2014: The Year of Sheroes

My Mumbai Mirror column, 28 Dec 2014. 

Hindi cinema this year gave its female actors a chance to spread out. Some punched, while others pulled no punches. What matters is that as the audience, we agreed to clap for both.

Madhuri Dixit in Dedh Ishqiya (2014)

The Hindi film industry has been hero-dominated for so many decades now that it's hard to believe that its earliest decades were all about the heroines: Sulochana, Fearless Nadia, Devika Rani. But 2014 might go down in history as the year that Bombay cinema came back round to the idea that there could be hits without heroes. 

This was made possible, in some measure, by the return of Hindi cinema's last generation of big-ticket heroines. It's fabulous that at least some of these utterly deserving divas are landing age-appropriate roles in films designed to showcase their particular charms. 2012 already saw Sridevi bring a lump to every throat in the room as the guileless housewife on a journey of self-discovery in English Vinglish. 2014 marked the glorious comeback of Madhuri Dixit, who played the poetically-minded Begum Para with the perfect air of seductive mystery in January's Dedh Ishqiya, and later in the year, played off her once arch-competitor Juhi Chawla (with Chawla playing against type) in the somewhat anti-climactic Gulab Gang.  

This year also saw a more recent returnee - Rani Mukherjee came back from a longish sabbatical with the immensely watchable, cheer-eliciting Mardaani. Priyanka Chopra had her own no-heroes movie: Mary Kom. The two films couldn't be more dissimilar in theme - a punchy cop drama set in Mumbai and Delhi, and a biopic of the stocky Manipuri woman who is India's most famous boxer - but in very different ways, these were films in which female audiences derived much pleasure from watching the woman on screen emerge victorious from physical battles. Mary Kom's initial attraction to boxing is linked to beating up badly behaved boys; Shivani Roy loves shocking male rowdies with some rowdyisms of her own, and plays gleefully to the gallery as she does so. 

Rani Mukherjee in Mardaani, 2014.

Interestingly, though, both films felt the need to play up their protagonists' nurturing side - a part-explanatory, part-compensatory move to balance out all that unfeminine punching we see them do. Mukherjee's character in Mardaani, a no-bullshit female cop with the ringing name of Shivani Shivaji Roy, is given no children of her own. But she and her doctor husband play adoptive parents to a young niece, and she is moved to eradicate a ring of child traffickers because they've abducted an orphaned girl with whom she has a quasi-maternal relationship. 

Motherhood was also played up in the movie version of MC Mary Kom's life, with Mary shown risking her coach's disfavour when she decides to get married and then have children, all at the peak of her hard-won boxing career. Produced by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Omung Kumar's film devotes an inordinate amount of screen-time to showing Mary being a hands-on mom: singing her twins to sleep, nursing them to health, and so on - one can't avoid the sneaking feeling that it's all in aid of preventing audiences judging her when she does decide to return to her career, while the kids still very young. (It was lovely, though, to see a man on the Hindi film screen play a hands-on dad as competently and believably as Darshan Kumar did as Onler Kom.) 

The parade of rough-talking women continued with Kangana Ranaut's strange and over-the-top outing in and as Revolver Rani (RR). A Tarantino-inspired take on a female Chambal dacoit some two decades after Phoolan Devi and Bandit Queen, RR could have been great but was tragically uneven in tone. Later in the year, we got Richa Chadda in the depressingly awful Tamanchey: another trigger-happy female gangster, like Ranaut in RR, ready to junk it all for marriage and motherhood. 

But Ranaut's film of the year -- and everyone's favourite 'woman-centric' movie -- was Queen. Vikas Bahl's surprise hit had Ranaut deliver a terrific stream-of-consciousness performance as sheltered Delhi girl Rani who, jilted at the mandap, makes the wonderful transition from panic-stricken to determined to carefree. 

Kangana Ranaut (right) in Queen, 2014

The foreign trip as transformatory ritual isn't new (think Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara), and Rani is perhaps a younger version of Sridevi in English Vinglish—but the film wins points for a host of other things, from giggly female friendship to joyful drunken spree to first exploratory kiss with a stranger, and most importantly, Rani's non-vengeful but firm rejection of her baffled groom. Queen opened up the universe a little more. 

Two other films delivered freedom to their female protagonists in surprising guises: Alia Bhatt as the poor little rich girl who finds liberation via abduction in Highway, and Parineeti Chopra as the oddball science geek who runs away from home -- to China! -- in the under-appreciated and charming Hasee Toh Phasee. 

Vidya Balan in Bobby Jasoos, 2014

My pick for independent woman character of the year, though, is probably Vidya Balan's Hyderabadi detective in the comic mystery caper Bobby Jasoos. Perhaps because there's nothing grand or heroic about her loose-plait-and-dupatta persona. She loves her family, but will risk their ire to fulfill her dream of her own detective agency. Since she's not in the realm of myth, she neither beats up any men nor has to prove her femininity. But when personable young men open car doors for her, they encounter a brisk dismissal: "Mereko aata hai gaadi ka darwaza kholna." For me, that's more than enough.

There's a myth about Mary

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

A big-budget film simplifies Mary Kom's story more than some of us would like. But then Hindi cinema, like Hollywood, is not in the business of realism. It is in the business of myth-making.

Omung Kumar's Mary Kom was discussed threadbare before anyone actually watched the film. The trailer released in end-July was shared by thousands. But detractors were many, too. The first objection was that Manipur-born Mary was played by Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra, her Punjabi features ineffectively masked by prosthetics. One piece suggested four actresses from India's northeast as more realistic choices.

The second charge was that big-budget Bollywood would cannibalise Mary's life, reducing complexities to broad strokes. Irate opinion pieces fed on (and into) a desire for ‘authenticity’ voiced widely on social media. A well-known documentary filmmaker said on Facebook that she had approached Mary Kom for a documentary in 2010, that Mary was “very excited”, but “the only language the [media] agency spoke was money”. The documentary didn't get made. The filmmaker seemed to lament Mary's decision, writing, “I just hope for her, that she made money out of this film and not just her media agency. Well, for good or for bad, at least she’ll be a household name and maybe become an inspiration for other female boxers.” One typical commenter on the thread wrote: “Characters like Milkha Singh and Mary Kom are stars in themselves, so u dont need another star to tell their story. Their name is enough. I still can’t comprehend how could both... allowed them to make films which seems like a cinematic extension of high gloss virgin plastic.” (sic)

I’m really glad the Indian media has outlets able to list actresses from the Northeast, and that there are so many people taking up online cudgels on behalf of a woman who has put the region in the spotlight. But wouldn't it be nice if all these angry people acknowledged that Mary Kom's life story belongs first and foremost, to herself? And if Kom has chosen to have it turned into a Sanjay Leela Bhansali film rather than a documentary, aren't we being presumptuous in suggesting that she shouldn't have?

Documentaries are crucial to my film-viewing life, and there are two fascinating ones on Mary Kom just on Youtube. But whether we like it or not, even the most acclaimed documentary would earn Kom a fraction of the money or bandwidth that this film will. Millions more Indians will hear of Mary Kom than of a documentary, and Chopra is crucial here. Mary Kom knows that. Having fought her way up from obscurity even as she rose through the world boxing ranks, Kom understands the power of fame. And given the absurdly unstarry treatment of non-cricketing sportspersons by Indian authorities (something documented with increasing and surprising frequency by Hindi films from Paan Singh Tomar to Chak De India), surely Mary and Milkha are best equipped to judge whether they need “another star” to tell their story.

Omung Kumar’s choppy film, though it fails to explain Mary's fascination with boxing, does capture her hunger for celebrity. A scene where Mary cooks a Manipuri meal for a visiting Delhi/Mumbai journalist prefigures current media stories of Mary’s down-home friendship with Priyanka Chopra. Later we see her treasure her medals, and paste clippings about herself in a scrapbook. Mary Kom may be a legend in Manipur, but she wants to be a legend across India. And she knows that there is no better way of ensuring that than to become the subject of a Bollywood myth.

Hindi films have been banned in Manipur since 2000 by the insurgent group Revolutionary Peoples Front, who see them as part of mainland India's expansionist strategy. But such a ban means little in the internet era. And many Manipuris, like Mary, seem happy with the moment in the Bollywood sun. “So what if they haven’t used a Manipuri actress, the story is ours. We should be proud as Indians,” said Mary's coach to IBNLive. “As a child, I watched so many movies and could never have dreamt that one day a film would be made on me,” Mary told Delhi Times. “I liked Amitabh Bachchan sir's boxing in Sholay film.” No wonder she seemed pleased as punch when an admiring Bachchan launched her autobiography Unbreakable last December.

We need to acknowledge that Hindi cinema, like Hollywood, is not in the business of realism. It is in the business of myth-making. Its myths can be dangerous, but they can also be powerfully affecting. No doubt there is a flattening of Manipur's socio-political context in Mary Kom, and of Mary's persona. Her fierce interest in girly things, almost as fierce as her boxing; the fact that her fashionableness involves a rise from ragged poverty; her deep Christian belief; the powerful links between sport and poverty in an underdeveloped region -- these are left tragically unexplored. But the film offers up a rare female icon: an almost impossible heroine who is both feminine and a fighter, managing motherhood while also fulfilling her career dreams.

But in a world where Mangte Chungneijang Mary Kom can get to the national list only by shortening herself to MC Mary Kom, Bollywood’s simplifications are merely a symptom. The malaise runs much deeper.