Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:
Two new films this week offer compelling portraits of women in power. But must gender roles be copied rather than changed? If we can't beat them, must we join them?
Something interesting is going on at the cinema this week. Two wonderfully dissimilar films -- one a mainstream Bollywood production house attempting a songless policier, the other trying to undercut documentary's dull image with colourful characters and music -- give centre stage to women in positions of authority. Pradeep Sarkar's pacey crime drama Mardaani stars Rani Mukerji as a Mumbai Crime Branch cop, while Deepti Kakkar and Fahad Mustafa's documentary Katiyabaaz is staged as a face-off between Loha Singh, the power thief of the film's title, and Ritu Maheshwari, an IAS officer trying to reform the dysfunctional Kanpur Electricity Supply Company (KESCO).
Considering it's a Yash Raj production and a star vehicle for the Chopra family's new bahu, Mardaani has generated rather little buzz. Perhaps that's unsurprising: it's a hero-less film and contemporary Bollywood -- and our male-dominated box office - clearly rations out bhaav along gender lines. But the title has also put off many members of the film's would-be audience, who are annoyed by the idea that a woman's strength must necessarily be couched as her masculine side.
Mukerji has defended the title, implying that we should read it not as literal but literary, since it's taken from Subhadra Kumari Chauhan's poem about the valiant queen Lakshmibai, who famously rode into battle against the British in 1857: "Khoob ladi mardaani woh toh Jhansi wali rani thhi". Mukerji spent her childhood in Jhansi, and her father (filmmaker Ram Mukerji) liked reading the poem to her, whether or not he actually named her after it.
But there's no getting away from the gendered signals sent out by the title, and watching the film, it's clear that the name is no coincidence. Shivani Shivaji Roy can hand out slaps and cuss words as easily as any man in the force, and she revels in the street display of physical power. Her clothes make no concessions to femininity, not even a kurta. She is either in uniform, or in trousers and collared shirts - and not fitted women's shirts that emphasise her curves. Roy's no-nonsense look is sans make-up. Her hair, though long, is always tied back. She's shown in a sari once. But that opening scene is also the one that establishes her comradely rapport with her all-male team. And how do we know she's one of the boys? Because she's happy to make their kind of jokes: their (male) boss's mood is off, it seems, because his wife yelled at him for forgetting to take her "anniversary shopping". It's as if entering into masculine repartee about ordinary 'wives' is the only way to signal that she isn't one.
Since the film insists on gender reversal rather than parity, we are not surprised to find that our heroine is partnered by a Bengali doctor husband as inconsequential and vulnerable as countless policemen's' wives and girlfriends from Shool to Seher (let's not even talk about Singham). And though the film nods at Shivani's nurturing side by having her bring up an orphaned niece, she doesn't have children of her own.
Contrast this with the real-life Ritu Maheshwari, the bureaucrat of Katiyabaaz, who's shown to have two young children and never wears anything but colourful saris. We learn almost nothing about her husband, but neither her domestic life nor her professional one shows any signs of gender role reversal. What also fascinated me about Maheshwari's authority is that it does not depend on her creating a rapport with the men who work under her, but seemingly the opposite -- maintaining a distance.
Perhaps this has less to do with these women as archetypes of female power and more with the different spheres in which they operate. Both are state functionaries. But for Mukerji's policewoman, the law is an ass. It is something whose limitations must be overcome to provide vigilante justice; while for the bureaucrat, the only means she has at her disposal are legal ones. It is not by swearing like a man that Maheshwari earns respect, but by keeping her voice down and insisting on decorum. In one remarkable scene, a shouting male MLA trying to browbeat Maheshwari is made to leave her office.
But in the long term, the even-tempered Maheshwari is transferred, while the male MLA wins the election, and presumably retains a hand in Kanpur's dysfunctional political present. Meanwhile Shivani Roy, though she wins her particular battle (a case of child sex trafficking), has to deal with male colleagues' accusations of taking things "too personally". Another time, she's told that she achieves more when keeping her cool: "jab tum shaant rehti ho".
Political mobilisation in both films is shown to be manipulated rather than representative. I was struck by the honesty of Mardaani's recognition that in the wrong political hands, even the discourse of women's safety (on which the film is itself riding) can be twisted to harass innocent people. All men are not evil, and all women are not innocent. But even this film doesn't seem to understand that if vigilante justice is so dangerous in one instance, it cannot be assumed to be the solution in another. Self-defence is one thing. But is female violence now the only answer to male violence? I completely understand the urge to clap, but I do wish we had something better to clap for.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 24 August, 2014.
Two new films this week offer compelling portraits of women in power. But must gender roles be copied rather than changed? If we can't beat them, must we join them?
Something interesting is going on at the cinema this week. Two wonderfully dissimilar films -- one a mainstream Bollywood production house attempting a songless policier, the other trying to undercut documentary's dull image with colourful characters and music -- give centre stage to women in positions of authority. Pradeep Sarkar's pacey crime drama Mardaani stars Rani Mukerji as a Mumbai Crime Branch cop, while Deepti Kakkar and Fahad Mustafa's documentary Katiyabaaz is staged as a face-off between Loha Singh, the power thief of the film's title, and Ritu Maheshwari, an IAS officer trying to reform the dysfunctional Kanpur Electricity Supply Company (KESCO).
Considering it's a Yash Raj production and a star vehicle for the Chopra family's new bahu, Mardaani has generated rather little buzz. Perhaps that's unsurprising: it's a hero-less film and contemporary Bollywood -- and our male-dominated box office - clearly rations out bhaav along gender lines. But the title has also put off many members of the film's would-be audience, who are annoyed by the idea that a woman's strength must necessarily be couched as her masculine side.
Mukerji has defended the title, implying that we should read it not as literal but literary, since it's taken from Subhadra Kumari Chauhan's poem about the valiant queen Lakshmibai, who famously rode into battle against the British in 1857: "Khoob ladi mardaani woh toh Jhansi wali rani thhi". Mukerji spent her childhood in Jhansi, and her father (filmmaker Ram Mukerji) liked reading the poem to her, whether or not he actually named her after it.
But there's no getting away from the gendered signals sent out by the title, and watching the film, it's clear that the name is no coincidence. Shivani Shivaji Roy can hand out slaps and cuss words as easily as any man in the force, and she revels in the street display of physical power. Her clothes make no concessions to femininity, not even a kurta. She is either in uniform, or in trousers and collared shirts - and not fitted women's shirts that emphasise her curves. Roy's no-nonsense look is sans make-up. Her hair, though long, is always tied back. She's shown in a sari once. But that opening scene is also the one that establishes her comradely rapport with her all-male team. And how do we know she's one of the boys? Because she's happy to make their kind of jokes: their (male) boss's mood is off, it seems, because his wife yelled at him for forgetting to take her "anniversary shopping". It's as if entering into masculine repartee about ordinary 'wives' is the only way to signal that she isn't one.
Since the film insists on gender reversal rather than parity, we are not surprised to find that our heroine is partnered by a Bengali doctor husband as inconsequential and vulnerable as countless policemen's' wives and girlfriends from Shool to Seher (let's not even talk about Singham). And though the film nods at Shivani's nurturing side by having her bring up an orphaned niece, she doesn't have children of her own.
Contrast this with the real-life Ritu Maheshwari, the bureaucrat of Katiyabaaz, who's shown to have two young children and never wears anything but colourful saris. We learn almost nothing about her husband, but neither her domestic life nor her professional one shows any signs of gender role reversal. What also fascinated me about Maheshwari's authority is that it does not depend on her creating a rapport with the men who work under her, but seemingly the opposite -- maintaining a distance.
Perhaps this has less to do with these women as archetypes of female power and more with the different spheres in which they operate. Both are state functionaries. But for Mukerji's policewoman, the law is an ass. It is something whose limitations must be overcome to provide vigilante justice; while for the bureaucrat, the only means she has at her disposal are legal ones. It is not by swearing like a man that Maheshwari earns respect, but by keeping her voice down and insisting on decorum. In one remarkable scene, a shouting male MLA trying to browbeat Maheshwari is made to leave her office.
But in the long term, the even-tempered Maheshwari is transferred, while the male MLA wins the election, and presumably retains a hand in Kanpur's dysfunctional political present. Meanwhile Shivani Roy, though she wins her particular battle (a case of child sex trafficking), has to deal with male colleagues' accusations of taking things "too personally". Another time, she's told that she achieves more when keeping her cool: "jab tum shaant rehti ho".
Political mobilisation in both films is shown to be manipulated rather than representative. I was struck by the honesty of Mardaani's recognition that in the wrong political hands, even the discourse of women's safety (on which the film is itself riding) can be twisted to harass innocent people. All men are not evil, and all women are not innocent. But even this film doesn't seem to understand that if vigilante justice is so dangerous in one instance, it cannot be assumed to be the solution in another. Self-defence is one thing. But is female violence now the only answer to male violence? I completely understand the urge to clap, but I do wish we had something better to clap for.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 24 August, 2014.
1 comment:
Hi Trisha, is there an email ID I can reach you on? This is for a project collaboration. Thanks, Ananya (ananya@creative-india.co)
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