Equating Badassery With Masculinity Fails Priyanka’s Jai Gangaajal

Why does Priyanka Chopra need to dissociate herself from her feminine identity to play a tough cop in ‘Jai Gangaajal’

Jai Gangaajal contains most of the hallmarks of Prakash Jha’s brand of filmmaking – a dusty hinterland setting, an exposé about politicians and political workers that offers little by way of insight but instead rides on broad strokes and loud histrionics – and he listlessly goes through the motions as if quite aware of the genericness of it all but all the more uninterested in invigorating it. And there’s the shrill music which combines rock with classical Hindustani vocals to a horrendous effect.

But if it weren’t so poorly directed, there’s actually an interesting germ of an idea in Jai Gangaajal. Abha Mathur (Priyanka Chopra), the appointed SP in the Bihar town Bankipur, is a resolutely strong-willed character in a chaotic town. She gets many a moment in which she enters a scene and challenges to put a stop to political goons’ unrestrained indulgences.

Interestingly, the film doesn’t give Abha a love interest – neither a pre-existing husband as in Mardaani nor one which develops through the course of the film as in Dilwale. Save for one scene, we never see her off duty. She stays fierce, and yet the film doesn’t for one moment allow her the swagger of someone in control – throughout the film, new obstacles keep cropping up for her, sometimes caused by someone from her own team. In theory, this sounds like a refreshing departure from both the portrayal of cops in movies and the portrayal of badass women in recent films.

In Jai Gangaajal, all of Abha’s subordinates are male cops. And while in moments of distress the policemen sometimes lose their marbles, Abha is always the one to steer things the right way. With so much going for it on paper, it’s a shame that almost none of these things translate onto the screen effectively because the film itself seems content being a run-of-the-mill drama about poor innocent people who never wear a shirt over their banians and paunchy, hot-headed big shots hell bent on snatching their land for a “project”.

Never once does the film pose as a “woman-oriented picture”, never once does the film seem to suggest that Abha’s accomplishments are somehow more admirable because she’s a woman, which could be its strength. But in what is the film’s biggest fault, one which reverses all of its on-paper strengths – it keeps equating badassery with masculinity.

In one scene, Abha emphatically beats up the local legislator’s aide for harassing a woman as her male colleagues stand passive. The policemen are overcome with shame at their own failure to take a stand and join Abha in beating the molesters. And as a punchline, they add, “Aaj tak hum napunsak the. Lekin aaj hum asli mard ban gaye.” (“Our acts thus far have been unmanly. But today, we’ve become real men”). Also, Murali Sharma plays an effeminate character called Munna Mardaani, and it seems that this particular character trait has been ascribed to him only for comic relief.

Throughout the film, Abha’s subordinates address her as “sir” or “madam-sir”, but never just “madam”. I’ve been told that that’s how female cops are addressed in reality; but that only adds to the film’s stance that in order to become the awesome purveyor of justice and goodness that Abha is, she has to dissociate herself from her feminine identity. The juxtaposition of a character like Abha and the rustic hinterland where she stands out as an anomaly could have resulted in a more intriguing conflict at the hands of a finer filmmaker, but Jai Gangaajal is unable to distance its own worldview from that of its antagonists.