The ‘anti-Bollywood’ films fighting 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, typically humorous, typically sexually adventurous, and so they’re all main characters, relatively 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 be capable of?

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 Film Festival and was nominated for a Bafta. Nicely-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 consuming binge, that he “stinks” and tells her employers sarcastically once they provide her a cleansing job that she’s “a home goddess”. 

Advised by means of offbeat dialogue, bodily comedy and a punkish soundtrack that features Iggy Pop, Sister Midnight presents a heroine in contrast to the rest filmed in India, based on 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 fully taken by Uma, she was this loopy creature, and I did not know why I resonated together with her, however I simply did. It was going to be a really skinny line taking part in 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 most recent character that gives a special type of feminine protagonist to Indian viewers, one who differs markedly from the normal Bollywood heroine. “Bollywood”, the title for Hindi-language studio cinema, has traditionally dominated the Indian box office, making round $1.36bn last year. Nevertheless it’s additionally been accused of being “sexist and regressive” in its angle in the direction of girls. In 2023, a landmark study in India examined a number of the nation’s greatest hits when it comes to gender illustration and sexual stereotyping, and located what they described as a “formulation” to a lot 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 means of gestures relatively 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 venture lead for the examine, told 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 essential, she added, as a result of “in India, the place households and colleges hardly ever educate about intercourse schooling and consent, all our responses are influenced by books and cinema”.

Against this, the male stars of the biggest Bollywood films of 2023 were described as “led by alpha male protagonists with rippling muscle groups 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, by which 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 women. It was made by Sandeep Reddy Vanga, whose earlier movie Kabir Singh confirmed the male lead openly stalking and harassing a woman and was the second greatest Bollywood film of 2019. 

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

“These heroines’ overriding precept is demureness,” she tells the BBC. “You possibly can have flashes of spirit, or chances are you’ll communicate your thoughts, however you’d even be good when it comes to 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 citing the rear, with a number of scenes by which you get to shine.”

In Sandhya Suri’s current drama Santosh, nevertheless, 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 staff in India. Santosh, performed by Shahana Goswami, is an enigmatic character who finds corruption in her native police pressure when a younger lady is raped and murdered. She has a feminine boss, performed by movie and TV actress Sunita Rajwar, who has discovered to compromise to remain on the high.

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

“There have been huge protests on the time [of the rape and murder], and I noticed the picture 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 potential for violence towards 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 should you took someone 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 option to be a girl that is not about being a person, and never about being oppressed. Is there another method in her society by which 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 greatest 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 Pageant and had a terrific response, and I used to be moved by simply how actual the movie felt to a neighborhood viewers,” she says. “Nevertheless it appears to be like 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 keep some semblance of a movie.”

Indian censorship selections have ceaselessly brought about controversy: in 2017, the decision to ban the feminist Indian film Lipstick Below My Burkha for being “too girl oriented” brought about an outcry, and was later overturned after adverse publicity. However many homegrown blockbusters are self-censoring, particularly on the subject of intercourse and sexuality. 

The 2021 Telugu-language hit Pushpa: The Rise, the story of a smuggler, removed 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, based on Shubhra Gupta, due to an insinuation that Srivalli (performed by Rashmika Mandanna) may wish to be sexually intimate together with her husband.

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

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

It makes Payal Kapadia’s acclaimed film All We Think about as Mild appear extra audacious when it comes to its exploration of intercourse. The primary ever Indian winner of the Cannes Movie Pageant’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, desires to get intimate together with her Muslim boyfriend, itself another taboo. There isn’t any speak of marriage upfront.

“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 quite a lot of autonomy with what you select to do together with your private life. It is infantilising girls. You possibly can be 25 years previous, making your individual cash, offering for your loved ones again house. However you’ll be able to’t resolve 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 known as it “a European movie taking place in India”.) Nevertheless it 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, gained the viewers award on the Sundance Movie Pageant. Set in a boarding faculty 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 (2001), to Lipstick Below 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 world viewers react to and what mainstream Indian audiences can pay to see, given the high ticket prices 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 unsure how a lot field workplace it made in India.” She provides that many viewers in India would react in “disbelief” to heroines akin to Sister Midnight’s Uma and Santosh have been they in a position to watch the flicks, as they’re so unconventional.

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

However Indian film-makers nonetheless must attempt to break stereotypes for audiences, based on Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi, the administrators behind Bengali-language movie Shadowbox. The movie, proven at this yr’s Berlin International Film Festival, 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 ceaselessly humiliated by the neighborhood due to it.

“After 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 giant a viewership girls characterize, and their urge for food to see tales the place their lives are mirrored relatively than projected in a tokenistic method.”

If cinema itself just isn’t an possibility, the rise of the worldwide streamers and OTT platforms (which permit viewers to look at content material immediately on their TV or by means of a telephone app) throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has supplied a spot for current, 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 means of patriarchy, the bedrock of the establishments of household and faith.”

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

“However persons are not really shopping for a ticket for these,” Gupta says. “It is principally 15-to 35-year-olds who’re going to the flicks, and often they happen to be young men. And the movie business 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 income final yr may be an impetus. After its bumper 2023, final yr Bollywood solely achieved 40% of the overall Indian box office profits, and Gupta says its “formulaic movies” are a part of the issue. “Persons are hungry for one thing totally different,” she says. “However the issue is, should you take them too far out of their consolation zone, I am unsure 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 flicks not anticipating to see girls who’re feminists, or girls who don’t ascribe to the concept of what a superb girl ought to be.”

Nonetheless, she provides, it isn’t simply feminine characters who must be written in another way to ensure that change to return. “I might say that in order for you your girls characters to be totally different, you even have to jot down your males in another 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 might be launched within the US on 16 Could 2025.