Film critic Udita Jhunjhunwala believes that women thrive on screen when they are allowed to contain multitudes. As examples, she points towards films like Raazi, Mardaani, Gangubai Kathiawadi, All We Imagine as Light, Girls Will Be Girls, Piku, Thappad and Kahaani, among others, which are significant, “not only because they centre women, but because they allow women subjectivity—desire, ambition, moral ambiguity, loneliness and anger—outside the traditional family framework. These are characters with texture, contradiction and nuance,” Jhunjhunwala notes.
Before the 2000s, it was the parallel cinema of filmmakers like Shyam Benegal, Goutam Ghose and K. Balachander that created alternative pathways for social debates, class consciousness, political commentary and, most of all, ushering in complex female characters played by veteran actors like Shabana Azmi, Aparna Sen, Deepti Naval, Smita Patil and Saritha. Today, these films have a cult following for their proto-feminist themes and have left their indelible mark on cinema. With mainstream Bollywood cinema continuing its production of formulaic, hyper-masculine and propaganda films with female characters once again regressing to mouthpieces, it’s smaller screens and OTT streaming platforms that are allowing writers and directors to take narrative risks. “Shows like Delhi Crime, Dahaad, Aarya, Bombay Begums and Kohrra portray women who move beyond symbolic ‘strength’ into institutional and political spaces as cops, power brokers, criminals, survivors, mothers and flawed authority figures,” Jhunjhunwala points out. “Long-form storytelling has created space for women characters with contradictions and conflicts; women who make informed choices, even when those choices are morally ambiguous. This is something mainstream Bollywood, still shaped by male stardom and theatrical formulas, often struggles to sustain consistently.”
