What women want, they get in Bollywood

When Vishal Bhardwaj approached producers with the script of 7 Khoon Maaf (7KM), he was asked to change the gender of his protagonist. “They wanted me to have a man kill his seven wives,” says the director who went ahead and broke one of the cardinal rules of Bollywood: he got a female star to take the lead. And he even convinced popular actors to play the seven men who are romanced and then killed by Susanna, played by Priyanka Chopra.

Earlier this year, in No One Killed Jessica (NOKJ), there was no larger-than-life hero shooting from the hip, but two women protagonists who carried the film on their shoulders. Rani Mukerji and Vidya Balan were not dolled up, they did not shed their clothes or break into the mandatory song-and-dance routine, and they were definitely not mere accessories to a bankable male star.
In debutant director Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat, Prateik Babbar played the protagonist but Monica Dogra’s character was central to the plot. Rao’s superstar husband Aamir Khan was just one of the many characters in the film.

Bollywood’s fixed formula that blends machismo, titillation and sexism to rake in the moolah seems to be undergoing a change. Slowly, the film industry is giving its female protagonists a little more respect and a lot more screen time. Balan agrees. “The lines between the sexes are blurring and actresses are getting a chance to essay a variety of roles,” says the actress who played a rustic seductress in Ishqiya and a single working mother in Paa.

More and more movies are exploring women-oriented subjects. “Both the Hindi film industry and Indian society are male-dominated. But we have now reached a point where the viewers are ready for movies that tell a good story through characters irrespective of their gender,” says Chopra.
Rajkumar Gupta, the director of No One Killed Jessica, attributes the trend to the changing social scenario. “There is a perceptible change in how audiences perceive women on the screen and off it,” he says.

Even though the Indian woman has been evolving over a period of time, her onscreen portrayal was driven largely by the preference of the male audience. It is only recently that there has been a shift in perception amongst men who are now more open to seeing multi-dimensional women on screen. “Men form nearly 70% of the Indian film audience. And movies in the past mainly catered to this segment,” says Siddharth Roy Kapur, CEO of UTV Motion Pictures that produced both NOKJ and 7KM. “But the commercial success of NOKJ proves that male protagonists are no longer the only driving force behind a film,” he says.

Emerging talent and evolving scripts are also contributing towards this attitudinal shift in Bollywood and its viewers. “It has taken some time, but now content and treatment matters. Even male superstars cannot pull off a film if the content is not good,” says Vinay Shukla, the writer and director of Mirch that focussed on female sexuality and infidelity. Industry insiders feel that the new age woman is now the new hero in Hindi films and the audience has accepted her.

Shukla feels that the trend of portraying women in a realistic and non-demeaning manner will only gain momentum in the coming years. “For small to medium budget filmmakers, casting women as central characters is an easy decision to make since we are not deterred by the popular notion of a male star driving the box office collections,” he says.

Other filmmakers who will agree with Shukla are Sujoy Ghosh and Milan Luthria who have cast Balan in Kahani and Dirty Picture respectively. While Kahani is about a pregnant woman looking for her missing husband, Dirty Picture is loosely based on the life of Southern bombshell Silk Smitha. The Bhatt camp, which had earlier showcased Mallika Sherawat as the neglected and adulterous wife in Murder, is back with its sequel starring Jacqueline Fernandes and Emraan Hashmi.