Bollywood For Beginners: Part 4

Note: This series was originally posted to my Bollywood blogspot blog and represents the cumulation of the wisdom of a decade or so spent in the Bollywood trenches. It would have last been edited in about 2014.

Bollywood for Beginners 4

Bollywood Character Archetypes: The Heroine

Popular Indian cinema is built around the hero but this doesn't mean that his female counterpart is doomed to a career of smiling and looking pretty. The best heroines go toe-to-toe with the heroes and can steal entire films right out from under their noses. The role of the heroine has undergone dramatic changes over the years as India--and the South Asian diaspora, who also make up a huge part of the Bollywood audience--have struggled with the role of women in the family and in society. Is wearing a mini-skirt an act of freedom? Or is it a straight-jacket? Is spurning an arranged marriage an act of courage? An act of callous indifference to the family? These are the kinds of questions facing the heroines of Bollywood today. As in life, there are no easy answers

Every Bollywood film must have a heroine; she doesn't need to be on screen very long but she must be there as a feminine counterpart to the hero.  While there are certainly plenty of films where the heroine is the main protagonist, generally a heroine has just one job: to let the hero--and by proxy, the audience--love her. For both heroes and heroines, the skill set needed to be a popular entertainer doesn’t necessarily overlap with that of a good actor. On top of their shared skill set encompassing melodrama, lip syncing, and dancing, a heroine needs to be pretty and have a certain girlish charm. Each heroine has her own character: wide-eyed and naive, earnest and stout-hearted, vapid and empty. The same role in the hands of two different heroines would be perceived completely differently. A heroine can be strong and capable. She can be somebody girls can look up to, playing a doctor, computer engineer, teacher, or police woman, and she can also be a spoiled rotten society girl or meek village maiden. But even in her worst avatars, the heroine is an important symbol. Just having a female presence on screen opposite the hero, no matter how small the role, reminds us that women exist. By that measure, there are Hollywood films that do worse in terms of female roles than even the most macho Bollywood potboilers.

New heroines are launched just like heroes but, except in very rare circumstances, a new heroine launch doesn’t have nearly the same fanfare as a new hero launch because they don’t have the same potential earning power. The sad fact is that a heroine’s lifespan is very short. A popular hero can stretch his career well into his 40s and even into his early 50s before switching over to character roles but a heroine is past her prime at 30. It’s an unfair double standard that comes partly from ageism and partly from a hunger on the part of producers, heroes, and audiences to continually have fresh pairings on screen. But this doesn't mean that there are no roles for women over 30 in Bollywood, they just aren’t the typical heroine roles. Actresses who remain in Bollywood past their heroine days find themselves playing the time-honored roles of saintly mother and her evil counterparts, as well as the sexually desirable vamp and her close sister the item girl, who is almost always an older woman. 

To give a recent example of how the age game works in Bollywood, the film Dabangg (2010) had a mid-40s hero (Salman Khan) and launched a new 23-year old heroine (Sonakshi Sinha). The hero’s mother was played by Dimple Kapadia (early 50s) who not ten years previously was playing the sexy older love interest to mid-30s heroes. Malaika Arora Khan, the item girl who drove all the men crazy with lust, was in her late 30s. The heroine may have only been 23 but women of a range of ages could be seen on screen. But because the lifespan of a heroine is so much shorter than that of a hero, heroines don’t loom nearly as large in the popular imagination as heroes do. There are exceptions like the legendary tragedy queen Meena Kumari, who played the leading lady up and until her death from cirrhosis of the liver at age 39. The silver lining of this for actresses is that a pretty but mildly talented girl can spin a short career out of a single hit film and then marry a wealthy businessman. Mildly talented heroes are kicked to the curb.

One issue that comes up in articles on Bollywood written from a Western perspective is the heroine’s sexuality or lack thereof. In recent years, for a variety of reasons including the global influence of MTV-style videos, there has been a push for heroines to use the type of imagery associated with “sexy” women in the West and for them to engage in so-called bold scenes, meaning showing skin, kissing, and possibly simulating sex. It has been framed this way in many corners of the media but Indian culture is not less “advanced” than the West and  Bollywood films are not less “adult” for not showing the same amount of sex on screen. Even in the old days, Bollywood showed sexy women on screen, although usually not the heroine, but the difference between the two film cultures is that Bollywood films take place in the public sphere and sex--like other bodily functions--is a matter for the private sphere. Audiences are generally well enough versed in filmi idiom that they can read between the lines and know when a song sequence implies that the characters have been intimate, even if both characters remain fully clothed. 

A few actresses have embraced this Westernized “sexy” avatar but many others remain extremely uncomfortable with being asked to do these things, yet if they refuse they are painted as regressive. Like many things, the “sexy” debate is more than it appears on the surface and often feels like it’s about the willingness of any particular actress to endure a Hollywood-style diet and exercise regime to gain a “bikini body.” This representation of Western “sexy” goes hand in hand with issues of class and nationalism and there has been strong pushback against displays that seem to be threatening traditional values. And while it may seem silly to Western eyes, an actress declaring that she won’t kiss on screen or wear a bikini sends a powerful message to her fanbase--not that she is virginal, since that same actress may also do some very sexy dance numbers--but that she is one of them, an ordinary Indian woman. 

This is the catch-22 for heroines today: they’re painted as Westernized hussies if they strip down and jingoistic prudes if they don’t. But even if an actress wears a bikini on screen, her public image must still be immaculate because the profession of acting has traditionally had (and still has) a seedy undertone. Actresses and dancers are occasionally arrested for prostitution and scandals involving producers running casting couch auditions, where aspiring actors and actresses are asked for sex in exchange for a role, are a dime a dozen. Because of this image, and probably very detailed behind-the-scenes knowledge, until very recently the daughters of stars were not encouraged to enter the film industry. 

Coming from outside the Indian culture it’s important to keep an open mind about women’s roles in Bollywood and try to think outside Western constructs of how society should work. If we can’t do this, we miss out on messages that can be quite powerful. An example from the 2012 film Rowdy Rathore involves rape. There is an old regressive masala film trope (quite prevalent in the 1980s) where a raped woman, usually the hero’s sister, will kill herself to preserve the family’s honor. This generally resulted in the hero taking revenge on a bunch of bad guys in an admittedly very satisfying way. Now, in Rowdy Rathore, there is a woman who is raped but she is the one who gets her revenge on the rapist and her husband embraces her back into the family. This message may mean nothing to a male film critic in Los Angeles but that doesn’t mean it should be dismissed so easily as regressive.

Another good example is the arranged marriage. Because marriage in Western media has come to represent romantic love rather than familial duty, it’s easy to be indignant when a happy ending has a heroine giving up her romantic suitor in order to have an arranged marriage with a man she doesn’t know but it’s all a matter of cultural perspective. Just because a heroine acts differently from the lead actress in a Hollywood romantic comedy doesn’t mean that she is trapped in a regressive role and unhappy.