Recent Bollywood releases Meri Pyari Bindu and Half Girlfriend had a lot more in common than their makers would like to admit. Both featured extremely independent, indecisive and nomadic female protagonists, and pining, righteous male 'heroes' who had lots of time on their hands to obsess over their object of affection.
Both movies showed disturbing instances of slut shaming. While Riya (played by Shraddha Kapoor) gets the full boys-hostel-hooting-treatment in Half Girlfriend, Bindu (played by Parineeti Chopra) is made fun of by her best friend Abhimanyu (played by Ayushmann Khurana) in Meri Pyari Bindu for making out with someone else in the front seat of a car. Bindu is not blameless in the slut shaming department either, as she deliberately interrupts a couple mid-coitus just for a few laughs, all part of her apparently adorable 'quirks'.
While Meri Pyari Bindu was a sweet film, it did have some problematic moments that cannot be ignored. For instance, Abhimanyu's father casually remarks he is okay with his son roaming in the streets late at night as long as it's for a 'girl' and proceeds to smirk with satisfaction. Abhimanyu writes to Bindu from an engineering college, describing the paucity of dateable women in his college and 'joking', "Before I start taking an interest in guys now, please come meet me". Yes, that's exactly how it works, men 'become' gay if you don't feed their appetite for sexy females (please detect heavy sarcasm). What puzzles me is the need for these smatterings of homophobia in an otherwise okay script. What do we get by those 10 seconds of grossly inappropriate messaging? Does it add some particular value to the movie or the character? No? Then why do it at all?
Back to the female protagonists, where Bindu, despite all her ambition, is content with being a mother in the end, and Riya abandons her exciting life singing in New York bars (her lifelong dream) to come live in Madhav's village and raise a child. While we can argue that these could be personal choices, there is no screen-time dedicated to finding out how they decided to abandon their passions that they fought for so tenaciously in the beginning of both films.
As for reactions to Half Girlfriend's theory that a woman needs to sleep with a man to prove her love, 'warna kat le', I had to witness harrowing catcalls and whistles cheering Madhav on, from an almost all-male audience when Madhav (played by Arjun Kapoor) is trying to cozy up to Riya by manhandling her. The movie did not depress me as much as the mass reaction by the audience that day. Will a world of evolved men be a utopian dream while some of them agree with the Chetan Bhagat version of what love is supposed to be? And no, appropriating the fight for building female toilets in schools is not going to redeem you Mr. Bhagat, feminism doesn't work selectively. Meanwhile, as both movies fail the Bechdel Test miserably, we're moving on to look for better movies to watch.
The author is Advocacy & Communications Manager at Population First
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