Cinema, and its struggles, with the depiction of the Bharatiya nari

THERE HAS BEEN much discourse recently on depictions of women in Indian cinema, with anger expressed about manifestations of misogyny—from “item numbers” that objectify women to scenes where the hero “woos” an reluctant heroine. It is imperative to have these conversations: after all, cinema is a influential medium, and this is a country where a large percentage of the population is under-educated and brought up to never question the assumptions of a deep-rooted patriarchal “tradition”. But it is also true that righteous anger sometimes get conflated with the knee-jerk snobbery that has been directed towards mainstream Hindi cinema for decades—and that when the two things combine it can lead to the forming of simplistic analyses. Before rushing to condemn, it is important to understand the attitude that a particular film has towards its own subject. A film that shows a hero running after a heroine can amount to a glorification of stalking—an endorsement of a dangerous idea that a woman’s “no” secretly means “yes” or “umm…well…maybe…if you try a little harder”. But if done with selfawareness, such a scene might also tell us something useful about the workings of an orthodox milieu where girls are conditioned to believe that they must never be the initiators in a relationship— that they must protect their “dignity” and not be desirous—while boys are conditioned to think that they must be the first-movers. It must be possible for a film to be a mirror to a society without implying that “this is how things should be.” The process of interpreting a film about a delicate subject— say, gender equations or communal violence—raises questions about the relationship between a society and its art or popular culture. For instance: should art necessarily set out to be corrective or prescriptive? Does a wellintentioned filmmaker have a responsibility to make his own moral position as clear as possible; to spell it out for less-sophisticated viewers? I don’t think such questions can have definite, context-free answers: they are useful as conversation-initiators. The answers will also vary from one viewer to the next. As a relatively privileged male, I know that my perspective on misogyny in cinema is necessarily a limited one. But I also know that at least a few of my women friends (intelligent, sensitive viewers) found nothing ill-intentioned about the recent film Raanjhanaa that has been denounced in some circles for its “glamorising” of the “stalker-hero”. It is tempting to believe that these issues are new—symptoms of a morally corrupt age—but they have really been around for decades. When Raj Kapoor slaps Nargis around and drags her by her hair in Awaara while she accepts, even welcomes, the treatment as her due, is this a endorsement of how men should behave with women or is it (given the context of the film’s narrative and its character types) a depiction of what might happen in a very specific situation? One can note that Kapoor’s films have often shown a somewhat disturbing, puritanical attitude to the female form. But as Camille Paglia once pointed out, male artists—from Botticelli to Alfred Hitchcock—have often had complex, ambivalent feelings about women that they grapple with and try to resolve through the creative process. This does not imply that the disturbing interpretations of their work are the only “correct” ones. In 1960, Hrishikesh Mukherjee made a lovely movie titled Anuradha, about a woman who forsakes her singing career and moves to a village with her doctor-husband. One scene has a male character—a figure of authority—delivering a flamboyant speech about the capacity of women to suffer and make sacrifices for the nation. Listening only to this speech, which comes at a key point in the story, you might think the film is endorsing the idea that a woman’s place is at home while the man’s profession is more important. But on a scene by scene basis, Anuradha is consistently sensitive to its heroine’s need for self-actualisation. In one mesmeric sequence, she sings in the presence of two men—her husband, who is barely paying heed to her song, and an old friend who is giving her all the attention she deserves, and there is no doubt where the viewer’s sympathies should lie. All this said, it is true that mainstream Hindi cinema has often relegated women to ciphers. In many cases, mothers and sisters in particular were not so much fleshed-out people but convenient foils for the male hero—our film history is dotted with mothers mollycoddling narcissistic sons (and this again may be a reflection of a society where mothers of convicted rapists routinely beg for “leniency” for their ladlaa). There is an inbuilt dichotomy in portrayals of mainstream movie mothers going back at least to the 1950s: on the one hand, the mother is someone to be worshipped, to be placed above all else; on the other hand, she has no personality of her own. She might as well be a Goddess statue made of cheap clay.

Which is why it has been heartening to see more varied and dynamic portrayals—and a willingness to break stereotypes—in the multiplex era of the last decade. We have, for instance, a Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na in which the terrific Ratna Pathak Shah plays a wisecracking mom who is a pal to her son, and whose banter with her dead husband’s wall-portrait marks a 180-degree twist on every maudlin wall-picture scene from movies of an earlier time. Or there is the Kirron Kher character in Dostana, initially dismayed about the possibility that her son is homosexual, but eventually coming around, gifting bangles to her “daughter-in-law” and wondering if traditional Indian rituals might accommodate something as alien as gay marriage. These scenes are played for laughs—and Dostana is an often facetious film—but they do touch on real cultural conflicts and on the ways in which parents from conservative backgrounds often have to change to keep up with the times. We should be grateful for this new-found variety and irreverence. In fact, one good way for Hindi cinema to start depicting women as sentient people—warts and all—is to start at the grass-roots level and puncture that ultimate holy cow, the sanctified mother. The rest will hopefully follow.