But unlike Angry Indian Goddesses, these women do not have the privilege or the platform to nurture their talents. Lipstick Under my Burkha is also a tale of frustrated aspirations. They are angry not only because they have had enough, they also know that end to this struggle is not in sight. The film closes on a meta note with one of the characters espousing the hope that one day we will be able to tell our own stories. They realise that despite their merit they are never seen as more than sexual objects and, in fact, resented for the success that is never seen as rightfully theirs. It’s a reaction that comes from several women who are successful or accomplished at what they do but are frustrated with the world they live in. One that many vigilante films have adopted before and after its release but there is one crucial difference – in Angry Indian Goddesses, the murders are not planned in cold-blood. In this film, men are included primarily as sexual predators and the only solution against them is presented as the ‘final solution’. I cannot comment on Veere for I have not watched the film but I want to reflect on what it meant to have four-five women as leads in two other films, Lipstick Under my Burkha and Angry Indian Goddesses.Īngry Indian Goddesses started the trend with an account of privileged women, whose privilege is accentuated by the inclusion of a domestic maid in their sisterhood. Veere di Wedding was promoted as the revolutionary film with four women play its leads but it rather represented a normalisation of a marginal trend in Hindi cinema, which has now become commercially viable. This article seeks to unravel some of these tangled webs of struggles witnessed in our popular, mainstream story-telling medium. Perhaps, one of the biggest challenge to patriarchy is to just tell stories of women who do not want to be like men but such trends have also provoked a backlash. The current moment in Hindi cinema has been complementing these societal struggles, perhaps even foreshadowing the MeToo challenges to patriarchy by both wresting authorial power to tell stories of relatable people, especially of women, but also displacing plot devices and narrative arcs familiar to stories that end up reaffirming patriarchal authority. A standard reply, reproduced in several platforms when questions like ‘why now’ or ‘what next’ are raised is illuminating of the problem societies face when women tell stories: “For now, we should just listen to the women who want to speak up.” It not only represents the struggle to tell our stories on our own terms but also tell them without a fixed agenda or plan. In the moment of triumph, is there also a need of introspection? The MeToo movement, in India and elsewhere, opens our world(s) up to these and many other questions that do not have easy or ready answers. Even as the struggle to find one’s voice and to be heard continues, we might also ask ourselves what we will be left with after we have successfully challenged male authority and supremacy in our stories, the idea of heroes and villains, of chaste wives and women of disreputable characters. I will not allow books to prove anything.”Īusten’s words, a searing commentary on how patriarchy controls the narrative, remains relevant today despite tenacious efforts by women to wrest authorial control from men and narrate our own stories.
Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree the pen has been in their hands. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story.