In the climax scene of Mother India (1957), the iconic mother, Radha (Nargis Dutt), kills her own son. The mother is deeply annoyed and hurt seeing that her younger son, Birju (Sunil Dutt), is forcefully abducting the daughter of the village moneylender. To save her, she fires the bullet and thus punishes her own son for such an immoral act. We see that Birju had never expected his own mother to do something like that. Years have passed since that movie, but Hindi cinema’s audience still finds it a little scandalous when it is presented with women characters brandishing guns or swords to kill goons or rapists. Cinema rarely celebrates female characters who perform ‘man-like’ violent roles on the screen.
The general audience of Hindi cinema expects its on-screen women to be merely beautiful, vulnerable and compassionate characters, and rarely appreciates ‘femme fatale’ characters. On occasions, Hindi cinema has broken this stereotype by presenting women in militant violent avatars (in films like Khoon Bhari Maang, Mirch Masala, Pratighat, NH10, Mardaani, etc.) and challenged the patriarchal cultural values of Bollywood, but it is yet to emerge as a popular genre.
Interestingly, with films like Bandit Queen, Bawandar and Sonchiriya, Dalit women have also been presented as heroic characters who fight the exploitative male control with feisty anger. In Bandit Queen, the lead character, Phoolan, rises against the heinous crimes of rape and caste atrocities and delivers justice with violent vengeance. The recently released 200 Halla Ho on Zee5 is a brave extension of a similar post-rape-revenge theme. It presents a quasi-realistic narrative of about 200 Dalit women who lynch a dreaded history-sheeter in a courtroom to end his regime of brutal crimes against women.