By Ila Ananya

‘Anaarkali is an enormously brave character for a Bollywood story.’ Photo courtesy: Swara Bhaskar Twitter.

Anaarkali of Aarah, writer-director Avinash Das’ debut movie, leaves you incredibly happy when you walk out of the theatre. It seems to have everything — it wastes no time in justifying Anaarkali’s profession (she’s an erotic singer), or why a woman performing songs about sexual desire has every right to fight sexual harassment. Anaarkali’s last scene, one that can hardly be summarised as well as it is performed, is the most satisfying end to a movie that lets women speak.

Swara Bhaskar, who has got two Filmfare Award nominations for her roles in Tanu Weds Manu (2011), and Raanjhanaa (2013), and acted in the widely acclaimed Nil Battey Sannata (2016), makes Anaarkali of Aarah what it is.

Here’s what she told us about the movie, her detailed research, and Bollywood.

How did you become a part of the film, and what was it about the film that made you want to be involved?

I had a strange association with the film, because Avinash [Das] had first offered it to me only to read and comment on, because he knows I’m very open about all matters gender. There was another actress he wanted to give it to. When he said he had somebody else in mind, I remember thinking this guy is crack — I mean who asks an actress to proofread for another.

But I was hooked from the title itself. At that time it was called ‘Anaarkali Aarahwali’. I liked the idea of a world where a woman performs such songs. I also have family in Bihar, so I thought it would be an interesting area to explore.

The first time I read it, I asked Avinash if he would be open to comments, and we talked for four and a half hours. Then I read two more drafts before coming on board. He tried getting another actress but it didn’t work out; I don’t know what happened. After all that, I remember him telling me, “You know, now that you’ve read it so many times…” Now I’m feeling very smug after reading the reviews because I had been very excited by the project and thought it had a lot of potential. My parents are now telling me the movie is done and I should move on, but it matters to me so much because I’ve seen it through from an idea to a proper film.

I did the film because I think of myself as much as a Bollywood audience, as an actor, and Anaarkali is a one-of-a-kind character.

What is it about Anaarkali’s character that excited you?

I thought Anaarkali was an enormously brave character for an Indian-Bollywood story. She is a woman who is an ultra-glamorous, very feisty, singing double meaning songs in the context of a society that isn’t friendly towards female self-expression, or even gender equality, safety – basic shit.

It’s such a deeply patriarchal world, and yet you have this character, and a performance form — a space where these women are in positions, not really of power, but they are cheered and desired. But this is only for the time they’re on stage. The moment they get down, and are walking down a road, they aren’t seen as anything. If anything happens, and there’s a small conflict, everything falls apart and you see the world of that male privilege. I thought it was an interesting fault line that these women live in, and for a movie to exist upon.

Did the script change a lot?

That’s Avinash’s most amazing quality as a writer-director. He wrote more than 20 drafts. He is able to take feedback constructively and convert it into better things.

We did argue a lot but Avinash was very open to me interpreting Anaarkali’s character in the way I wanted. So I would push the envelope with wanting her to be unapologetic. I wanted the audience to be uncomfortable with the morality of our society, simply because she is considered a ‘loose’, and ‘slutty’ girl.

For instance, in one draft of the script we discussed whether Anaarkali and Anwar [who she runs away to Delhi with], were or weren’t involved. I was saying I think they are involved, or that they will eventually be involved, but that’s not the point. I think it is okay to not fully explain that part of her.

What were the other kinds of discussions you had about any of the characters?

We talked a lot about Sanjay’s [Misra] character. He’s a very fine actor, and is so well-loved. My only concern was that all the sympathy could go to him [he plays the powerful VC who molests Anaarkali on stage] at the end of the movie. I didn’t want people coming out of the theatre and thinking, “Arre yaar, aisa bhi kuch nahi kiya tha [what he did wasn’t that big a deal].” Avinash, Ravinder Randhawa, who wrote the songs and is responsible for the gender politics, and I, would often spend time figuring out how to ensure that the sympathy remains with Anaarkali.

The songs in the movie aren’t shot in the same way that item songs are…

Bollywood has used item numbers for glamour. In Anaarkali of Aarah, we’ve given the ‘item girl’ her own world and voice, a story, and a perspective. The songs aren’t shot in the same way as other Bollywood item songs. They’re shot in a very yes-we’re-watching-a-performance way.

One of my favourite scenes in the movie is when Anaarkali runs to Delhi, and says she wants to work.

I loved that moment too. I liked the dynamic of Anwar trying to be a ‘man’ and saying, “No I will work, you won’t sing here.” But he isn’t like that because he’s too young to take on the responsibilities that he thinks he can take on. And Anaarkali is not the person who will stay home either.

There’s actually a scene that was cut. In that scene, Anwar sees that she’s had a break down. Reshma, the house owner, tells him something like, “Obviously she’s going to be like this, she just sits there and does nothing. I told her I’ll get her a job washing dishes or doing jhadoo pocha, but she says, ‘Anwar won’t like it’. What else do you expect if she’s at home all day doing nothing?”

That interaction felt so good to hear, because it was a conversation about a woman wanting to work, and a performer saying she wants to perform.

Did you do a lot of research for the movie?

I went to Aarah looking for women who were involved in this performance. That’s how I found the Orchestra Party [a group of performers]. In some sense, they were the real Anaarkali of Aarah. We became friends, and I started chatting with them. I listened to their songs and recorded them. That’s where I picked up Anarkali’s body language, and language, from observation.

Of course, the songs they sing are a lot more suggestive than anything we sing. I remember when I sat down with someone who knew the language, to try and understand the lyrics. I was like, “Okay then”, and died of shock.

Also, in the movie, Anaarkali has more agency, and I do wonder sometimes if we’ve created a hero, in some sense. But I guess that’s alright as well; it’s a liberty we took for a reason.

Swara Bhaskar as Anaarkali in a still from Anaarkali of Aarah.

What were some of the interesting things you found in your research?

I remember two things that influenced the way I built up Anaarkali.

When I asked Munni Devi, the head of Orchestra Party, to sing some songs, she sang an early number of hers. It was a sweet song about a young bride complaining — one of the lines was like, ‘Mohe chota mila de bhartar, jawani kaise kati.’ ‘Bhartar’ means husband, and the woman is essentially saying “My husband is small.” When I asked her about newer songs, she said, “No, I’ll sing you a Nirgun Bhajan.” My jaw was on the floor. She actually sang me a Nirgun Bhajan. This became a pointer to peg Anaarkali’s character on, because I realised that whatever the world thinks of these women, they see themselves as artists.

The second thing was that I’d wanted to watch them perform. The show was to start at midnight, and Munni Devi had told me to come at 9:30 pm. They were all dressed up; she was in an orange sari, and decked up with a lot of gold from top to bottom. She was looking harassed when I arrived. When I asked her what had happened, she said the girls who were supposed to perform hadn’t shown up. They had left two days ago, for another performance. Munni Devi found that it was because the organisers of the previous event had simply stopped the women from leaving.

I couldn’t imagine this. As an actor and performer, I was used to working on shifts, and that’s what we get paid for. I can’t imagine not being allowed to leave. It made me realise that however feisty Anarkali is, she also lives in a world that’s extremely volatile and male.

What is it like to make Anaarkali of Aarah in an industry that is misogynistic?

I don’t think Bollywood is consciously misogynistic. I think it’s misogynistic and sexist in the blind and unconscious sort of way that I guess all our fathers or brothers are.

Bollywood is like this about so many things, like the stereotyping of South Indians or sardars. It’s a very unthinking approach to what you’re doing. When you’re trying to make a formula film for instance, you’re constantly wondering what will get the audience to laugh or clap. That’s the reason item numbers are there—hasi aaegi, taliyan bajegi. I think it’s changing a bit, but not a lot.

What kind of responses do you expect to the movie?

I did believe it would do well. I’m curious about how men react to it. I felt that one response would be hopeful, and I can see why I’m getting that from a lot of women, but I also hoped it would make some people uncomfortable. In my mind that’s also a good thing. It would encourage questions.

The post ‘Bollywood is Blindly Sexist the Way Our Fathers Are.’ Swara Bhaskar on Male Privilege, Working Women and Playing the Amazing Anaarkali appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Rasika Dugal. Image courtesy Rasiga Dugal Facebook page

Rasika Dugal enacting all the roles on all the days is kind of what we all needed today but just didn’t know it.

In this hilarious new video, she reminds why we love her so much as she plays a director, producer, lawyer, stylist, painfully but hilariously nervous assistant director, (slightly sleazy?) sound dada, hopelessly vague casting director, an out-of-work actor (at “Prithivi” Cafe, of course), a fan and a hair stylist (my personal favourite), basically enacting all the days of the week in an actor’s life. I’ve never met any of these folks or ever been on the set of a Bollywood movie, but she makes me feel intimately familiar with all these folks and tropes, and I assume it’s because she’s just so good.

The video is the second in a series called So, Basically. I loved everything about it, except I feel a bit suspicious of the Vidya Balan reference for reasons I can’t exactly put my finger on.

By the way, check out the hilarious and most eye-roll-enabling work “advice” that Rasika Dugal has received about being an actor here.

The post Rasika Dugal Enacting All the Roles in Bollywood in this Funny New Video Reminds Us Why We Love Her So Much appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Madhur Bhandarkar. Photo courtesy Madhur Bhandarkar Facebook page

Every now and then, you hear a story from Bollywood that makes you begin to wonder if you’re dreaming.

Back in 2004, model Preeti Jain filed a case against filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar for allegedly raping her 16 times between 1999 and 2004. In 2011, a Mumbai metropolitan court “found substance” in the allegations and directed Bhandarkar to face trial. Bhandarkar moved the Supreme Court for relief against the charge, and the Supreme Court quashed the charges against him in 2012, as Jain no longer wanted to pursue the case.

If this isn’t already dark and scary enough, things are about to get a lot weirder. A few months after filing the original case against Bhandarkar, Jain allegedly paid gangster Arun Gawli’s aide Naresh Pardeshi a sum of Rs. 75,000 to kill Madhur Bhandarkar.

Preeti Jain. Photo courtesy BhojpuriFilmDuniya.com

When the murder wasn’t carried out, Jain asked Pardeshi for her money back, as you do. When Arun Gawli heard about this, incredibly, he apparently told the police about the entire scene. Which seemed a bit crazy to us, because we assumed it meant he implicated himself. As it turned out, there was no evidence against Arun Gawli, so he got off scot-free, but he’d ratted his aides out to the police in his apparent bid get revenge on Jain for demanding her money back. Pardeshi and Shivram Das have both been sentenced to three years in jail along with Preeti Jain. All three have been granted bail.

Bhandarkar has since posted this tweet:

Somethings are better left unsaid! Somethings are better left as they are. Life moves on, so have I.

— Madhur Bhandarkar (@imbhandarkar) April 28, 2017

No, no, no. Let us say more things and not move on. Let us talk more about sexual assault and sexism in Bollywood. Let us talk also about cops and gangsters being besties. Let us also talk about the astonishing near-fictional character called Preeti Jain who 13 years into this saga is still saying things like, “I am not disheartened. Once we receive the detailed order, we will study it and move ahead for an appeal,” and “I have complete faith in the judiciary.”

The post The Unbelievable Madhur Bhandarkar and Preeti Jain Saga Involves Rape, Money and a Murder Plot appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Still from Devdas

So DNA India just published a report that says that the Central Board Of Film Certification (CBFC) has been instructed by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to remove all signs of physical and verbal abuse against women in movies.

I have two very conflicting feelings about this. Part of me is happy with the move, because the movies have a huge role to play in influencing and deciding people’s mindsets, and showing them what is both normal and desirable.

But it’s also dangerous to desensitise people’s minds to violence against women by bombarding them with images of it in the movies: it makes both men and women think that this kind of violence is normal, widespread and acceptable, and takes away from how shocking and horrifying it is. Plus, it was always a bit annoying how they would put up a warning about cigarettes and alcohol whenever they showed up in movies, but it was apparently perfectly fine to show images of women getting beaten without any rider that it was disgusting and illegal and that the actors don’t support it.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder what this will mean for people who are trying to make movies, and also, what it means that there’s a government body telling us what words we are allowed to use. And that it gets to decide how women will be represented in movies.

DNA reports that this new move also means that words that are abusive towards women will also be removed from movies. While I would love for movies (and people) to be less verbally abusive towards women, it’s a bit infantilising for the CBFC (or anyone) to tell us which swear words to use. And while I am of course also sick to death of stuffy directors saying that all their scenes of rape and violence and abuse against women are necessary for their art or whatever, it is still, at the end of the day, art, and we should be a little wary of any kind of muzzle or ban on artistic expression, or any kind of expression. And it isn’t like the CBFC is the most discerning body out there: every other day, it makes the news for banning or cutting out scenes from great movies just because they don’t fit their strange sensibilities.

But for once, and believe me, I never thought I’d say this, it looks like the CBFC is coming from a good place with this move. We’ve all been waiting for directors and members of the film industry to just organically realise that they can’t keep selling violence and sexism against women, but since that doesn’t seem like it’s happening, maybe the CBFC took note of the immense impact that cinema has on society and is trying to do it’s own little part. What do you think?

The post The Censor Board is Coming Out with a New Rule About Women in Movies and We’re Not Sure How We Feel About It appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Ila Ananya

Still from Half Girlfriend

Last night I met two friends I went to school with. We live in different cities, and we hadn’t met each other for five years, so apart from taking our first photo together (in 13 years of friendship), we made our way through two towers of beer and talked about everything. We talked about our parents and what they’d say if we tried to discuss boys with them, grumbled about college and the future, and then landed, quite smoothly, at our own love lives.

The three of us have grown apart (and then stumbled back to each other almost inevitably), but until last night, none of us were quite sure what the other thought about relationships — not with particular people, but as a thing. But the conclusion to love conversations came more easily than any of us expected: at 21, we happily floated in and out of wanting, not wanting, and half-wanting men and women as we went about figuring out the rest of our lives.

So watching Mohit Suri’s Half Girlfriend (based on Chetan Bhagat’s eponymous novel) the morning after that conversation is, to put it mildly, maddening. Everyone says that Bhagat wrote his novel imagining it as a Bollywood movie. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that neither Bhagat nor Bollywood knew what to do with all the potential that’s packed into the fantastic inventive phrase ‘half girlfriend’. A phrase at last for at least some of the in-between places we can be in relationships.

Still from Half Girlfriend

Suri went a step ahead, rather literally, and decided to imagine the book’s protagonist Riya (Shraddha Kapoor) as a half person. She isn’t even in the in-between space that is half girlfriend for very long. After all, we are told, with being half girlfriend comes guilt and wistfulness; a longing to be full girlfriend, and subsequently wife and mother. As Riya tells Madhav Jha (Arjun Kapoor), she’d said she would be his half girlfriend only because she was running, at lightning speed, away from love. Why? Because she had seen how much her father abused her mother.

When Bhagat’s book came out in October 2014, he explained what he meant by the term half girlfriend. It was, he said, “a unique Indian phenomenon, where boys and girls are not clear about their relationship status with each other”. I’m not sure why this is a ‘unique Indian phenomenon’, but the woman that I imagine as being in the half girlfriend zone is very different from the Riya of Bhagat’s imagination. I thought the term captured the vagueness of many of my relationships, in all their uncertainties and namelessness. But unlike Bhagat and Bollywood make it out to be, this grey zone has been occasionally confusing, but not a perpetually depressing place to be in. It’s not a waiting room for the Marriage Train either.

In Bhagat’s book, Madhav has turned up at Riya’s house (she’s sick), desperate to finish an older conversation about whether she’s his girlfriend. It’s when we first hear her say she’s his half girlfriend — more than casual friends, but not in a relationship — “I don’t want a relationship right now. With anyone,” she had told him a few days before this. “We are both too young, inexperienced but curious.”

Still from Half Girlfriend

Instead, in the movie, Riya and her in-between space, after whom both Bhagat’s book, and the movie are named, are never central. It is Madhav’s love story; it’s about him moving from Bihar to Delhi to study in St Stephen’s College, and about Riya teaching him English to win over Bill Gates. Madhav, we are told, is doing so much good; after all, he wants funds to build toilets in his mother’s school in Bihar so that girls can get admission there too. And Riya, (whom he loves so much that he makes annoying sappy eyes at her throughout the movie) Madhav tells us, has always been the woman who disappears. Apparently, she disappears because she is his half girlfriend, but really, Riya’s character only seems ghost-like, appearing magically when he needs help, or to be sacrificial because she thinks she will get in his way and ruin his life. I’m not sure how.

Bollywood movies have always been desperate to end “happily” with women coming full circle to become full girlfriend. Most movies are too scared to end differently, almost as though they can’t handle the cracks in the symbolic order that would come from being half girlfriend. Unless say in Meri Pyaari Bindu, where the heroine is cleansed of ambition and baptised afresh by motherhood, then the hero need not marry her.

For instance, what would have happened if Vaani Kapoor and Ranveer Singh didn’t get together at the end of Befikre by jumping off a cliff into the sea, while furiously kissing each other, with Aditya Chopra telling us that love is like bungee jumping? Badrinath Ki Dulhania could have ended with Alia Bhatt’s decision to become an air hostess, without sending her back to get married to Varun Dhawan, who keeps turning up at her house drunk, and kidnaps her by shoving her in the boot of his car. And what if Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, which did do something with this in-betweeness of friendship and love, didn’t make Anushka Sharma get cancer and let Ranbir Kapoor’s abusive man-child behaviour be more apparent?

In each of these movies, as in Half Girlfriend, Bollywood has only shown that it doesn’t know how to handle the completely normal reality of women feeling in-between things for men — any ending has always been at the expense of women, the ones who must compromise more and adjust more, because the aim is always to be full girlfriend.

At the end of Half Girlfriend, we are made to feel bad for Madhav, drunk in New York and spending his nights rushing from one bar to the next, searching for Riya. She has always dreamt of singing in a jazz bar in New York, and when Madhav finally finds out where she’s performing, we see him run through the streets, get hit by a car, get up and still keep running until he reaches her. We all know what happens after this. But what do we know about Riya and how she made her way to New York to fulfil this dream she had? Nothing.

At 21, I am supposed to be both the subject and object of Bhagat’s literary/sociological ambitions. I wonder how many of the thousands of others, fellows of the prized demographic, who read his book, is feeling annoyed that the movie has erased the one thing Bhagat got right.

The post Half Girlfriend: Why is Bollywood So Desperate to End with Women Becoming ‘Full Girlfriends’ appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Photo courtesy Film Companion via Facebook

Late last month, Anupama Chopra asked India’s leading stand-up comedians about sexism in the industry, and the ensuing scene was all kinds of gross.

Now, in a video posted yesterday by Film Companion, Anupama Chopra sat down with playback singers Neeti Mohan, Jonita Gandhi, Aditi Singh Sharma and Neha Bhasin, and asked them straight up about the gender politics in the field that allow for a singer like Arijit Singh to be a household name, while female singers don’t reach that level of stardom and popularity.

Her question was greeted with a heartfelt “thank you so much” from Neha Bhasin, and the kind of responses that make it clear that this is something the leading women in the business have been thinking about a lot.

Neeti Mohan immediately says it’s because they don’t have that many female songs. Aditi Singh Sharma points out that if an album has seven songs, 90 percent of the time, five of the songs will be male, while two would be female, or one would be a female song and the other a duet. Neeti Mohan hilariously interjects, the duet will have two “female lines” [in a high-pitched voice], leaving the artist wondering how on earth that becomes a duet.

Neha Bhasin also says that the situation would begin to improve when female actors start demanding full songs in their films, because these movies are their movies too, and they’re making the films run. She says she feels like male actors are just leading the way, and female actors doing item songs. Jonita Gandhi talks about how frustrating it is when songs are composed without women in mind, which forces female singers to sing in keys that aren’t comfortable for them and that totally ignore their range.

It’s a really wonderful, thought-provoking exchange, and it’s quite exhilarating to see these women discussing the subject the way they do, which is by laughing at the absurdity of the situation and the people who perpetuate it, with total confidence in their own abilities and skill. While some part of me absently wonders how this scene would have gone down if there were any male singers in the room, probably because of what happened with the comedians, I’m so glad there weren’t, because then we wouldn’t have been able to see this gem:

The post India’s Leading Female Playback Singers Sat Down to Talk about Sexism, Arijit Singh and Fake Duets appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Tupur Chatterjee

Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle. Photo courtesy Lata Mangeshkar Facebook page

The first time I heard Farida Khanum sing “Haaye mar jayein ge, hum toh lut jayenge, aisi baatein kiya na karo,” I felt a bit nervous — were women in our part of the world (especially those across the border) allowed to say ‘haaye’ like that? What on earth was this devastatingly haunting sensuality? Khanum’s languid throaty voice, and her hypnotic powers of persuasion and cajoling clearly belonged to another world. A world very far from what I’d grown up in, listening to the Hindi film heroine lip-sync: this was an adult woman singing an adult song. And, such a world did exist.

Usha Uthup — who in the 1970s sang at Trinca’s, one of Calcutta’s iconic nightclubs on Park Street, donning her trademark Kanjeevaram saris — was reportedly thrown out of music class in her school because her voice was way outside of the acceptable female range. While she was never hired to sing for the Hindi film heroine because of the gravity in her voice, and entirely marginalised in the Lata-Asha era, she still managed to top the charts on Radio Ceylon with hits like ‘Koi Yahan Naache Naache’ and ‘Hari Om Hari’. Would a singer like Uthup have found more success in mainstream film music today? Perhaps. My hopefulness is not entirely unfounded: I recently saw 12-year-old Riya Biswas on a singing reality show. She belted out a dense jazz-meets-classical-meets-disco version of Geeta Dutt’s ‘Jata kahan hai deewane’, and followed it up with a modulation of her voice into a significantly thinner pitch for Lata Mangeshkar’s ‘Hoton pe aisi baat main dabake chali aayi’. With some luck, Biswas will not be asked to pick one of these personas over the others.

Lata Mangeshkar, the definitive female voice for decades, largely covered two out of the three stereotypical characters available for the heroine: the sexuality unaware infantile (grown) girl and the Hindu wife/Mother Nation. Asha Bhosle, her sister, took on the task of rendering the third voice (which Mangeshkar refused) — the ‘bad’ girls — cabaret dancers, vamps, and tragic courtesans. There were, of course, some spillovers (like the eternal ‘Pyaar kiya toh darna kya’, ‘Aaa janejah’ with its shockingly racist picturisation, and the Lata-Asha duet ‘Mirchi Main Kohlapur Ki’). Mangeshkar’s public persona — desexualised, virginal, “pure”, devotional, Hindu — powerfully shaped the Indian national imagination of what a woman singing should sound like. The ‘good’ woman’s voice remained within the contours of the sweet, smooth, shrill, adolescent, and safe. It rarely strayed into the realms of the textured, husky, thick, too warm, or complicated. There was only one standard of measurement for the female voice and it was Lata Mangeshkar’s. My aim here is not to comment upon Mangeshkar’s singing abilities or if her voice is “good” or “bad”. It’s an analysis of the ways in which her vocal tone and particular style of singing helped fashion Bollywood’s predominant expression of Indian femininity. The passing of the Lata-era has indeed created spaces for newer ways of hearing the female voice and its associated gender identities.

Jawaharlal Nehru, Lata Mangeshkar. Photo courtesy Lata Mangeshkar Facebook page

Consider for instance, the case of Neha Bhasin (singer of Bollywood hits ‘Kuch khaas hai’, ‘Dhunki’ and ‘Jag Goomeya’). She was one of the girls chosen for India’s first all-girl pop band: Channel V’s Viva. Like most other Indian pop stars, Bhasin soon found that when the initial euphoria faded (the debut album did sell 50 million copies), she had to make do as a Bollywood playback singer. In a recent interview with Anupama Chopra in Film Companion, Bhasin expressed her discomfort with the term ‘playback’ singing. She is not comfortable playing in the back, she’s a performer and wants her due — “I was born a popstar”. She also said that her voice was considered “manly”. Bhasin’s vocal style is characteristically thicker than the pitch the female singer is expected to have. For singers like Bhasin, the future however, lies beyond film music. Most upcoming artists are exploring YouTube and other forms of social media to create their distinctive musical expressions.

Neha Bhasin. Photo courtesy Neha Bhasin Facebook

Bhasin has tried to avoid being typecast by taking on songs that are challenging in different ways. (It is not only female actors who face this problem.) She says, “I am not that lucky girl who sings 100 similar songs and becomes famous.” In a remarkable series of music videos, Bhasin sings Punjabi folk songs she grew up hearing from her mother and grandmother. All of these videos are styled distinctively: she dons a new and provocative avatar in each, reminiscent of Lady Gaga. In several of these, including her latest, ‘Chan Mahi’, she even defies the stereotypical Bollywood body. The songs themselves are often traditional, passed down through oral family histories and about women, marriage, and their everyday struggles in the household. It is also a radical feminising of the otherwise masochistic world of the Punjabi male hip-hop/pop star. Along with heaps of praises for her voice, and her intelligent reinterpretations of these nostalgic sounds and songs, several of Bhasin’s female fans routinely comment upon the ways in which she helps break stereotypes associated with body and sexuality.

These developments, however, are less than a decade old. The aftereffects of Lata Mangeshkar were so strong that all other kinds of female voices had very little breathing space. In 1981, India Today carried a cover story on Mangeskar called, ‘The Incredible Singing Machine’. The journalist called Lata a “modern day Meera”, the “single woman in a white sari who visits the Mahalaxmi Temple every week in a white Ambassador car.” As for Asha, he concluded that she not only lacked Lata’s range but also had an even greater “problem”: “an oozing sensuality of her voice, a compelling come-hitherness, which makes her slotted only for the cabaret and disco numbers.” He went on to describe Mangeshkar’s clout in the industry — a frown from her would send music directors into a tizzy and a disapproving shake of her head would give everybody cold feet. In fact, no other female artiste has managed this extent of ownership and monopoly over her craft in the notoriously sexist world of Bollywood. While actresses aged, got married, and had to leave the silver screen, Lata continued to voice each new generation. In other words, the female voice remained frozen in time — always slightly adolescent and “delightfully high”.

Ahsa Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar. Photo courtesy Lata Mangeshkar Facebook page

According to sociologist Sanjay Srivastava (in the May 15-21, 2004 issue of Economic and Political Weekly), Mangeskhkar’s vocal style did not have any precedents in the traditions of Indian music or of female singers from the subcontinent — the range of both of which was extremely diverse. He argues that Mangeshkar’s voice was the perfect antidote to national anxieties about performing women and women in public space whose “presence was ‘thinned’ through the expressive timbre granted to them”. Mangeshkar’s public persona further helped cement the image of the “pure” Indian woman whose desire, sexual and otherwise, did not run amok like other women in the entertainment industry. There was no gossip around her personal life that circulated in the film magazines. She refused to sing cabarets, disco songs, and lavanis. Her sibling, Asha Bhosle had no such qualms and had a very different personal trajectory. Bhosle eloped from her house when she was 16, walked out of an abusive marriage at 26 and supported three children through her singing — gladly taking on all rejects and leftovers from her older sister. Asha was called upon to sing for female characters whose sexualities could not be curtailed within the realm of family, marriage, or motherhood (think Umrao Jaan, Monica from ‘Piya tu ab toh aaja’ and the pot-smoking Jenny from Hare Rama Hare Krishna.) However some of India’s most iconic disco numbers, like the inimitable ‘Aap Jaisa koi meri zindagi mein aaye’ were sung by the wildly popular Pakistani pop sensation Nazia Hassan.

Whether Mangeshkar’s monopoly over the music industry can be considered a tale of feminist triumph or not (as director Basu Battacharya liked to see it) is a matter of debate. The downside of this was that no other female singing talents could find a substantial foothold in the industry, and whatever little they could sing had to sound like Lata. Both sisters have hotly denied all rumours that they squashed the careers of other female singers by allegedly refusing to work with music directors who dared to pick anybody new. Despite the denials, it seems as though the career trajectories of several other singers during the Lata-Asha era was mysteriously short and often bizarre. Consider for instance, the case of Suman Kalyanpur, also known as the “poor man’s Lata”. Not many people know that she sang the hits ‘Na na karte pyaar tumi se kar baithe’ (Jab Jab Phool Khile, 1965) and ‘Aaj kal tere mere pyaar ke charche’ (Bramachari, 1968). Her voice was uncannily like Lata’s but she did not get her due. In fact, radio stations often played her songs passing them off as Mangeshkar’s. In an interview, Kalyanpur recalls, “Meri aawaaz nazuk aur patli thi [My voice was gentle and thin]. What could I do? Also when Radio Ceylon relayed the songs, the names were never announced. Even the records sometimes gave the wrong name. Maybe that caused more confusion. Shreya Ghoshal’s voice is also thin, but can people go wrong now?” Others like Runa Laila and Vani Jairam managed to sing a few stray songs and eventually packed their bags for other shores. (Poor Runa Laila was also thought to be a Bangladeshi spy.) To be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a “nasuk and patli” vocal tone. What is problematic is when one kind of expression begins to determine and define the entire politics of the female voice.

The Lata-hangover continued well into the 1990s — singers like Alka Yagnik, Kavita Krishnamurthy, Sadhna Sargam, and Anuradha Paudwal continued the legacy of the nasuk awaaz. Several of these singers started out as dubbing and scratch artists who would record initial versions of a song that would finally be sung by the main artist (mostly Lata). There were several others like Vandana Vajpayee, but they never really made it big. I recall hearing Sunidhi Chauhan’s spunky voice in her debut film Mast (1999), only for it to have thinned considerably in later projects (clearly her voice had too much pluck as she soon became the “queen of item songs”.) Similarly Shreya Ghosal opted to follow up her adolescent debut — romantic numbers for Devdas — with the unconventional, un-Lata like racy ‘Jaadu hai, nasha hai’ from Jism (2003). While Chauhan and Ghosal started a few trends, it is only recently that we have begun to hear new and distinct female voices that have their own kind of plural personas, depths, and tonalities like Anuksha Manchanda, Rekha Bharadwaj, Shilpa Rao, Jasleen Kaur Royal, Neeti Mohan, Nooran Sisters, Neha Bhasin, Sneha Khanwalkar, Kanika Kapoor, Aditi Singh Sharma, Jonita Gandhi, Alisha Chinoy, Monali Thakur.

Sneha Khanwalker via her Facebook page

The situation however is complicated. The sudden arrival of a multiplicity of female voices might have shaken the hegemony of the monolithic voice but these singers still have to operate within the sexist matrix of Bollywood, which has always had a deeply skewed relationship to female talent and labour. Several of these new talents see themselves as singers, songwriters, and performers — identities that cannot be contained within the oddity ‘playback’ singer. Despite the sudden availability of a range of textures for the female voice, they often remain interchangeable. This is one of the disadvantages of the post-Lata era. As Jonita Gandhi, Aditi Singh Sharma, Neha Bhasin and Neeti Mohan revealed in the aforementioned interview with Anupama Chopra, songs are written for the male voice with a nominal number of lines given to the female. Often songs are entirely composed for the male singer with the women having to adjust their keys to “fit” the song. The pendulum seems to have swung to the extreme opposite — from a demand for every female singer to sound like Lata, there seems to be an insatiable appetite for the “something new”. (Arijit Singh says: LOLWUT.)

Despite limitations, the tide is definitely changing. A force to reckon with is Sneha Khanwalker, India’s third female music director with a serious proclivity for the ethnographic. (For the uninitiated, Khanwalker composed the startlingly refreshing soundtracks for Oye Lucky Lucky Oye and Gangs of Wasseypur, and sang my favourite song from GoW: ‘Kalaa Rey’.) She also used her own voice for the hyper-male, super gangster song ‘Keh Keh Loonga’. The other female voices on the album are Padmashree Sharda Sinha, the “voice of Bihari folk” (‘Tar bijli se patle hai hamare piya’) and 12-year-old Durga (‘Dil Chi Cha Leather’) who use to previously sing on the train stations of Mumbai. For Oye Lucky, Khanwalkar travelled to an all-male, all-night music festival in Haryana to find new ways for us to think about the aural scape of the overdone Punjab. This is her signature style — as we also saw in MTV’s Sound Trippin. She has a ear for the acoustics of our everyday lives. Jasleen Kaur Royal, another rising singer-composer, is often seen with a mouth organ, a trampoline, and a guitar, all of which she wears on her physical self. These expressions are not only bringing forth the overlooked and plural sonic worlds of popular culture in India, but also finally accommodating new and agile ways of imagining the gendered voice.

Tupur Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Radio TV Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on film and architecture.

The post How the Lata Mangeshkar-Asha Bhosle Era of Bollywood Music Marginalised an Entire Range of Female Singers appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Still from Jab Harry Met Sejal

As seems to happen too frequently, Pahlaj Nihalani has once again gotten confused and imagined that the CBFC is his personal side hobby to run however seems fun at the time. I thought it couldn’t get worse than the time he tried to ban Lipstick Under My Burkha because it was “too lady-oriented” (thank god that that movie is being released, and their poster is a vivid fuck-you to Nihalani and the CBFC).

Yesterday, we were talking about the CBFC demanding that the word ‘intercourse’ be deleted from the mini-trailer of Imtiaz Ali’s new film, Jab Harry Met Sejal. Now, Nihalini has thrown some kind of open challenge at the makers of the film or the country at large, and said that he will allow the word ‘intercourse’ if 1 lakh people vote for the word to stay. He said to Mirror Now, “If you take the voting from the public, I definitely promise you that I’ll clear this word from the picture as well as the promo. You should take the voting from the public… 1 lac.”

#EXCLUSIVE: Get 1 Lakh votes, I will clear #JabHarryMetSejal & trailer, says CBFC Chief Pahlaj Nihalani #SanskariNihalani @FayeDSouza pic.twitter.com/Q54uUgTFPJ

— Mirror Now (@MirrorNow) June 23, 2017

Okay, a couple of things. First of all, nice shirt.

More importantly, it doesn’t work that way. At all. This is your job, you don’t get to throw open opinion polls and random challenges for cuts depending on what mood you’re in, and trying to do that shows just how lightly you take your job and the people connected to it.

But if this is some kind of precedent that’s being set for how the CBFC will work in the future, it’s really nothing but bad news. There’s no doubt that a Shah Rukh Khan and Anushka Sharma starrer will get all the votes it needs to beat any censor’s challenge, but the same can’t be said of smaller films with lesser known actors. A move like this not only makes a joke of film certification and the CBFC, but it also ensures that censorship will applied selectively to smaller films while big budget movies can do whatever they want.

The post Pahlaj Nihalani Would Rather Throw a Ridiculous Challenge to Jab Harry Met Sejal Than Do His Job appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Pooja Pande

Sunny Leone. Still from Mostly Sunny

This is one of the very few scenes of Mostly Sunny — a documentary chronicling Sunny Leone’s rise to fame — which does not have the lady in the frame. In this scene, an arrogant man sitting in his perfectly air-conditioned corporate office doles out gyaan with the kind of nonchalant smugness painfully familiar to us women, mansplaining his self-professed genius and Sunny Leone, minus any self-awareness. (Much like that other self-professed genius Ram Gopal Varma mansplaining Sunny Leone in his recent painful-to-watch short Meri Beti Sunny Leone Banna Chahti Hai.).

The man in this Sunny-less scene is Raj Nayak, CEO, Colors TV, and in the interview, he is showcasing for the viewer his deadly insights into life, the universe, and everything, telling us how he decided to give the go-ahead in inviting “a porn star” into the Big Boss house, which soon became her entry into Bombay. “For some reason, the team got cold feet after signing her on… We were sitting in a creative meeting and I said, ‘So what if she’s a porn star?’ Who are we to judge anybody?’” Minutes later, Nayak proclaims that the show earned her “respectability”.

Still from Mostly Sunny

This is what I liked about Mostly Sunny — the ways in which it renders shameful the desperation of all those who — as Mrinalini Sharma, involved in filming Pink Lips, a Sunny Leone number for Hate Story 2 puts it later on in the film — “want a piece of her”. But those who cannot stop themselves from judging her.

Others in this department include a sprawled-on-his-couch coolth along the lines of, “The only person who can write the obituary of Sunny Leone is Sunny Leone herself” ; an ever-ready-to-be-interviewed Suhel Seth, who speaks of his “Brand Leone insights” like he’s the only who’s noticed them (Oh, Sunny speaks of her adoring husband and happy marriage in the same breath as her career in the adult entertainment business? How amazing, Mr Seth!); a foaming-at-the-mouth Kiran Bedi who dares you if you’ve seen “her YouTubes” before going onto proclaim Leone “worse than an animal”, pretty much responsible for the “rise of rapes”. Watching them pronounce their sermons from the mount gives you an understanding of what obscenity really looks like, much more than a million views on Pornhub ever could. They’re all different versions of Bhupendra Chaubey, the IBN news anchor who interviewed Leone and tried hard to demean her — he who was immortalised so fabulously as ‘Uncle’ by writer Jugal Mody.

Mostly Sunny directed by Dilip Mehta, is also very clever in probing this desperation deeper and laying bare the artifices of a society, and in particular, the Bollywood industry. It’s an industry where Leone is now a firm fixture, ever since a in an also-ran horror film sent her skyrocketing into the hall of fame — “I still have goosebumps when I think about it,” she says, in all seriousness. And you take her seriously, even though she’s referring to something called Baby Doll.

As the camera takes you onset and off, you see the “fake Rajasthani huts” being transported around on cue, the extras who sweat and cavort around Leone and live schizophrenic lives, mocking the very rules of a business they’d do anything to be part of. “It doesn’t matter if you learnt acting or dancing, or even martial arts to make it big here,” says one woman who, like the millions of others teeming in Bombay, dreams of stardom, “it all boils down to whether you are willing to ‘compro’ or not.” Sniggering in one breath, she follows it up matter of factly, “Oh, for sure, I’d do anything to be Sunny Leone.”

It is because she lives in this world of lights and glaring cameras that demand your masks be firmly on at all times that Sunny Leone seems naked, in its truest, I’d go so far as to say, purest sense. “I don’t give a shit”, she says, as Punjabi-forthright as they come; a final call on her detractors, all of them aching to fit her into the box that suits them and their world views.

Sunny Leone. Image courtesy Mostly Sunny Facebook page

Mostly Sunny is not without its fair share of flaws. The Sarnia, Canada segment — where Leone spent her childhood — is very weak, too conveniently crafted in the ‘origins of a legend’ phenomenon. And there is a complete disinterest in showcasing the hard work that Leone surely puts in — we simply do not get a glimpse of it, even something as obvious as say, a workout session.

But it’s the grip on the truths that explore questions of who’s the ‘real faker’ in a world that runs on money and money alone that make it a compelling watch. Like the mini-businesses she’s set rolling, which go ka-ching! The camera follows Hitesh Kapopara, her trusted costume man, as he trawls through the city’s shanties making sure “Sunny didi’s” gold bustier is ready on time, and takes us inside his home where his delighted mother shares, “Ever since he’s been working for her, things have been good.

There is one particular moment when the point of it all shines brightly and clearly, like gold. When she’s asked the future-gazing question of what she thinks she’ll tell her unborn kids about her life as a porn star, Leone tries to answer it by mumbling something about choices and decisions. And then she pauses. “I have no freaking idea what I’ll say to them,” she finally mouths.

And that’s when you can finally articulate it: She’s special, Leone, because she’s real. Yeh duniya, I tell you, is peetal. But Baby Doll, now she’s pure gold.

(Mostly Sunny; Documentary, 2016; Directed by Dilip Mehta; Streaming on Netflix.)

Delhi-based writer-editor Pooja Pande digs calling a spade a spade, even at the risk of being termed killjoy. Read more here.

The post ‘I Don’t Give a Shit.’ The New Sunny Leone Documentary Tells Some Dangerous Truths About Bollywood appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Nidhi Kinhal

Screenshot from Toilet: Ek Prem Katha

The gutter of the male saviour complex is strong with the new Akshay Kumar-Bhumi Pednekar film Toilet: Ek Prem Katha.

Just watch the latest song released for proof. ‘Hans Mat Pagli’ is a typical “oh look at this dude falling so head over heels in love” kind of a song. It has all the familiar elements: Sonu Nigam, black-and-white slow motion shots, pretty landscapes — except, it is creepy max. It seems like Bollywood still hasn’t learnt that stalking is not romantic. Here, Akshay Kumar is seen following Bhumi Pednekar, and pulling all the tricks in the book to click pictures of her. Without her consent.

Here are some of the things he does for success: Follows her auto in a bike, hides behind a wall with his phone with the camera app open, wears a monkey cap and pretends to serve chai, boards a train she’s in, and as if there was any stone unturned, climbs a goddamn tree for a shot and slides down, all dreamy and heroic.

Bhumi Pednekar is visibly uncomfortable throughout the song. If the trailer is anything to go by, they get married later. Sure, we’ve seen these before. Be it Raanjhanaa or Ekk Deewana Tha, these stalker “heroes” have informed generations of what is acceptable in the name of love. Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, for all its women’s empowerment mottos, takes it a disgusting step further. Why just follow her incessantly when you can use modern technology to preserve your beloved’s beauty, amirite?

What we do know is this — that stalking causes fear and suffering for the victim, and what we don’t know (or we don’t realise) is that it’s hard to report and prosecute anywhere in the world. In the US, more than 15 percent of women say they have tolerated stalking. A US Department of Justice report said that 3 percent of victims reported stalkers to the police over 15 times.

Like this case that Slate talks about, where Helen Pearson had to endure five years of harassment by her neighbour, Joseph Willis, all because she turned his offer, of a date, down. Of course, the story doesn’t end there. Willis, who obviously couldn’t handle rejection (and the phrase “no means no”) thought it’d be fun to relentlessly stalk her — he slashed her ties, sent her threatening letters and even left a dead cat at her door. Naturally, Helen complained to the police 125 times and they didn’t take her seriously even when he stabbed her several times in 2013. Until now, when they apologised for dereliction of duty.

Stalking cases in India are terribly common. The media is also a strong influence behind how stalking is treated and viewed. Remember the Indian man in Australia who said he was inspired by Bollywood movies to escape conviction?

Anyway, we really suggest you don’t do this to yourself, but if you want to see how infuriating this business is, head over here.

The post Bollywood Isn’t the Only One that Can’t Get Enough of Stalking Women appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Swati Parashar and Prabha Rani

On June 23rd, Tupur Chatterjee wrote an essay, talking about how Lata Mangeshkar, her particular voice, her clout and whether she subdued a whole generation of playback singers with the power of both. This new essay contests Chatterjee’s argument and says that Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle fought for their position in a sexist industry, spelling out why it isn’t fair to paint them any other way. Plunge in!

Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle. Photo courtesy spotboye website

Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle via Lata Mangeshkar Facebook

Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle courtesy Surbhi Sangeet Vidhyalaya via Facebook

Lata Mangeshkar. Photo courtesy via Tribute to Lata Mangeshkar Facebook page

Asha Bhosle. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi. Photo courtesy Mohammad Rafi- Tum Mujhe Yun Bhula Na Paoge Facebook page

Mohd. Rafi via Mohammed Rafi Sahab Facebook page

The post Regardless of What You May Have Heard, Lata Mangeshkar Paved the Way for Women Playback Singers Who Came Later appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Pahlaj Nihalani. Photo courtesy The Bollywood Reporter Facebook page

So here’s the background. On the 22nd of June, it was reported that CBFC chief Pahlaj Nihalani had said that he wants the word ‘intercourse’ cut from the trailer of the Anushka Sharma and Shah Rukh Khan film Jab Harry Met Sejal. Two days later, he forgot that this is his real job and not some fun bet he’s laying with his friends in his living room, and told Mirror Now that if 1 lakh people voted for the word ‘intercourse’ to remain in the movie and the trailer, he would let it pass. He later added that the voters must be married and above the age of 36. You know, just because.

Of course, they got 1 lakh votes, and Mirror Now sent a reporter to ask Nihalani what he intends to do now that he’s lost his weird wager. Nihalani is now complaining that he’s being harassed by the channel. He said that they sent a young, female reporter who waited for six hours outside the CBFC office (as journalists do when they’re waiting to speak to someone), and then thrust a mike into his face asking questions about the “intercourse language” in the film. He complains that she followed him after he refused to answer and kept asking him questions. Unbelievably, this grown man then said that he “can’t talk about sex with a reporter young enough to be his daughter”.

Wait, there’s more. He then said that the reporter kept badgering him with questions and followed him into the lift, and that it was to his credit that he kept his cool. “What if I had lost my temper? She’d gave gone back and made a story about sexual harassment against me.”

Mr.Nihalani, why are you silent now?
First he challenges, then he shirks!
Censor boss has nothing to say to @MirrorNow. #SanskariNihalani pic.twitter.com/XiLw8P9tBM

— Mirror Now (@MirrorNow) June 30, 2017

It’s disgusting: you’d expect this kind of rhetoric from lonely men on the internet constantly crying about false rape cases, but from the head of the CBFC? What are you supposed to do if the head of the CBFC holds such astonishingly misogynistic opinions about women, and clearly can’t take his job seriously enough to a) do it without turning it into a nation-wide betting game, and b) discuss aspects of it in an adult and professional way without feeling shy when discussing censorship with a fellow working professional.

After everything he’s done and said, can’t we just go ahead and ban Nihalani already?

The post Pahlaj Nihalani’s Latest Remarks against a Female Reporter Make Us Wish We Could Just Ban Him Instead appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Tiger Shroff. Photo courtesy Tiger Shroff Facebook page

Oh, Tiger.

Tiger Shroff’s latest statements aren’t exactly shocking. Remember the fiasco that took place after he gave an interview to Rediff around the time of the release of his movie Baaghi:A Rebel for Love? In the interview, he said that he wants to get married to a housewife-type girl from the village who should stay at home, keep the house clean and give him home-cooked food. He also said he wants a massage when he gets home from work so that he can “get relaxed”. After the interview was published, he denied that he had ever made those statements, prompting Rediff to clarify that they had a recording of the interview, which they would be happy to share with Tiger to refresh his memory.

Now, in an interview to Mumbai Mirror on the subject of one of his upcoming movies, he was asked about his two female co-stars. He responded by saying “I don’t really care about the padding around me. It’s the script and my character that matter.”. Its pretty indicative of his approach to movies, which seem like they’re meant to be all about him, and to the way he thinks about his female co-stars specifically, and perhaps, women in general. As the Huffington Post points out, it’s important to remember that padding is something extra, unnecessary and superfluous used to bulk up the main attraction.

Of course, while he didn’t specifically refer to female actors, it feels like he couldn’t be referring to much else, since the question was about his two female co-actors, and he hasn’t yet done a movie with a male lead other than him.

It reminds me of something documentary filmmaker and founder of our favourite Agents of Ishq, Paromita Vohra, said in an interview with The Spool about the appeal of Shah Rukh Khan: that he’s a lover, and one of the very few leading Bollywood actors about whom you can say that despite being the “lead” and the name that’s most widely publicised whenever he’s involved in a movie, he has a quality that makes you remember who the female co-star, the “heroine”, is, and this says a lot about his particular brand of sexiness. We’ll leave it to you to decide what that says about the sex appeal of Tiger Shroff.

The post Tiger Shroff Would Clearly Rather Romance Himself than His Female Co-Stars appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Nidhi Kinhal

Still from Youtube

We love that everyone’s taking a dive into the melodies of the past, with the recent conversation about Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhonsle, and the playback singing industry. In June, Tupur Chatterjee wrote about how Lata’s “the sexually unaware infantile (grown) girl and the Hindu wife/Mother Nation” image, and Asha’s “bad girl” voice marginalised female singers with different voices. In a follow-up, Swati Parashar and Prabha Rani offered a feminist reading of their life and career, arguing that Lata and Asha fought for their place in a male-dominated industry.

Now, our favourite Paromita Vohra is smashing all the stereotypes about sexiness, conventional voices, and the “vamp-virgin narrative.” Pleasure is her area of expertise, and “Hindi films songs are a big fat textbook in that syllabus.” In the newest edition of Agents of Ishq‘s regular weekend feature Sexy Saturday Songs, she questions the notion that mischievous voices are the only way old Hindi songs expressed sexual passion. “Can there be a more contained, not always evident sexy? Just because you don’t have a come-hither note in your voice does that mean your voice doesn’t have chashni in its pants? I don’t think so – and I’m sure you don’t either,” she points out.

Through a playlist of wonderful, sensuous Lata Mangeshkar songs, she reminds us that the all these patriarchal assumptions, and the lines between “good” and “bad”, “loving” and “bold”, are all blur and unnecessary. After all, emotions can be sexy, falling in love is sexy, longing is sexy. “And this emotional sexy is something Lata Mangeshkar, I think, sings so very well – among other kinds,” she adds.

The playlist, starting with the philosophical and insightful ‘Sansar Se Bhaage Phirte Ho’, all the way to the unlikely ‘Dilbar Dil Se Pyare’, the widely cherished ‘Lag Jaa Gale’, and ‘Ni Main Yaar Manana Ni’, is definitely a “more grown-up reconsideration of how many ways sexy can exist (answer: infinite).” It’s a perfect Monday evening listen, so plug in your earphones (or not), and enjoy.

The post Lata vs Asha. Feminist Rejoinder vs Feminist Response. Agents of Ishq Jumps into the Fray appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Imtiaz Ali. Photo courtesy Imtiaz Ali Facebook page

In a recent interview to Mid-Day, director Imtiaz Ali was asked how he feels about people saying that all his movies are the same: that they’re about people who go off on a journey and then find themselves. Imtiaz responds by saying, “I’m not scared of sounding similar, but I am scared of not being genuine.”

Oh good, because he genuinely sounds similar to a thatha in his next answer to a question about strong female protagonists.

When asked about the strong female protagonists in his movies, he begins by saying he’s always admired women more than men, and that women are a beautiful, intelligent and fascinating “species”. Ignoring the fact that he thinks women are a species of their own, any assertion that women are fascinating always reminds me of this joke:

guys: women are a mystery.
women: Here is what we-
guys: LITERALLY WHAT DO THEY WANT?
women: well for start-
guys: Guess we’ll never know!

— Sophia Benoit (@1followernodad) December 4, 2015

But I digress.

Immediately after proclaiming his fascination and respect for women, Ali says, “There are times when I’m surprised to see that in most of my films, the female characters are smarter.”

Why ya, Imti? If you have so much respect for women and love them so much, why would it shock you that your own female characters are smart? I feel like if you’ve actually spent any time around women, you wouldn’t find it so surprising that they’re smart, and in fact very often much smarter than the men around them.

Maybe he was talking about how his female protagonists are different from a lot of the vacuous roles women actors are given in comparison to male leads in Bollywood generally, but since he’s talking about his own characters and his own movies, it’s a bit hard to understand where all this surprise is coming from.

The post Hey Imtiaz Ali, If You Respect Women So Much, Why Are You Surprised They’re Smart? appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Prasoon Joshi. Photo courtesy Prasoon Joshi Facebook page

Did you throw a party last night when you heard the news that Pahlaj Nihalani has finally been kicked out of the job he was undertaking so professionally as head of the CBFC?

Let’s not waste any more time talking about that guy, because he’s already gotten way more publicity than he really ever should have, to the extent that he even once audaciously accused Mirror Now of using his name to get themselves publicity when they pursued him for a statement on a frankly inane bet he had made (and lost) with them.

Anyway, the new head of the CBFC (which stands for Central Board of Film Certification, not Censor Board FC as Nihalani tricked us into believing) is now Prasoon Joshi. He’s a poet, lyricist and ad executive, and was closely involved in both LK Advani’s 2009 campaign and the BJP’s 2014 election campaign that restructured focus entirely on Narendra Modi, so much so that he’s been referred to as the “dynamo” behind the 2014 campaign. (Just personally, I find this deeply worrying, because I’ve never liked anyone who’s been described as a “dynamo” before.) It was also around 2014 that he wrote the anthem Saugandh, which was voiced by that other dynamo, Narendra Modi. His most recent link to the BJP is his involvement in the Swachh Bharat campaign.

Photo courtesy Prasoon Joshi via Facebook

More interestingly, after the 2016 Rio Olympics Joshi wrote a poem honouring female athletes like Dipa Karmakar and Sakshi Malik, which many people found very inspiring and that TomatoHeart.com classified as a “tight slap on the face of the male chauvinists”.

Of course, he doesn’t bestow such kind words on everyone. Back in January 2016, when a vaanthi uncle tried to humiliate Sunny Leone in a televised interview on CNN-IBN (and failed spectacularly and got made fun of by the whole country), Joshi said that he does not respect Sunny Leone’s profession, likened her work to drug dealing and said that “if there is a profession which doesn’t play a constructive role in building a great society we need to criticise it as well”. (Leone naturally and truthfully responded to this criticism by saying, “I don’t know who Prasoon Joshi is.”)

On the plus side, despite his proven loyalty to the ruling BJP party, he has made some statements to the press on censorship that hopefully mean he isn’t as scissor-happy as Nihalani famously was. In an interview with Bollywood Hungama, Joshi once said that ‘we need to create a society where there is no requirement of any censorship’. Firstpost reports that at a public panel discussion, Joshi also questioned the government’s right to censor and asked why India needs censorship at all. He also once said he was disappointed with Bollywood songs that demean women, and pointed to his own work (he wrote Maa from Taare Zameen Par) for examples of songs that don’t demean them.

Not sure what to make of him yet, basically. He’s just as closely tied to the BJP as Nihalani was, if not closer, but as one commentator points out, the problem with Nihalani was not his active support for the BJP, but just his general prudery and love for random censorship. While Joshi’s respect for women and their choices seems to fluctuate depending on whether he approves of their careers or not, his statements against censorship when he wasn’t in power do seem like a good sign. And if they don’t turn out to reflect his true beliefs, they will be at least something we can hold him against him if he turns out to be as big a petty tyrant as Nihalani was.

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By Apoorva Sripathi

Image courtesy, VIP 2 Facebook page

The most unsatisfying part of Velai Illa Pattadhaari 2 (VIP 2) is the ending. Usually, in formulaic Tamil films, the hero fights the villain, beats up his gang of rowdies and then delivers a mass but simple message on “unmai dhaan jeikkum” (“truth only wins”) and “dharmam dhaan vellum” (“duty always triumphs”).

If in VIP 1, we saw a struggling Raghuvaran, trying his best to get employed, who then meets his neighbour, falls in love with her, watches TV serials with her mother, sings some gaana songs about life, witnesses his mother’s death and most importantly, fights a privileged male villain who takes over his father’s business, in this movie, we see a married Raghuvaran, who loses his job and who goes head-to-head against, Kajol. She who played the infamously vanquished lover in Gupt, returns to Tamil cinema after two decades. Last time round she played the unforgettable heroine in Minsara Kanavu aka Sapney. This time she is a villain.

Unfortunately, instead of a spectacular climax fight scene, in VIP 2, Dhanush’s character Raghuvaran takes the mansplaining route and admonishes Kajol’s character Vasundhara, about fixing her ‘attitude’ (take note please of his usage of “headweight”, which is a delightfully south Indian term for arrogance) and about how her story of a single-girl-fighting-against-all-odds-to-come-up-on-top isn’t a big deal. Why are you arrogant about it, he asks and advises her to be humble and proud about it. “Aren’t man and woman equal?”, he asks. “Women are supposed to be physically weaker, but they’re mentally stronger,” he faffs, with a glass of wine in hand.

Kajol on set with Dhanush in VIP 2. Photo courtesy, Kajol’s Instagram page

Vasundhara, who so far refused to be undefeated by anything, including almost losing her contract (she uses a minister’s influence to win it back) and the employee rebellion when she takes over Raghuvaran’s company, is brought down by a 2-minute yada yada yada from Dhanush (there may have been words but I only heard yada yada yada).

Instead of slaying him with her eyebrows, she smiles and decides to become friends with Raghuvaran and hops on his bike to get breakfast. In just one short speech, the baddie is vanquished. Now it makes sense, those other reports that mentioned Kajol isn’t necessarily playing a villain, but just “locking horns with Dhanush”. Underlying message: She always had good in her, even though she was an arrogant woman — she just needed a man to tame her and bring that inherent goodness out.

If there is a girl fighting against the all odds story in VIP 2 it’s not the character Vasundhara, it’s the actor Kajol. Even though it may be a needless sequel to VIP 1, and by all means, Raghuvaran’s story, the film belongs to Kajol, despite the poor script and stingily imagined role. The movie opens with a shot of her stilettos seen getting out of a car and when her name is announced at an award function, she makes her presence known with an effortless hair flip. She stylishly removes her reading glasses and hands it over to her assistant. And she wears sunglasses with the greatest swagger since Rajinikanth. Truly, Kajol’s biggest service is to remember all the great bad women of Tamil cinema.

Vasundhara’s also an arrogant, rich, spoilt woman (by Tamil movie standards) who switches to English while making presentations, points her fingers at people (disrespectful by Tamil movie standards) while talking and uses the F-word quite liberally. She has all the makings of a modern Tamil villi (Tamil for female villains). She is merely the latest in a familiar list of head-weighty, English-spouting villis like Ramya Krishnan’s Neelambari in Padaiyappa (1999) who was the quintessential 90s villi.

Like Neelambari, who is “angry, rich, ‘modern’ (typically meaning westernised), impulsive, single/separated, hen-pecking, having an unreasonable hatred for a man or men in general,” as Ranjani Krishnakumar writes in her essay on female villains, Vasundhara too is angry (there are a couple of outbursts), rich, modern, decadent (she calls for a glass of champagne to celebrate when Raghuvaran loses his job) and importantly, single. Unlike Neelambari, who wore lovely saris and adorned jasmine flowers in her hair, Vasundhara is sleek when it comes to her outfits (think tailored suits and high-waisted pants) and calculating when it comes to her moves.

But in the end, Vasundhara too gets ‘tamed’ by the man, with so little satisfaction.

Where Neelambari chose to take her own life, leaving with a parting message that she’d “attain” (meaning marry him) the hero Rajinikanth in her next birth, Vasundhara is given just a talking down — there’s no showdown, there’s no matching of wits or power. She’s taught to eat humble pie by the humblest man of all. (But perhaps should we count as progress that the trajectory unconventional female character in Tamil cinema doesn’t end in her death? I don’t know.)

Vasundhara’s character also resembles Shanti Devi of Mannan (a 90s Rajinikanth film where the arrogant antagonist-heroine is taught a lesson by her hero-husband) in some ways. They’re both businesswomen who run successful companies; they’re ambitious and ruthless. Vasundhara doesn’t hesitate to do anything to take someone down. She snatches projects out of Raghuvaran’s hands, uses her political connections to play dirty, runs down the company he works for and even buys his shares in the company he starts. It’s expected of a male villain — professional rivalry, especially those of self-made men is never an alarming reflection on their gender. Rather, it’s intrinsic; men are ambitious, we’re informed over and over again thanks to Tamil cinema.

A still from the movie.

In VIP 2, it’s raw ambition that drives Kajol’s character — she keeps talking about how she was orphaned as a 13-year-old girl and had to claw her way out of her situation with her extended family to retain her money and emerge victorious. She keeps insisting that this made her the woman she is today. Naturally, when she comes across a boy half her age, who tries to advise her on how to be a person in the world (the moment moment Raghuvaran picks to give her this first lecture is when his company is awarded a construction contract because he came across as humble, honest and down-to-earth, while Vasundhara is haughty), she dismisses him and later, does all that she can to make him her employee to humiliate him.

A still from the movie

Most women who play the villains or cross paths with the heroes and then become villains in Tamil cinema do so because of romantic mishaps. Either the hero spurned them because they weren’t feminine enough, like Eswari (Shriya Reddy) in Thimiru, who was boisterous and ran around with a gang of rowdies trying to intimidate her love interest Vishal into marrying her. Or because the hero preferred a simple, shy-type homely girl: In Padaiyappa, Rajinikanth invokes the three gunas in Sanskrit (or primal forces that drive our characteristics) to explain why he prefers sattvic Soundarya (patient, kind and nurturing) to the rajasic Ramya Krishnan (angry, arrogant and lustful).

There’s no romance situation here with Vasundhara the villain, but in case you felt like you are missing out on that quota, she is not the only woman in the movie who is shown her place. There are three other women in the movie, all of whom get similar treatment. Amala Paul, who is Dhanush’s girlfriend-turned-wife Shalini, is a nagging homemaker, who quits her job as a dentist and does everything around the house. His mother (who died in the earlier movie) is a kindly apparition in the sequel and offers Raghuvaran support when he’s down. His boss’ daughter Anitha is another mother to him (not for nothing did she receive his mother’s lungs in a transplant in the first movie) and checks up on him when he quits his job.

But at the end of the day, they all need help from a man. Whether it’s Anitha who needs to be saved from rowdies who roughed her up or Shalini who must be dropped off to work by her husband. Similarly for Vasundhara, who’s put in her place, but minus the trademark showdown.

Which brings me to what I needed from this movie. Just gimme a warehouse full of boxes and a smash-everything-kill-everybody final fight scene any day — it’s so much better than having a man who complains about doing housework, complains about his wife’s “nagging” and lectures about equality, emerging as the victor.

Kajol should have got blood, not breakfast.

Co-published with Firstpost.

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By Sharanya Gopinathan

Mudit (right) suffers from (temporary) erectile dysfunction, which he and Suggu (left) discover during an ill-fated pre-marital tryst. Photo courtesy YouTube

My favourite scene in Shubh Mangal Saavdhan is one where (I feel) Bhumi Pedneker scolds all men on behalf of all women as she yells at Ayushmann Khurrana for falling into a trap of his own making. In a grand show of his love for Suggu (Bhumi Pedneker), Mudit (Ayushmann Khurrana) takes a death-defying leap from one cable car in Rishikesh to the other, where Suggu sits, and misses. He ends up hanging on the cable car from a window on the side, and begs Suggu to give him a hand. She refuses, basically telling him it’s his own stupid fault he’s hanging there and no one ever asked him to jump from a cablecar.

It’s a wonderful moment that neatly reflects the frustration and absurdity women feel at the plight of men around them trying to deal with the consequences of toxic masculinity, or struggling to deal with the patriarchy’s negative effects on their own lives.

Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, a remake of the Tamil movie Kalyana Samayal Saadham, is the story of the marriage between Sugandha and currently-impotent Mudit. Shy, bumbling-but-also-not Mudit suffers from (temporary) erectile dysfunction, which he and Suggu discover during an ill-fated pre-marital tryst, and the rest of the movie revolves around negotiating parents, in-laws, publics, veterinarians (yes) and their own relationship woes to get married despite it.

Image via Facebook page

It’s a surprising topic, and definitely one a lot of people don’t talk about. In that way, Shubh Mangal Saavdhan falls squarely into a trend we seem to be smack in the middle of, which is of Bollywood movies deliberately speaking about typically “taboo” subjects, like Phullu, the story of a man who saves the women of his village by inventing sanitary pads, Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, which is Akshay Kumar’s ode to Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat campaign, and the upcoming Padman, where Akshay Kumar will save the women of the country by, you guessed it, inventing a pad-making machine.

That’s pretty much where the similarity ends though. Toilet, which also featured Bhumi Pedneker, has been described as a “long Swachh Bharat ad with songs”, and it repeatedly whacks you in the face with a message that honestly seems to be the government’s marketing strategy these days: Real men build their women toilets. Phullu valiantly cuts his own hand for blood to test the pads he’s making (seems a bit excessive, no?) and fights all odds (including the women around him) to save women. Padman, which tells the story of Tamil Nadu-based Arunachalam Muruganantham, who found a way to provide low-cost pads to women, hasn’t been released yet, but it’s to be headlined by Akshay Kumar, so you can be sure that whatever day it is, Kumar will surely be the one to save it.

Shubh Mangal Saavdhan isn’t in the business of building male heroes, preaching or politics. There’s no moral or message, it isn’t issued in public interest and you won’t learn anything about the reality or biology of erectile dysfunction if you watch it. It’s just a fun movie about the difficulties and hilarities that could possibly come out of a situation involving a couple, erectile dysfunction, a family and a wedding.

Part of the movie’s appeal is also in its unexpected moments of irreverence and wry humour. Photo courtesy YouTube

Part of the movie’s appeal is also in its unexpected moments of irreverence and wry humour. After Toilet, you feel pleasantly surprised seeing Bhumi in a movie that pokes fun at the plan of “digital India”. There’s also a subtle, hilarious and kind of meta scene where the family is in a theatre, watching a commercial that Bhumi’s mother stars in: It’s for a GPS tracker that spies on your “bahu-beti” for their own safety. It somehow feels like Shubh Mangal Saavdhan is littered with these little Easter eggs of feminist jokes for women to laugh at privately in their heads if they get it.

For me, the experience of watching the movie first thing this morning was also uniquely fun. As entertaining as this movie is, it doesn’t have the star power or the kind of subject matter that fills up first day first shows, so the theatre I watched it in was mostly empty, except for a handful of other women in twos and threes, and a school kid couple who came to make out. So it felt fine to laugh a little extra-loud, exclaim at the fun bits and look around appreciatively during the jokes, because we were the only people in central Bangalore who had chosen to spend a weekday morning watching a movie about erectile dysfunction. Surprisingly but also not surprisingly, the boy half of the school kid couple was the only male in the theatre I watched it in.

In this movie, erectile dysfunction is just a part of a larger, refreshing picture. Image courtesy, Shubh Mangal Saavdhan Facebook page

Back when Kalyana Samayal Saadham, the Tamil original was released, the hero was praised for agreeing to this kind of a role in a time when “heroism was synonymous with machismo”. In that case, perhaps Ayushmann Khurrana too deserves praise in 2017 for taking on a role that flies in the face of all the machismo and saviour-complexes we continue to demand from our heroes. Ayushmann’s heroism doesn’t lie in his ability to beat up bad guys (which he does in fact do once in the movie), nor does he even come close to saving anyone (in fact, it’s Bhumi who saves him). He loves Bhumi: not in a nasty way that invokes mothers or goddesses, just in a real, young, human way. He credits her for his confidence and his remaining security in his masculinity, and in fact says that it’s Bhumi who’s turning him into a man (if this sounds like a weird thing to say, just trust me, it works in the movie). His real victories aren’t the ones he wins when he beats lechers on the street, but the more difficult ones, with confidence, and family.

Mudit’s masculinity is constructed in the movie by showing you where masculinity doesn’t lie. Photo courtesy Shubh Mangal Saavdhan Facebook page

Mudit’s masculinity is constructed in the movie by showing you where masculinity doesn’t lie: In getting an erection, being sexually aggressive or brash or violent. In the course of the story, you’re shown that there’s nothing masculine or desirable about being the kind of person who makes decisions for your girlfriend, or who doesn’t know how to take no for an answer. If anything, this movie tells you that masculinity isn’t about being able to get it up, but it is about anything else you want it to be, and anything that you are. It doesn’t teach you that real men build toilets, it doesn’t teach you anything at all. And that’s a good thing.

In fact, despite being touted as such, this movie isn’t even really about erectile dysfunction after all, although that is something that happens in it. It’s mostly just about figuring your way through love and family in an embarrassing situation, so much so that we don’t even get to finally hear how they get over the whole erectile-dysfunction problem. It was supposed to be enough for us to know that they do, and in fact, it is.

Co-published with Firstpost

The post Shubh Mangal Saavdhan: How Ayushmann Khurrana Will Save Us All from Akshay Kumar appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Salman Khan. Photo courtesy celebsyard.com

Researchers from IIT, IBM and DU have just released the results of their really comprehensive study on gender stereotyping in Bollywood movies. It looked at 880 movie trailers and the scripts of 13 movies released between 2008 and 2017, and interestingly, the Wikipedia entries of 4000 Hindi movies released between 1970-2017, analysing their plots, movie titles, soundtrack and cast information and images.

One part of the paper looks at the adjectives most commonly used to describe men and women. Men were commonly described as wealthy, strong, successful, simple, strict, famous, drunk, corrupt and respected. Women characters on the other hand, were most widely described as pretty, rich, poor, sexy, pregnant, widowed, adopted, ailing, arrogant, conservative and insane (!).

It looked at how men and women were introduced into the plot: men with descriptions of their personality and profession (“honest policeman”), while women were described by their physical appearance and relationship to another character (“hero’s beautiful younger sister”).

Confirming what all the leading female playback singers told Anupama Chopra when they sat down to speak with her about discrimination in the industry on a controversial episode of Film Companion, this study shows the huge gender disparity in the number of male and female singer on Bollywood soundtracks.

On that Film Companion episode, the singers talked about how there are no songs for female singers, and even the songs they do get to sing are often just so-called “duets”, where female singers have to sing about four high lines. This study warned about this factor too, and clarified that their findings only reveal whether a woman has appeared on the soundtrack or not: it doesn’t measure how much time or how many lines she sang on the track. So these numbers actually paint an optimistic picture of what the disparity really looks like.

They also analysed how much men and women get to speak in different movies, and the findings reveal some funny things. Everyone who hated Pink for handing the national baton of women’s rights to Amitabh Bachchan (and also for all the publicity stunts arranged around it, like Amitabh Bachchan’s conveniently timed letter to his granddaughters about skirts) will feel vindicated by the findings: the lead cast dialogue analysis of the film shows that 3/4th of the dialogue was spoken by a man. And Apurva Asrani’s Aligarh seems to have no dialogues by women at all!

The report uncovers a whole bunch of other fascinating findings, including a “knowledge graph” for male and female characters, the centrality of men and women to the plot, the distribution of emotions (women are always happy, men are always angry) and a lot more. You can see the full study here.

The post Men are Always Angry and Women Always Happy. What We Learnt From a New Study on Sexism in Bollywood Movies appeared first on The Ladies Finger.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Photo courtesy Nawazuddin Siddiqui Facebook page

Nawazuddin Siddiqui may have set a new record! A mere fifteen days after its release, he’s hastily withdrawn his memoir An Ordinary Life, co-authored by Rituparna Chatterjee, after two women he wrote about spoke out indignantly about his portrayal of their relationship with him.

An Ordinary Life cover

He named his Miss Lovely co-star Niharika Singh, and detailed the story of going to her house to eat mutton (in thanks for the admittedly terrible mutton dinner he cooked for her once) and finding her ready to seduce him. Niharika Singh, for her part, said about the account, “Nawaz and I had a brief relationship in 2009 during the making of Miss Lovely that lasted less than a few months. So today, when he paints me as a woman in fur enticing him into her bedroom with candles, or desperately calling him and emailing other women on his behalf, I can only laugh.”

A Delhi-based lawyer named Gautam Gulati, who admits he has never met Niharika Singh, doesn’t know her and has nothing to do with her, has taken it upon himself to lodge a complaint with the National Commission for Women, requesting a direction to register an FIR under sections 376 (rape), 497 (adultery) and 509 (insulting the modesty of a woman) of the IPC, which at this point seems highly excessive.

Another actress Siddiqui wrote about, Sunita Rajwar, also called Siddiqui out on the accuracy of his portrayal of their relationship. About his break up with Rajwar, Siddiqui wrote, “maybe she wanted to date someone successful, not a struggling, desperate actor who was out of work”, and also that she once painted hearts on the walls of his room. Rajwar rubbished both claims, and says that Siddiqui was always a sympathy-seeker and that’s why he made it seem like she broke up with him because he was poor. She said the real reason she broke up with him is that she found out he had been sharing details of their relationship with other people, which is really seeming on-brand for Siddiqui right now.

In the midst of the short-lived controversy, Siddiqui announced his withdrawal of the book with this tweet:

I m apologising 2 every1 who’s sentiments r hurt bcz of d chaos around my memoir #AnOrdinaryLife
I hereby regret & decide 2 withdraw my book

— Nawazuddin Siddiqui (@Nawazuddin_S) October 30, 2017

The post Candlelit Seductions, Hearts on the Wall and Other Things Nawazuddin Siddiqui Made Up in His Withdrawn Memoir appeared first on The Ladies Finger.