The newest power couple on the block, Deepika and Ranveer are proving to be quite a handful for the Indian media. First, despite their detailed itinerary being public, the glamorous #DeepVeerKiShaadi debuted on social media only once the couple decided to release photos. Second, this seems to be a couple that simply refuses to conform - from Deepika’s hearty laugh to Ranveer’s ripply kurta, they seem to be breaking the stereotypes that characterise big bad Bollywood.
In the India that I grew up in, female Bollywood actors in the 90s had to precariously toe the treacherous line between bold and demure. Too demure and you’re not desirable anymore. Too bold, well then, you’re only that. The female actor thus, was perpetually expected to be just the right amount of sugar and spice (and preferably not everything nice when in the bedroom).
This idealised, damsel-in-perpetual distress image had to be maintained for erstwhile female actors to check the box that rendered itself applicable to the epicurean male fantasy. Inevitably, a personal life, replete with love, loss and lovers was out of bounds. Female actors hence had to put their life on hold, so that they could continue to be the right amount of demure yet desirable, shy yet sexy. Anything that contradicted this image - be that an advertisement, a divorce or a dress, had to be sacrificed at the altar of a pandering to an industry and subsequently an audience that judged them, less for their professional skills and more for what they chose to be. Every now and then though, there were actors like Parveen Babi, Zeenat Aman and Rekha who would refuse to conform to the rules of the game, though not without consequence.
We’ve come a long way since then, and while this sanskari audience has moved on to Twitter and Instagram, a new crop of female actors has taken over Bollywood. Unfortunately, for the guardians of sanskar, these women seem to have run out of f**** to give.
Like the time Priyanka Chopra was moral policed for wearing a knee-revealing dress while meeting the revered Prime Minister and she responded with a photo that had both her and her mother showing off their exquisite appendage. Or when Anushka Sharma was trolled for telling off someone for littering. These new bunch of women refuse to give in to the quintessential male fantasy and are asking to be treated for the professionals they are.
Since last year, some of Bollywood’s leading female actors chose to marry at the peak of their careers - something that even a decade ago would have been the death knell for their acting careers. Ours is a country where women who prioritise their careers and women who prioritise their relationships are still mutually exclusive in “respectful” families.
Bollywood itself has reiterated this stereotype time and again, with powerful women characters who have in the scope of the screenplay given in to their maternal instinct and reclaimed their hallowed place in the kitchen, making healthy muesli breakfasts, if not sandwiches.
Earlier when women actors married at all, they would be pronounced incapable by the media of further carrying out their duties of rendering themselves as lascivious sex objects up for grabs. Women actors thus kept their relationships and marriages hidden from the public eye, lest it affect their desirability quotient.
After all, a married woman in India, is considered “taken” - her lustability sacrificed at the altar of patriarchal morality and the revered bro-code. The only escape was perhaps what we call “boudibaji” in Bengali (loosely translated as lusting after the sister-in-law) an idea that culminates in characters like Savita Bhabi.
Sunny Leone was the first woman to have exposed this hypocrisy through veritable search numbers. And while we can play the game of chicken and egg in the fervent search of whether it is the patriarchal audience or the patriarchs in the industry itself that have fuelled this system, we have to admit that we have all been party to the system at some point or another.
This new flock of women in the industry however, has turned this matrix on its head - they are refusing to cower under these expectations, urging both filmmakers and audiences to treat them as actors instead of an assortment of cleavage, kamar and legs.
In a country like ours, where Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hun is a real phenomena, this has far-reaching implications! Bollywood has forever been the ally of men. In 2015, an Australian lawyer actually kept his client - a 32-year-old security guard of Indian origin, accused of stalking and harassing women - out of jail by using Bollywood as his line of defence - he argued that in his (client’s) culture, the aggressive pursuit of women was only a stepping stone to winning the woman’s heart.
While the accused got off with a meagre restraining order, maybe with this new bunch of assertive women being the face of the industry in and outside India, Bollywood could someday become a woman’s ally too? Who knows, with wonders like Kareena Kapoor hosting a show on feminism, gentrification, may not always be such a bad thing after all?
(Views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)