For Shah Rukh fangirls, Hindi romance movies from 2013 to 2015 are getting old… Sitting in the cinema, watching our hero in action movies with fast cars High altitude and few women, the body of many fangirls of Shah Rukh became weak. Our icon has abandoned us… Anupama Chopra, recalling how Shah Rukh’s characters used to be Raj or Rahul in love, concluded her review of Chennai Express 2013 with the plea, ‘Now come back, Rahul. All is forgiven.’
After going into high machine mode, our hero will return to us in 2016 with a female director at the top. He will play the role of a sexy young girl. Since then, he’s continued to talk to women on screen and act in films where women make up more than half of the dialogue. It’s a radical departure from most commercial Hindi cinemas, where the loud, overbearing presence of a male superstar inevitably drowns out the voices of women.
In the late 2010s, audiences had a choice of niche films and web series in which women were empowered to speak. However, ‘popular’ films with equal dialogue by women will no longer dominate box office records. A DDLJ, with lots of female voices, was the top grossing film of 1995 and one of the most successful films of all time at the box office. But in 2020, we’re back to a time when the box office was dominated by loud and proud men. Movies about women’s menstrual health hardly have any dialogue from women. Men will constantly speak up for women. While Hindi film scripts are changing to feature women with voice and interest, male characters continue to receive much more humanity and subjectivity while women still vehemently opposed. Movies where women talk freely and often are often the ones that don’t have male superstars. When women’s words are central to the plot, their characters are often concepts or causes, rarely complex, complete people. They are what Paromita Vohra calls ‘a new catalog of [female] of all kinds—heavy, dizzy, hero, victim’. A woman on film is always Beauty, Bitch or Bechari, never even our own messy Bridget Jones desi.
At the same time, complex montages have diminished the need for men in films to be as charismatic as Shah Rukh or as muscular as Salman. Their plot helps audiences appreciate male characters beyond the measure of sexual attractiveness, masculinity, or wealth. They dedicate a rich interior to the losers of capitalism with sympathetic stories of corporate burnout, older men, bald men, Young unemployed become sperm donors, coal mafias, gangsters and psychopaths. The movie theater’s new heroes are hardly morning idols, they’re great scenarios about the neighborhood men. However, women are still the subjects, their sex lives seem to be the only concern. They remain physically present, whether they are wrestling, dancing, performing jauhar or looking painfully seductive, but almost always in silence. At the end of this book in the midst of a pandemic, I measured how many lines are spoken by women in some of Hindi cinema’s biggest hits. The results were disappointing. At the movies, most of the women are still pretty and quiet.
Before the pandemic closed cinemas, the highest-grossing Hindi film of 2019 was War, starring Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff. Its contribution to Hindi cinema is undoubtedly the inclusion of homoerotica. The camera pays tribute to these men, their muscles, their gait, and their beauty. Women who happen to be worshiped glorify male physiques, the film pretends to be a fashionable action movie with a fleeting concern about Indian Muslim identity. A woman appears in a bikini scene and song shortly after the interval, dying shortly after. Another person plays an important role in the plot but says almost nothing. Compare this to Shah Rukh’s last release before the pandemic, Zero, which features two powerful female performances — Katrina Kaif plays a troubled, charismatic actress and Anushka Sharma plays as a scientist. The film doesn’t care about male heroes and has many scenes in which these strong women mock Shah Rukh’s character for not being able to match them. The contrast is literally created by the fact that the character of Shah Rukh is a dwarf. Of course, Khan will always keep us guessing, never allowing me or anyone else to trap him with clichés. His post-pandemic release is being worked on by the same team that created War.
Shah Rukh is not a feminist icon. The overwhelming power of men to determine the commercial fate of a film would never allow it… But when measuring the screen time and dialogue of his most successful films compared to In contemporary films, one finds that Shah Rukh’s films have more time and space for women’s words. Female characters tend to play a more equal role in his work, perhaps because establishing romantic love or family harmony requires more female participation, such as in an action movie full of male hormones or a thrilling gangster story. Although even in movies where he plays a criminal or a robot, women’s words are still central to the plot. And women have much to say about Shah Rukh, from Mumbai to Morocco. He’s not a feminist icon, but certainly one.
(Excerpt with permission from Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence, by Shrayana Bhattacharya; published by HarperCollins; 2021)
