The Angel of Hindi Cinema

Cinema is known to us as a world where we can escape from the realities of our life and into the life of the unreal. It provides a relief from the monotony of life and is also the most easily accessible mode of entertainment. But like all forms of media, it does a lot in forming our ideology and generating our opinions. In this essay, I have tried to put the Hindi cinema under scrutiny in its portrayal of women. How have the women been represented in movies? Has there been a change in their representation in all these years, is it for better or for worse? What kind of a woman is the heroine? How close are they to reality? Is she independent or is she weak and feeble? Does she need the male to get her through the adversaries in life? And most importantly, how far has the new age cinema succeeded in erasing these stereotypes. These are some of the questions that I have tried to raise in this essay.

According to Louis Althusser, media is one of the many ideological state apparatuses that come into play in shaping our ideas and thoughts. We think in the fashion that the media teaches us. We create stereotypes, we develop favourites, and we accept something and reject something else. But how does cinema respond to the issue of gender? Instead of transcending the stereotypes, it seems to have made them even stronger. Yes, indeed the portrayal of women is very close to reality but that portrayal, that reality is accepted with open arms and not contested. In our cinema, we seem to be in support of the treatment that is received by women all over the country and the behaviour that is expected of them. They are expected to be docile, timid, loyal beyond belief and submissive to the males. They must keep their desires and dreams secondary to the needs of those around them.

In movies like Dahej(1950), Gauri(1968), Devi(1970), Biwi ho toh Aisi(1988) the women are depicted as extremely loyal and complying figures. They follow the word of their husbands like the word of God and are ready to lay their lives at his feet if he demands. The Indian patriarchal values never found a better medium to institutionalize themselves in the minds of the people. They are the ‘angels of the house’, ‘tulsi’ in the ‘angan’. They are selfless beyond belief and they do not think twice when it comes to choosing between the family and their dreams. In Abhimaan(1973) Jaya Bacchan’s character  gave up her bright career as a singer to feed the ego of her husband, played by Amitabh Bacchan. Though the selfishness and the egoism of the husband are criticized in the movie, it is not enough for the wife to leave him. The conventional values of duty to the husband and the house are adhered to and that gives the story a happy ending.

It is not like the women in Indian cinemas were not depicted to be smart and intelligent enough to work, but at the same time, the family and not the self was held to be of primary importance. Even in blockbuster films like Hum Apke Hain Koun(1994) where women played very important roles, they were not accepted as working women.  Madhuri Dixit in her very first scene is introduced as a computer engineer and yet when Salman Khan day dreams about their future together, he sees her sending him to office with a goodbye kiss while herself staying back to take care of his family and cooking for them. In Hum Saath Saath Hain(1999) Sonali Bendre is playing a shy, timid doctor but the ‘doctor’  part of her personality is never shown to the audience. Are the heroines intelligent and smart for the namesake?

The leading lady of the Indian cinema is either white or black in her character. She is the wife or the other woman, a heroine or a vamp, Madonna or a whore. The middle path is never found. In Aa Ab Laut Chalen(1999) Akshay Khanna leaves the wayward NRI Suman Ranganathan for the angelic, loving Aishwarya Rai. She is shown to have forgotten her Indian ‘sanskars’ for having lived too long outside the country. On similar lines is David Dhawan’s Biwi No.1 (1999) where Salman Khan gets seduced by Sushmita Sen, a confident, career oriented model. Karishma Kapoor calls Sushmita Sen ‘the other woman’ and blames her for all the chaos. She is looked at as a house wrecker and a demon all through the movie and Salman Khan is forgiven at the end after a very childish attempt at apologizing to his wife. It has been one of the first movies that irked me for a very long time. Even I, as a child of seven, could feel something wrong in the treatment of the issue of adultery but apparently the movie was a huge hit among the Indian audience.

The movies did not digress from reality in their assumption of the physical ability of the woman either. They are feeble, they are weak, and they need a man to protect them from the bad, bad world. The frequent “bachao” in the cinemas is usually a call for man by a woman to save her “izzat”. Whatever happened to the women of substance? Where are the women who are able to live life depending only on themselves? In stories like Seeta aur Geeta(1972) Geeta is a strong, cunning woman but somewhere in the movie there has to be a scene where she will require the help of a hero. The ego of the male audience must not be fiddled with.

The cinema that is being made today is trying to break free from the earlier stereotypes but only for the worse. A new version of bold, audacious and skimpily clad actresses has surfaced. They perform cheesy item numbers, show off their body without restrain to feed the male gaze even further. Surely they are nothing like earlier portrayal of women but at what cost? This attempt at getting a new identity reduces them even further to the level of an “item”.  And not just some random B-grade actress but the big guns of mainstream Indian cinema are also participating with full heart in this venture.

The only thing which seems to bring a little joy to the feminist fans of Indian cinema is the kind of work being pursued by the likes of Vidya Balan and Konkana Sen Sharma. They are trying to work with the movies that catch the true spirit of womanhood. Movies like No One Killed Jessica (2011), Chameli(2003), Ishqiya(2010), Paa(2009) are not all centred on women issues. They just have powerful women characters which are not like what we have read in the above paragraphs. These movies have helped shift the focus of the camera from the body of the woman to her identity as an individual. Paa was about a child suffering from progeria and not about any women related issue; even then R. Balki was able to give the audience one of the most well defined female characters in Indian cinema. Vidya Balan played a strong mother who managed her work and son’s responsibility together.

One of the first movies that I remember to have impressed me in its portrayal of a woman was Ghar Ho Toh Aisa(1990). It was not a very famous movie but the way Meenakshi Sheshadri acted out cunning, smart, and intelligent and yet a good hearted daughter-in-law, caught my attention. She was a social worker who was asked to come to Anil Kapoor’s house as his fake new wife who would help him in curbing the ways of his cruel mother, played by Bindu. In stark contrast to Meenakshi’s character was Asha Parekh’s. Parekh played a tortured, extremely docile and subjugated ‘bahu’ who lived at the mercy of her ‘saas’. Meenakshi was able to get some sense into the mother-in-law’s head through her many manoeuvres. Where at one instance Asha Parekh easily takes a slap from Bindu, Meenakshi Sheshadri catches her hand before she could be slapped. For her, the old order of taking absolutely anything from elders doesn’t hold any ground. She is employed and powerful. She is independent and not arrogant about it. There are more such female characters in the Indian cinema. All we have to do is dig deeper to find the gems.