Laadli Awards: The Quint's 1984 Docu & Bengali Film Industry Exposé Win Big
The Quint wins Laadli Awards for stories on Sikh women's fight for justice and harassment in Bengali cinema.
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Two editorial-defining stories from The Quint — ‘The Kaurs of 1984: How Sikh Women Continue to Fight 40 Years of Injustice’ and ‘“Then Don’t Do Films”: How Women Actors in the Bengali Film Industry Are Silenced’ — won big at the Laadli Media & Advertising Awards 2025.
The ceremony, held in Mumbai, saw nominees and winners from prestigious newsrooms across India.
'The Kaurs of 1984: How Sikh Women Continue to Fight 40 Years of Injustice'
The Quint’s documentary ‘The Kaurs of 1984’ has won big at the Laadli Awards 2025 — a recognition that belongs first to the women who refused to be erased.
The documentary was awarded in the ‘Web Documentary (English) – North’ category.
For decades, the Sikh women of Trilokpuri have carried the weight of a massacre the nation tried to forget. They watched husbands and sons dragged out and killed. They survived sexual violence, fire, mobs, and a state that looked away. And yet, through grief and crushing poverty, they raised their families, preserved testimonies, and kept fighting for justice in a system designed to exhaust them.
The Kaurs of 1984 honours these women — their courage, their stubborn memory, their refusal to let silence swallow the truth. It documents how accountability came only through their persistence, and how even 40 years later, justice remains unfinished.
(Photo: The Quint)
The team that worked on the documentary included
Zijah Sherwani (Reporter, Producer & Creative Director)
Jaspreet Singh (Reporter/Producer)
Nitin Bisht (Video Editor)
Athar Rather & Shiv Kumar Maurya (Camera)
Aditya Menon (Senior Editor)
Ritu Kapur (Executive Producer)
'Then Don't Do Films:' How Women Actors in Bengali Film Industry Are 'Silenced'
The story highlighting the sexual harassment of women in the Bengali film industry, reported by The Quint’s former correspondents Varsha Sriram and Madhusree Goswami, was recognised in two categories — Web Article (Regionals) and National Winner.
You can read the full article here.
The article exposed the entrenched misogyny, power imbalance, and routine harassment faced by women in the Bengali film and television industries. Through testimonies of both newcomers and established performers, the story revealed how women were pressured to accept inappropriate demands, endure verbal abuse, and navigate toxic work environments to keep working.
Actors recounted being dismissed, mocked, or threatened whenever they raised concerns about unsafe sets, predatory behaviour, or exploitative contracts. The repeated response — “Then don’t do films” — showed how gatekeepers weaponised scarcity of roles and financial insecurity to silence women. Complaints mechanisms either did not exist or were controlled by the same powerful men who dictated opportunities.
(Photo: The Quint)
The team that worked on the story included:
Varsha Sriram and Madhusree Goswami (former correspondents at The Quint)
Shelly Walia (Executive Editor)
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