkin. Miss World, Manushi Chhillar, spoke about the need for ‘social responsibility that will push for change in society’.
The release of the film also saw its producer Twinkle Khanna talking about menstrual hygiene at various fora including BBC World and at the United Nations Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Summit.
These are baby steps, punctuation marks in a desperately-needed conversation. The power of popular culture cannot be underestimated in a country where Bollywood is a reigning deity. But every effort that ends up normalizing a biological function, thereby promoting health and well-being can only be welcomed.