Sexism in Media: Bollywood

My relationship with the world of Bollywood is complicated to say the least. Some of my earliest memories consist of the TV blaring those iconic Hindi songs, and being intimately familiar with most of the lyrics and dance moves. I think it isn’t unfair to say that a gigantic proportion of Bollywood movies are mind numbingly senseless, and not ironically! I had always thought this was an attempt to pander to the larger masses in India to gain wider public acclaim. And along the way, dumb comedy like that of Houseful or Entertainment and unrealistic action scenes like in Singham or in literally any Salman Khan movie, became one of the most defining characteristics of the institution of Bollywood. To be perfectly candid, I now almost exclusively see Hollywood movies because, for the most part, they lack these extremely annoying traits and one can often see at least an attempt to be original or creative within their narratives. They are not without their own flaws, like side lining or villainizing people of colour, lacking in LGBT representation, and completely failing the Bechdel test, to name only a few. But modern day Hollywood is changing, as their audience increasingly becomes socially aware or woke and doesn’t refrain from straight up ‘cancelling’ anything and everything on twitter. I don’t see the same pattern with Bollywood.

With only a handful of exceptions, newer Bollywood movies have remained utterly sexist. While some of the previously mentioned faults are relatively harmless, this one irks me to a great extent. In the majority of movies, women are portrayed as weak, in need of saving, and yet a picture of elegance and beauty, setting extremely impractical and shallow standards for the women in its audience. Movie creators go out of their way to include item dances, adding female characters solely as a romantic interest for the main lead. While I agree that movies need to be a certain degree of titillating to achieve a positive response from the audience, this can also be done by not demeaning an entire gender. One of the primary ways in which the male lead exerts his masculinity is through violence, and almost always to save the heroine in distress. I am now going to list the number of ways in which this is problematic, and exactly how it affects the psyche of a young person in India. Not only does this completely side line the dangers and complexities of being a woman, at the mercy of physically stronger men, but it also propagates this toxic ideology that masculinity can only be exhibited through a show of violence. While romance supposedly showcases a sensitive side to these male characters, it has underlying notion of sex, which once again proves his masculinity more than his love and adoration. In both these ways, the female character is simply used to further a masculine agenda, rather than be having a complete persona of her own. There are other examples of this as well, tropes that require the heroine to have an overbearing father, or one where she is conflicted between a career and her boyfriend, or is caught in a love triangle. Even if all of these sound like plot lines with great potential for providing a character with emotional depth, its execution is done in a way that simply highlights the main male characters yearning and angst and undermines any and all character development for the female.

But then again, India itself is not as progressive it ought to be in this arena. Women are still widely known to be caretakers of the house, a man’s family is still given dahej, and the social status of women is much worse off in rural areas. Isn’t the objective of media to reflect society as it is now, rather than representing an ideal which strips the movie of any sense of realism? This point does partially hold some merit, but rather than endorsing these very backward facets of our society which most Bollywood movies do, popular media has an obligation to critique it, as rare movies such as Pink (2016) achieve in doing. Pink followed the story of three young women (critics never fail to mention that they were extremely independent), battling a court case against their rapists. It is a commentary on the prevalent culture of sexual assault and issues of consent. The movie took care to detail how this experience affected the women and the people surrounding them, filling them strengths as well as flaws. Doing so must not only be limited to a serious genre such as this, but can also be incorporated into the endless stream of comedy and drama films released on the big screen every year, where even if major themes do not include social issues, female characters are at least treated as people.

The reason I did not contest this phenomena before, even though I had noticed its existence form a fairly young age, is because these movies’ blatant sexism and incoherent stupidity have become a major defining characteristic of Bollywood itself, to the extent where I believe ‘it’s not a Hindi movie if it’s not idiotic and superficial.’ Indian youth have accepted the fact that they do not want any better than an expectation of entertainment from these movies. When will we stop giving free passes to movie creators, and commending them when they continue to uphold such archaic values of patriarchy? And when will we, as an audience, cease to be okay with the fact that movie creators are treating us like we have absolutely no intelligence at all?