The representation of the female lead in Hindi cinema has undergone various transformations throughout the decades. RINKU GHOSH chronicles her nuances, both cinematic and now economic, and studies how she has been faring against all odds

Alka Singh aka Revolver Rani has aced it as our own catwoman, all feline grace and fury, seductress and the avenging angel, a lover and a killer, innocent and damaged, simple yet mysterious, not a bra-burner but an armoured bra warrior, raw and elegant because of it. She is an acid-spewing sharpshooter whose heart beats for a man much lesser than her wit and gun-toting, athletic litheness; she saves her toyboy knowing full well that he will never commit. She takes on the oligarchy of men, aware that she will be manipulated, but outruns them with an ease that challenges their custodial hold on her role-playing in society. And that is why Revolver Rani is a benchmark film, following the story of the other Rani, who dumped by her overreaching fiancé, overcomes her inhibitions, taboos and lesser abilities to fly free. And solo.

In fact, Revolver Rani is the first woman superhero who is going to be a franchise like Krrish. The money may not have exactly tumbled in with the first roll of the dice but director Sai Kabir believes that the character has had such a hold on the psyche of the film-goer that the franchise would one day do the dhoom at the box office.

Much has been said about the return of women in mainstream cinema ever since Vidya Balan changed the rules of the game, being a strong counterfoil and sometimes even outsmarting men in the moderately successful Ishqiya and the cult hit Kahaani. The cash registers of Barfi!, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani and Cocktail showed how meatier parts for top notch commercial actresses like Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone had eroded the contours of conformity while not shying away from stereotyped glamour. The return of yesteryear divas Madhuri Dixit and Sridevi with their gorgeous aura intact showed ageism was about maturity like good wine casked rightly. But more than skilful crafting, these films show how the mainstream Hindi film industry has turned full circle, from the fearless Nadia of yore, from the Bandini of unrequited love and crime of passion, the quiet sacredness of Mother India to the revenge-seeking strategist of Khoon Bhari Maang and the visceral fulsomeness of Rani, Bundelkhand to Bombay. This change is more evolutionary in terms of popular projection, and the woman in Hindi films, from struggling among arthouse portrayals, is quickly appropriating contemporary reality. That a woman can drive her own destiny, without the man, despite the man, even using the man. And in the Hollywoodian motif of Thelma and louise, she may not trust Vijay (we all know the stolidity this screen name represents in popular imagination) but ride into the sunset with Vijaylakshmi (the erstwhile fallen angel who overrides her victimhood, tramples codified expectations and makes confident choices, black, white and all shades in between). Or the frail Para Jaan, who makes men look so gullible with her guile that she chooses another like-minded woman as her companion.

HISTORY AS A MIRROR

We often wonder why the feisty women of the cinema of the 1930s, who blazed the screen with their personalities, got reduced to the Manuvadi formula of fortitude and servitude. The father of Indian cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke, had to settle for a man to play the female lead in Raja Harishchandra in 1913 because no woman from any strata of society was prepared to work in such a lowly profession. But as films began to rely on the Western template, there was an efflorescence of imitative pioneers, who were laying the foundation stone and wanted to look their best. Also the early films were the first public platform for shaping the popular imagination of women, beautiful, skillful and expressive. The 1930s were, therefore, about progressiveness. The years were defined by Devika Rani, actor and producer, Fatima Begum, the first Indian woman director who made Bulbul-e-Paristan. There was Durga Khote, a Brahmin, who made the extraordinary decision of acting in films at a time when it was considered a dubious profession. Mary Evans, popularly known as Fearless Nadia, was a feminist much before the term was understood.

By the 1940s, cinema changed from being a creative forum to a commercial industry where entertainment was paramount; it changed from being a Western-inspired phenomenon to being more Indian in context as the nation marched towards its own independence from colonialism. Women were offshoots of the benevolent Bharat mata and came to be depicted in a way that would appeal to the decision-making and more importantly, the paying males of the family. So they reinforced a rather chauvinistic attitude towards women and their place in family and society.

last year, while delivering a lecture on Representation of Women in Indian Cinema and Beyond, veteran actress Sharmila Tagore recounted: “In 1957, when I acted in Apur Sansar, I was asked to leave my school. The principal felt I would be a bad influence on the other girls. I vividly remember another incident during the shooting of Kashmir Ki Kali in 1963 when the daughter of a reputed industrial family visited the location. Photographs taken on the occasion found their way on the cover of Filmfare. The family, aghast at the thought of their daughter appearing with film stars in a film magazine, bought out the entire print run of the issue. Since then, societal attitudes towards films have changed dramatically.” This change in attitude brought a wave of change in the film industry as well. After all, cinema has been the reflection of societal and cultural changes.

In the 1950s, Bimal Roy had strong and realistic women characters in his films Sujata and Bandini, perhaps echoing the birthing of a nation, seeking an identity but almost Christ-like in their fortitude. In Mother India, Nargis essayed what is probably the most iconic female role in the history of Indian cinema, while Mughal-e-Azam had Madhubala in the pivotal role. Down the years, there was a Pakeezah and Umrao Jaan. But they were largely geared towards satisfying the male view of the woman and her unhappiness was elevated as “sacrifice”. It was the actresses, through their screen presence, intelligence and histrionics, who elevated the narrative and their roles to an iconic status and became inspirational figures. Referring to the “virtuous female stereotypes”, Shyam Benegal, one of the few Indian filmmakers who created strong, individualistic women even in a rural, feudal set-up, says, “Her virtue was in being the good mother, wife, sister — a set of essential roles a woman has to play — which was a terrible kind of oppression; a glorification of not allowing the woman any choice. In the 1950s and the era that followed, glimpses of our patriarchal society were visible. However, I always chose to stand out and if you will see, 90 per cent of my films are about women and their untold stories. That subtext has now become the main script.”

Benegal’s films like Ankur, Bhumika, Mandi and Hari Bhari, have well-written female characters. But these were in the nature of exceptions and were no match for the huge blockbusters of mainstream cinema which kept reinforcing stereotypes of women as young, beautiful, innocent yet sexy, pliable, obedient, always placing her family and others before herself.

Popular cinema, as film scholar Maithili Rao says, endorsed the norm that “A woman’s place is at home. Her interest is best served by directing all her energies and intellect in finding a man and keeping him. Marriage is her passport to life and she is happy only when she is brought into the fold of marriage and motherhood and submits to the norms of society.” Any other aspiration or indulgence was the terrain of the vamp, a category which has ceased to exist now as the onscreen woman grew in fullness.

The early 60s were marked by two mainstream films, Guide and Sahib, Bibi Aur Ghulam, with remarkable women protagonists, one who breaks out of her marriage to live her life and the other, drowning herself in alcoholism as the rejected wife and finding solace in a beautiful platonic relationship with a family retainer. later, directors like Gulzar, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee were praised for a refreshingly different treatment of women characters. However, it was argued that even in their films (for example in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anupama, Anuradha, Guddi and Khoobsurat), women seldom ventured out to work, barring Abhimaan which was a critique of male chauvinism. It can be argued that in the 1960s and 1970s, when Mukherjee made his films, women rarely went out to work although we had a powerful woman prime minister. Also, for an administration battling waves of political and economic crises, the common man was crying for a better future. In films, that deliverance from every form of injustice came in the form of a “masculine” hero, the “angry young man.” 

The 80s were a cry for new identities as women began to rise at the workplace and broke their secretarial values. Films like Arth, Mirch Masala and Bazaar carried that edge of determination though these films were categorised as parallel films. Explains Benegal, “To a filmmaker like me, who has always believed in his stories, parallel and mainstream were just terms. One had vision, the other had money that had to be recovered from the lowest common denominator. All that mattered to me or still matters to me is the fact that there was always an audience for those films. That can only grow.”

Author and film historian Aruna Vasudev attributes the 80s’ change in portrayal of women in mainline cinema to the explosion of television. “That was the time when the family audience stopped going out to theatres frequently and home videos and films were booming. Popular films focussed on the young audience and basic entertainment. If you notice there was a plethora of love stories and dance musicals; the hero fighting the system began fighting for his girl, who was no more than an arm candy. It was only in the post-liberalisation years, with the first wave of economic prosperity and attendant social and political changes that the audience evolved and matured. The multiplex culture was a reaction. Filmmakers decided that they couldn’t get back the monolithic family audience but a segmented approach could work. So distributors and theatre owners upgraded the total viewing experience and allowed the multi-themed, multi-screen format. Filmmakers also realised that in the new economy, women not only had a mind and voice of their own; they also earned enough to make key consumer choices. To play safe, filmmakers in the late 90s made safe films revolving around women’s issues. But the break-out happened only recently, as regression deepened on TV given their conservative mid-town reach. The marketable space and demographics changed the dynamics.” Benegal feels the change was bound to happen. “Today’s women aren’t worshippers of an image, they are achievers in their own right and want their bold selves reflected in cinema.”

Film critic Rauf Ahmed, however, dismisses the societal logic in favour of the internecine pulls and pressures of a closed industry. “Women formed the basis of Indian cinema since the beginning. However, it slowly started fading out with the change in the dynamics of the film industry. When Shammi Kapoor entered, he took the celluloid by storm. For the first time in Bollywood history, heroines started getting secondary roles as Kapoor would steal the show completely. That era was immediately followed by Rajesh Khanna, where superstardom was associated with the male actor. After him, there was Amitabh Bachchan. The action cinema was the exclusive domain of male actors. Before anybody could realise, Bollywood had become a male-centric industry in the 70s, a legacy of which still holds good in the hundred crore plus Khan ventures. The then new writers like Javed-Salim didn’t pay attention to female characters as they would do for the male ones. Once Javed Akhtar told me that the duo could never get into the hearts and minds of women with the same sensitivity, felicity and ease as they could of men. He said they started thinking of emotional ideas whenever they attempted anything for women. There were not enough selling points as far as women-centric films went. Also, writers had presumptive ideas about women. The 80s in Bollywood were about mindless decline, the thunder of southern filmmakers and valiant efforts by intelligent actors like Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil to be the torchbearers alongside their mainstream efforts.”

MOTHERHOOD TO FlESH AND BlOOD

The transition has been believable largely because the woman has stepped down from the pedestal of being an all-encompassing and all-bearing godhead to one who is more human in frailty and yet superhuman in possibility. The first hitback to the “amazing grace” came in the form of Shekhar Kapoor’s Bandit Queen and Vinay Shukla’s Godmother, both based on the lives of real women outlaws who avenged their early exploitation by their own solutions, martial and sagacious. By the time Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya happened, the battle was one of equals, of wits, of a deliciously delicate chess game rather than full bluster. They moved on from grievance to displaying their perspectives, desire and even ambitions.  

The ground had even been laid as far back as the 1970s. Film scholar Shahla Raza talked about how even in the Hindi cinema in the 70s had women in different working roles (Jaya Bachchan as a knife sharpener in Zanjeer and a singer in Abhimaan, Hema Malini as a village tonga driver in Sholay and the general manager of a company in Trishul, Rakhee as corporate secretary in Trishul and a doctor in Kala Patthar, Vidya Sinha who works in a private firm in Chhoti Si Baat). But the same films subsumed that independent aura when posited against the dominant, aggressive male. Abhimaan begins with the premise of the wife being more talented than the husband. This in itself defies the stereotype. However, the film crumbles from then on when the wife gives up her thriving musical career for satisfying the husband’s ego and a predictable closure that demands prioritising marriage and motherhood and a martyrdom for the great Indian parivar.

The working woman vanished from the popular blockbusters of the 80s and 90s mainline films and was even relegated completely to the home on the pretence of being capable but rich and, therefore, not needed to work for her glorious designer upkeep. There was the modern woman but she wasn’t the one next door, who did groceries, multi-tasked at work and came back home dog tired. The modern woman was allowed her space to the extent that she didn’t challenge the context of the male character.

One must credit filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar here who gave the big commercial push with his real women series, the ones who would break down daily and get up, via Chandni Bar, Page 3, Corporate, Fashion and hitting a crescendo with Heroine, where the perceived diva is reduced to the ordinariness of being a nervous wreck. If there were the gossamer dreams of Karan Johar, Bhandarkar’s successful retelling of real stories with mainline women actors looking for a breather from formula did the trick. It’s not known if the national awards, the cash registers or the actresses themselves taking a risk did it for Bhandarkar but he had breathed life into body suits. By the time Kahaani happened, women characters had become close to reality, if not the reality itself. The village belle in the romanticised bazaar town of Salman Khan’s Dabangg can speak her mind and take the crowd along. The camera has shifted attention from the woman’s body to the identity and allowed it to express itself in myriad ways.

Veteran filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt summed it beautifully this women’s day. “In India, we can’t make sweeping statements claiming that the portrayal of women in Bollywood has progressed or regressed. As a director, I have always made films giving the women centrestage. Conservatives and vested groups have often claimed that the women in my recent films have been scantily clad or are overtly sexual. However, they can’t deny that the women in my films have been in charge of their own destiny. Now women can live life with dignity, without relying on a man for support. And Shabana Azmi and Vidya Balan are national icons today.”

GENDERlESS ACCEPTANCE

A major credit for the change in portrayal of women in films goes to the viewers reconciling themselves to the content and story rather than being enamoured by the trappings of the character. Says Rauf, “Commercial cinema is changing from the larger-than-life to relatable, slice-of-life experiences. New-age filmmakers are more interested in experimenting with the storyline rather than indulging in gender-centric debates about a boy-girl ratio. Ayan Mukerjee’s Wake Up Sid was as much a Ranbir Kapoor film as much it was about Konkana Sen. Zoya Akhtar’s films are about subjects, not gender.” More so, because popular media, be it entertainment or news television, have firmly established the centrality of women in a series of visual images they roll out everyday.

Vikas Bahl, director of Queen, clarifies that he didn’t conceive of a hero or ensemble drama. “Queen was not conceived as a woman-centric film but a subject. The character could have been a guy also. For me, the gender wasn’t important. I wanted a travelogue full of fun, frolic, adventure, surprise and self-discovery. I conceived Rani because I thought filmmakers should learn to present women in a more entertaining manner beyond the formulaic wavelength of cardboard cut-outs. I found most women-oriented films depressive, dark and hard-hitting. For most filmmakers, a woman’s life has to have a disaster. We never think that she can be entertaining on screen. Even in real life, a woman, who knows cooking and is great at house management, is not expected to have a great sense of humour or crack jokes. According to me, women are more interesting than men. Their emotional graph is complicated. They have devised entertainment formats like kitty parties and talent clubs to hang out together and have fun, even when the men are busy or cast them away.

“Queen proved how a woman can hog the limelight and be the centre of attraction for two hours by virtue of being a real person, warts and all. Time doesn’t determine cinema. The audience was ready for such a film 10 years ago. If a movie connects with the audience, it’s always the perfect time. The only thing that changes with time is technology and its dramatic effect on storytelling. Emotionally, people are ready for most stories.”

Strangely, there has been a much more open acceptance of the genderless approach by women directors, from Sai Paranjape to Farah Khan and now Zoya Akhtar, who have courageously worked their way from within the contours to present a robust story and bringing their feminine insight, perhaps, to a more wholesome projection of characters, men included. Farah Khan has, in fact, subjected herself to another woman director, Bela Sehgal, playing a Parsi woman who finds love rather late in the mature rom com Shireen Farhad Ki Toh Nikal Padi.

MARKET ECONOMICS

Years of male dominance, the superhero action films and the need to expand the scope of the film market to the heartland mid-towns have undoubtedly strengthened an unwritten law: male stars bring in the audience, they are paid much more than their female colleagues, it is very difficult to find funding for a woman-oriented script unless a male star agrees to make a guest appearance and a leading lady’s career in cinema is substantially shorter than a man’s. Even front-runners like Priyanka Chopra and Katrina Kaif have in their various interviews accepted that the man is expected to bring in the three digit crores and so they cannot argue for pay parity or insist upon a meatier part. One of the reasons why Chopra, despite trying out women-based cinema, doesn’t mind switching back to playing item girl, that post-vamp creation expected to satisfy the ultimate Playboy fantasy.

But studio honchos say the success of films like The Dirty Picture, Kahaani or Queen or Highway have proven that producers are willing to invest in women-oriented stories beyond the low-budget or indie limits. “That’s because the treatment varies greatly. Earlier, women were fighting the system or seeking justice. Today, they are coming on their own and want to make their presence felt. Gulaab Gang was never about revenge. In fact, the conflict was between two strong characters, who happened to be women.  If Amitabh Bachchan can rule the roost in Sarkar, why not Madhuri Dixit set her terms in my filmIJ The woman can be as much wily as the man,” says Soumik Sen, director of Gulaab Gang.

Ajit Andhare, COO Viacom 18 Motion Pictures, believes it is important to back the right script, the power of story-telling and putting the characters above everything else. The real challenge, according to him, is to translate the script onscreen effectively enough to strike a collective chord. And consistently so. That in itself will dissolve all categorisation and give the roundedness of a good film.

But we still have a long way to go. As Rauf says, “Today, heroines like Vidya Balan and Kangana Ranaut have tried to break the conventional norms, taking image risks themselves, but it is a foul cry to call it as a trend. There are market risks involved and no one wants to invest in a film which has no intention to shake the box office. If you look at the blockbusters, most of them are action-oriented films, be it Singham, Dabangg, Ghajini or Krrish. And action will always be the forte of men. The audience is not going to come to theatre to watch women beating men without a reason. But they would happily watch Salman Khan ripping apart his detractors on screen.”

Says Sen, “The biggest glitches today are marketing and budget constraints. When we want to make women-centric films, we are told not to cross ‘certain figures’ because they are not popcorn films. So when they do well, the margins are profitable on a small investment. Then they may push the envelope a bit further. I would say this is a process. Also, the audience is still hesitant in accepting heroines as the hero of the film. The box office opening of most of such films, be it Queen or English Vinglish, never drew thunderous response. The returns poured in on the basis of word-of-mouth. The Dirty Picture received phenomenal success because it had the film-goers’ masala. It is surprising that a corny comedy like Grand Masti, which objectified women crassly in the name of laughs, can do business of over Rs 100 crore but Gulaab Gang failed to do even one third of that.”

This is why some of our leading ladies are dabbling in the business of producing films while they command their highest prices onscreen. Deepika Padukone has reportedly gone for a profit-sharing agreement for Homi Adajania’s Finding Fanny Fernandes. Anushka Sharma has slashed her price and is co-producing NH10 with Vikram Motwane, knowing such offers won’t come her way so soon. Has-been actress Diya Mirza is producing the Vidya Balan-driven Bobby Jasoos. But in the end you have to give it to Madhuri Dixit and Sridevi for sticking to their starry guns and a no-compromise script plan despite their age. Maybe the top women within the industry will bring in the revolution. 

(inputs Divya Kaushik & Karan Bhardwaj)