Recently, a friend sent me a link to a TV show - Love2HateU which featured "the prolific Mr. Mahesh Bhatt" coming face-to-face with a girl who declared she hated his readily available sound bytes for all occasions and his current propensity for being associated with cinematic sleaze. Mahesh Bhatt, loud and belligerent, unapologetic about his recent choices and ever-ready opinions, bellowed at her with a devil-may-care attitude that was intimidating yet oddly impressive. For the most part, it felt like he was playing to the gallery, vying for some much desired TV buzz by being not just controversial but outright ridiculous (in my opinion, of course).
Overall, immensely forgettable.
But there was a moment there, when defending Mallika Sherawat's choice to shed her clothes for fame, he accused his hater for being anti-feminist because she couldn't respect that path to fame.
"Women like you pretend to fight for the cause of women and yet you are the biggest enemies of women"
Being a strongly vocal feminist (almost to a fault) myself, yet oddly prudish by the standards of today's generation, it got me thinking about what feminism means, what we ask for when we demand gender equality and what is implied by the oft-touted phrase "women's liberation" and how is all of this coming forward in Hindi films today.
As for any serious writer, the first thing for me to do was, of course, get the Wikipedia definition. As expected the scope of the issue was too vast to wrap up in a couple of trite sentences. For the interested reader, you can find the details here.
Noticeably, it doesn't talk about how women dress or the use of sex appeal by women to get ahead in life, possibly because that is something as old as time.
My next thought was to see what roles were women being offered in Hindi films today. I didn't need a refresher course on all the songs being churned out today be it Munni, Sheila or Chameli, we've all heard way too much about their Tinku Jiya's and Ooh La La's.
What about mainstream cinema and leading actresses? What were they being offered?
A cursory look through the top grossing films of 2011 gives us this list -
- a spoilt little rich girl in love with her bodyguard (Bodyguard),
- a damsel in distress mother being protected by the robotic replica of her dead husband (Ra-One),
- another spoilt little rich girl with a cursory interest in a career but a more real interest in getting married (Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara),
- the ditzy, air-headed shrew who manipulates every waking moment of her harried fiance (Delhi Belly) and
- a sultry starlet ready to shed every bit of clothing for fame and glory (The Dirty Picture).
Admittedly there are also a couple of roles like the the gutsy journalist (Delhi Belly) or the live-life-on-the-edge deep-sea diver (Zindagi...) but they're few and far between and almost never the only female protagonist in the film.
It's not a very impressive list, as I see it. Women are either in need of protection or are simply annoying. And no matter who they are or in what phase of life, they must either already have a man or are on the constant look out for one.
(I can almost hear most of my male readers snicker at this point. )
Women in Indian cinema are rarely portrayed as intelligent, self-reliant, independent characters facing real situations with courage and gumption, without a man, while being fully clothed.
So where is the much talked about gender equality?
Specifically on the topic of Mallika Sherawat and her claims to fame - is it really being liberated if the shortcut to some twisted idea of success is the display of one's anatomical assets? If so, then why should a Salman Khan be ridiculed for it and a Mallika Sherawat be applauded? Leveraging the anatomy you were born with as acting talent, irrespective of how many hours you put in the gym or under the scalpel, sounds to me to be quite the opposite of liberation, no matter what your gender is.
Women are still not paid at par to the men, unless it's an "item song" which requires little acting and a lot of blatant sexual display. When someone as notable as Mahesh Bhatt touts women who look like they're having an asthma attack while they heave their bosoms as sensual and remarkably modern / liberated, it propagates this illusion even further.
Mr Bhatt, to your point above I'd like to say to you that when you ask Udita Goswami or Mallika Sherawat to strip for your movies, you know deep-down that your target demographic is not the liberated 21st century feminist. Nor is it the forward-thinking, self-aware male who has a healthy respect for womanhood and all her beauty. For obvious reasons. Whether you admit it or not, no matter how you justify it, you're pandering to the repressed Indian male who gets to wolf whistle at an unknown woman in the comfortable dark anonymity of the movie theater because he's unable to have that desired freedom at home. And, at that point, you're no better than the feudal lords who cultivated harems and sex slaves under the umbrella of patronizing the arts. The only difference is that today you have convinced the women who do your bidding that it is the gutsy, "modern" thing to do, at the cost of their self-respect and dignity.
"What you see as a degeneration, I see as an evolution..." said the angry Mr Bhatt at a later point in the show.
I wonder what it is an evolution into. If women in cinema are consistently reduced to a sum of their body parts, to me it means that the much needed feminist movement is being twisted into making women believe they are powerful only if they take their clothes off because "that is what sells". (I believe that is the oldest excuse in the book to peddle trash under the name of artistic expression.) True feminism is not needing to resort to sexual power play for one-upmanship. How did we ever let anyone convince us otherwise?
Even more so, my message for all the Munnis and Shiela and Chamelis, to all the Malika Sherawats and Nisha Kotharis, out there is - don't mistake scandal for respect or infamy for glory. As a woman, you're more than just eye-candy. You're so much more than that.
Isn't that what Feminism is really all about after all, Mr. Bhatt?
Great post @nutty!
ReplyDeleteI wish it was you debating Bhatt Sahab :)
ha ha! me too!
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