Singer Chinmayi Sripaada on how joining the #MeToo movement changed her

The Ananda Vikatan Award, a golden statue partly shaped like the nib of a pen, given out by a popular Tamil language weekly magazine, stands on a side table in Chinmayi Sripaada’s Abhiramapuram home. A week ago, the 34-year-old playback singer won the Best Singer award for the song Kaathalae Kaathalae from last year’s film 96, that has Vijay Sethupathi and Trisha in the lead. Sripaada has sung six of the eight songs for the blockbuster Tamil film.

The adulation that surrounds her songs on the internet is overwhelming. “Vera (another) level song,” says one YouTube comment. “I can’t control my emotions, tears” writes another fan from Kerala. At the award function, Tamil actress Trisha, clutching her own golden statue, looked at Sripaada and said: “I sometimes felt she was more Jaanu (Trisha’s character in the film) than me.”

Seated somewhere in the middle rows, Sripaada smiled back at her. The awards that went out that day celebrated a rich year in Tamil cinema — and movies that challenged social order — but in that sea of people Sripaada was on her own. “A lot of people from the industry pretended not to see me that day,” she says.

Four months ago, in October 2018, swept by the courage of the collective in the #MeToo movement, Sripaada decided to share a story from her early days in the Tamil film industry. She took to Twitter and called out Vairamuthu, a powerful and prominent Tamil literary figure and lyricist, for sexual misconduct.

“Until then, the feeling of being a ‘victim’ was ingrained in my mind,” says Sripaada. She was an only child to a single mother and she sang in Tamil cinemas — in conservative Chennai it was more than enough to refuse renting out houses to the mother-daughter duo. “I constantly felt like I couldn’t go through with this. My parents separated when I was a year old. There wasn’t a day in my life when I didn’t grow up knowing I was raised by a divorcee. My grandfather had to stop by every now and then to be the male face of the house,” she says.

But there she was taking to Twitter after journalist Sandhya Menon first shared an anonymous allegation about how Vairamuthu had sexually harassed an 18-year-old woman who had gone to meet the poet for a project. Sripaada first retweeted it with a comment sharing a similar allegation made against Vairamuthu to her anonymously, but it only took 24 hours for her to share her own story: first, an invitation to his hotel room when she was 17 or 18 years old while on tour in Switzerland, then groped by him in his office in Chennai, where she was so frightened that she ran out leaving her slippers behind. “If #MeToo had not happened, I would have probably shared what happened to me with maybe 10 to 15 people in my circle. But I started hearing about stories from my own fraternity (Tamil film industry) and I thought I must speak up,” she says.

Courtesy : The Indian Express