The ‘anti-Bollywood’ movies combating sexist stereotypes

Sister Midnight, Santosh and All We Think about as Mild are a part of a brand new wave of female-centred Indian movies difficult the roles of conventional Bollywood heroines.

They’re unpredictable, generally humorous, generally sexually adventurous, they usually’re all main characters, moderately than orbiting a person. The heroines of movies together with Sister Midnight, Santosh, Ladies Will Be Ladies, All We Think about as Mild and Shadowbox are giving worldwide audiences an opportunity to see feminine characters from India who differ from most conventional Bollywood heroines. However do Indian audiences wish to watch them – or will they even have the ability to?

A feral bride in an organized marriage that neither she nor the groom significantly need, Uma is the protagonist of Karan Kandhari’s spiky comedy Sister Midnight, which premiered on the 2024 Cannes Movie Competition and was nominated for a Bafta. Effectively-known Bollywood actress Radhika Apte, who performs her, is proven battling family chores. “Males are dim,” her neighbour tells her. “They’re going to eat something. Simply add chilli and salt.” Uma informs her awkward groom, who has gone on a week-long ingesting binge, that he “stinks” and tells her employers sarcastically after they supply her a cleansing job that she’s “a home goddess”. 

Advised by way of offbeat dialogue, bodily comedy and a punkish soundtrack that features Iggy Pop, Sister Midnight presents a heroine not like anything filmed in India, in line with Apte. “I would by no means learn something prefer it earlier than and I could not put it down,” she tells the BBC. “I used to be utterly taken by Uma, she was this loopy creature, and I did not know why I resonated along with her, however I simply did. It was going to be a really skinny line enjoying her between it being actually cool and it going improper. And that excited and challenged me. I additionally like how unapologetic Uma is and the extra she accepts herself, the freer and stronger she turns into.”  

Uma is the newest character that provides a special type of feminine protagonist to Indian viewers, one who differs markedly from the standard Bollywood heroine. “Bollywood”, the identify for Hindi-language studio cinema, has traditionally dominated the Indian field workplace, making round $1.36bn final 12 months. But it surely’s additionally been accused of being “sexist and regressive” in its perspective in the direction of girls. In 2023, a landmark examine in India examined a few of the nation’s largest hits by way of gender illustration and sexual stereotyping, and located what they described as a “system” to lots of Bollywood’s feminine characters. 

“The feminine lead needs to be skinny and exquisite. She needs to be coy and demure who expresses consent by way of gestures moderately than phrases, however [she] wears sexually revealing clothes and needs to be considerably fashionable to permit for her to be in a pre-marital relationship which is a transgression,” Professor Lakshmi Lingam, the mission lead for the examine, instructed the BBC on the time. “There’s little or no try and do one thing totally different.”

The depiction of each female and male characters on display screen is necessary, she added, as a result of “in India, the place households and colleges not often educate about intercourse schooling and consent, all our responses are influenced by books and cinema”.

Against this, the male stars of the largest Bollywood movies of 2023 have been described as “led by alpha male protagonists with rippling muscle tissues and blazing weapons brandished on display screen as they went on a bone-crunching rampage to conquer their enemies”. The hit movies included Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan and Jawan, wherein he performs a spy and vigilante, in addition to the much-criticised, hyper-violent Animal, starring Ranbir Kapoor, a movie accused of misogyny and objectifying girls. It was made by Sandeep Reddy Vanga, whose earlier movie Kabir Singh confirmed the male lead brazenly stalking and harassing a lady and was the second largest Bollywood film of 2019. 

There have been hit movies displaying girls in roles of authority, together with feminine rocket scientists in Mission Mangal, additionally one of the vital profitable Bollywood movies of 2019, and movies praised for a contemporary perspective on gender roles, resembling Karan Johar’s Rocky aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (Rocky and Rani’s Love Story). However nonetheless Shubhra Gupta, the movie critic for each day newspaper The Indian Categorical, laments the dearth of “wriggle room” India’s main women usually have of their roles.

“These heroines’ overriding precept is demureness,” she tells the BBC. “You may have flashes of spirit, or you could communicate your thoughts, however you’d even be excellent by way of magnificence, and you would be very clearly subservient to the main man and no matter he’s doing. You’re just about all the time mentioning the rear, with just a few scenes wherein you get to shine.”

In Sandhya Suri’s latest drama Santosh, nonetheless, a Dalit girl (from the bottom caste in Indian society) is as a police officer, with the authority that brings. Santosh inherits her husband’s police officer job when he dies in service, one thing that is doable on compassionate grounds for presidency workers in India. Santosh, performed by Shahana Goswami, is an enigmatic character who finds corruption in her native police drive when a younger lady is raped and murdered. She has a feminine boss, performed by movie and TV actress Sunita Rajwar, who has realized to compromise to remain on the prime.

Suri, beforehand a documentary maker, says she was influenced in making it by the real-life gang rape and homicide in 2012 of a younger girl on a bus in Delhi, which made worldwide headlines and led to new legal guidelines to safeguard girls. (Regardless of that, sexual violence in opposition to girls and ladies stays excessive in India, and a 2022 report discovered that cruelty by a husband or his family remained the largest crime in opposition to Indian girls.)

“There have been large protests on the time [of the rape and murder], and I noticed the photograph of a feminine cop being confronted by some very offended feminine protestors. I noticed that picture and I noticed the expression on the cop’s face, and it was so enigmatic that I used to be simply very, very taken by it. It was so attention-grabbing. She was at each ends of energy. There was the opportunity of violence in opposition to her, however [it was] additionally doable for her to mete out violence as nicely with that uniform,” Suri tells the BBC.

“I wished to know in case you took any person like Santosh, shut up within the kitchen of her home, and you place her in that place, what’s her response to that?” she explains. “I wished to ask if there was a approach to be a lady that is not about being a person, and never about being oppressed. Is there another approach in her society wherein she could be, and that there could also be a line she steps over?”

Santosh, which was made in Hindi, was the UK’s Oscar entry for finest worldwide movie in 2025 – one attribute each Sister Midnight and Santosh share is that, although they have been filmed in India, they’re made by British Indian film-makers. Sister Midnight’s makers hope to launch it in India in 2025, however Suri tells the BBC that Santosh will nearly definitely not get a cinema launch there.

“We screened it on the Mumbai Worldwide Movie Competition and had an important response, and I used to be moved by simply how actual the movie felt to an area viewers,” she says. “But it surely seems to be just like the movie will not launch in India, sadly, because it was admitted to the censor board (CBFC) and there have been so many cuts, I could not preserve some semblance of a movie.”

Indian censorship choices have continuously brought about controversy: in 2017, the choice to ban the feminist Indian film Lipstick Beneath My Burkha for being “too woman oriented” brought about an outcry, and was later overturned after unfavorable publicity. However many homegrown blockbusters are self-censoring, particularly relating to intercourse and sexuality. 

The 2021 Telugu-language hit Pushpa: The Rise, the story of a smuggler, eliminated a scene the place the hero Pushpa (performed by Allu Arjun) touches the chest of the heroine, Srivalli, due to complaints from the viewers. In 2024, Pushpa 2: The Rule once more brought about controversy in India, in line with Shubhra Gupta, due to an insinuation that Srivalli (performed by Rashmika Mandanna) would possibly wish to be sexually intimate along with her husband.

“The [female] character acts very cute, she comes on to the hero and may be very playful when she needs a bit of assignation,” Gupta says of it. “The remainder of the movie she’s serving the hero. She needs her husband to not have intercourse with anybody else. However in actual fact, it turned an actual speaking level in India as a result of it is not one thing heroes or main women within the motion pictures are presupposed to have conversations about.

“And our mainstream movie expertise continues to be very a lot that if a lady has a sexual expertise outdoors marriage, there can be some castigation connected to it,” she provides. “She will not be ‘pure’ anymore, she’ll be often known as ‘daring’ which implies she’s been round.” 

It makes Payal Kapadia’s acclaimed movie All We Think about as Mild appear extra audacious by way of its exploration of intercourse. The primary ever Indian winner of the Cannes Movie Competition’s Grand Prix is the story of a nurse, Prabha, who’s been deserted in her organized marriage. In the meantime, her youthful flatmate Anu, a Hindu, needs to get intimate along with her Muslim boyfriend, itself one other taboo. There is no speak of marriage prematurely.

“The movie’s in regards to the preoccupations I’ve had for a while,” Kapadia tells the BBC. “Ladies in India could be financially impartial, however there may be nonetheless not loads of autonomy with what you select to do together with your private life. It is infantilising girls. You can be 25 years previous, making your personal cash, offering for your loved ones again residence. However you may’t determine who to be with or who to marry.”

Regardless of the accolades, All We Think about as Mild was not chosen as India’s 2025 Oscar entry (the deciding jury referred to as it “a European movie happening in India”.) But it surely wasn’t the one movie by an Indian feminine director in 2024 that put a younger girl’s sexual awakening on display screen – the English and Hindi language film Ladies Will Be Ladies, by Shuchi Talati, received the viewers award on the Sundance Movie Competition. Set in a boarding college within the Himalayas, it is the story of an 18-year-old lady who falls in love with a boy for the primary time, however whose romance is disrupted by her mom.

However Indian movies breaking societal “norms” have discovered worldwide recognition earlier than, from Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding ceremony (2001), to Lipstick Beneath My Burkha (2016), and 2014’s LGBTQ+ teenage love story, Margarita with a Straw. Shubhra Gupta says there’s nonetheless an enormous hole between what a global viewers react to and what mainstream Indian audiences can pay to see, given the excessive ticket costs in cinemas.

“These movies we’re speaking about are a part of impartial Indian movie, which is basically the place all of the thrilling issues occur, and that is just about true of all world cinema,” she says. “Payal Kapadia has had a superb journey with All We Think about as Mild, and it did get a cinema launch right here. However I am undecided how a lot field workplace it made in India.” She provides that many viewers in India would react in “disbelief” to heroines resembling Sister Midnight’s Uma and Santosh have been they in a position to watch the films, as they’re so unconventional.

“They would not have the ability to droop disbelief that in Santosh, a Dalit girl from the decrease caste, could be made into the lead, that she’s driving the narrative. It could be such a tough promote right here,” she says. “And Radhika Apte’s character Uma is a spouse, however she shouldn’t be submissive. She goes on the market and does all these mad issues. They’re glorious movies which may do nicely on a streaming platform, or they are going to discover a discerning viewers – however a discerning viewers would not actually make up the numbers {that a} large funds Bollywood movie will.” 

However Indian film-makers nonetheless should attempt to break stereotypes for audiences, in line with Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi, the administrators behind Bengali-language movie Shadowbox. The movie, proven at this 12 months’s Berlin Worldwide Movie Competition, is the story of Maya, (performed by Tillotama Shome) who holds down a number of jobs and battles to maintain her household going as a result of her husband, a former soldier, struggles together with his psychological well being and is continuously humiliated by the neighborhood due to it.

“Once we’re speaking about working class underprivileged girls, the time period ‘from the margins’ tends to crop up,” Das tells the BBC. “However the ‘margin’ represents an enormous majority of our inhabitants. The place are their tales, then? It is excessive time we broke stereotypes, and to do that extra girls want to inform their very own tales. I really feel producers and distributors of movie underestimate how massive a viewership girls characterize, and their urge for food to see tales the place their lives are mirrored moderately than projected in a tokenistic approach.”

If cinema itself shouldn’t be an possibility, the rise of the worldwide streamers and OTT platforms (which permit viewers to observe content material immediately on their TV or by way of a telephone app) in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic has supplied a spot for latest, extra audacious, female-focused film-making. The Nice Indian Kitchen in 2021 by Jeo Child, a Malayalam language movie, turned successful on the app Neestream, and variations of the story have been additionally made in Tamil and Hindi. It is the story of an organized marriage, and the movie reveals, from a feminine viewpoint, family drudgery, disagreeable in-laws and monotonous and painful intercourse with an uncaring husband, with one feminine critic saying of it that “the movie rips by way of patriarchy, the bedrock of the establishments of household and faith.”

Laapataa Women, by Kiran Rao (which did develop into India’s Oscar entry this 12 months) additionally offers with an undesirable organized marriage and was launched on Netflix, as was 2020’s Gunjan Saxena, which instructed the story of India’s first ever feminine fighter pilot.

“However individuals are not truly shopping for a ticket for these,” Gupta says. “It is largely 15-to 35-year-olds who’re going to the films, and typically they occur to be younger males. And the movie trade continues to be a boy’s membership to a big extent.” 

For extra nuanced feminine characters to be seen in big-budget cinema movies, in the end Bollywood’s lack of earnings final 12 months is perhaps an impetus. After its bumper 2023, final 12 months Bollywood solely achieved 40% of the general Indian field workplace earnings, and Gupta says its “formulaic movies” are a part of the issue. “Individuals are hungry for one thing totally different,” she says. “However the issue is, in case you take them too far out of their consolation zone, I am undecided whether or not they’ll come to the cinema. So sadly, we have ended up sustaining this equilibrium so that individuals will come to the films not anticipating to see girls who’re feminists, or girls who don’t ascribe to the concept of what girl must be.”

Nevertheless, she provides, it is not simply feminine characters who should be written in a different way to ensure that change to come back. “I’d say that if you’d like your girls characters to be totally different, you even have to jot down your males in a different way too,” says Gupta. “There must be a cosmic shift throughout the board.”

Santosh and Sister Midnight are at present on launch within the UK. Sister Midnight can be launched within the US on 16 Could 2025.