Move over angry young man, 2018 was ruled by angry young women in Bollywood

Illustration by Soham Sen/ThePrint

In India, 2018 was all about women discovering the revolutionary power of their anger, on screen and off it.

In the preface to Intercourse, her book on sex in literature and society, the late feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin wrote: “Men often react to women’s words –speaking and writing – as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologise. Women shut up. Women trivialise what we know, Women shrink. Women pull back”.

Not anymore. In India, 2018 was all about women discovering the revolutionary power of their anger. They were angry at men like Alok Nath and M.J. Akbar who had got away with decades of bad behaviour because no one spoke up. They were angry at being denied the freedom to pray at Sabarimala. And they were angry that the women’s reservation bill had been kept hanging, yet again, despite a government with an avowed commitment to beti bachao beti padhao and ensuring adequate representation to women in public office.

As angry farmers marched across the country pleading for their rights; as seething students protested against a leak in the Staff Selection Commission papers; and as Dalits argued vehemently against the perceived dilution of the SC/ST Act 1989, it seemed almost every community had discovered its voice and was no longer content to watch from the sidelines.

On screen, feminine anger exploded with an unexpected ferocity, and in unforeseen ways. In Dhadak, the film that launched the careers of two second-generation stars, it was the young woman who brandished a gun and stood up to her upper caste family, which had problems with her blossoming romance with a lower caste boy.

In Kedarnath, it was the woman again who smashed the Brahminical patriarchy by making the first (and second and third) move on her intended conquest, a winsome Muslim porter, and by being particularly insolent to her “pundit” father and her militant fiancé. And in Manmarziyaan, it was, once again, the woman who forced her boyfriend to elope with her, and then confronted his mother about them.

None of these women were happy to accept the lot that destiny had allotted to them, whether it was a palatial home for Parthavi in Dhadak, or a comfortable life as the soon-to-be wife of Kedarnath’s most eligible Brahmin boy. But their angst revolved mostly around their love lives.

In the exceedingly-daring Pataakha, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, the anger, which found expression in the hair-pulling and face-scratching, was actually about their unhappiness with life, or what sociologists like to call the post-code lottery. The warring sisters, Badki aka Champa and Chutki aka Genda aka Marigold, have a dream but they find no way through which they can achieve it. Badki wants to run her own dairy business and Chutki wants to learn enough English to perhaps teach it one day.

But their plans are dashed because of their circumstances, or so they think. The film opens with each of them calling the other “chudail” and “kutiya”, and doesn’t get any better subsequently. The film positions the two as India and Pakistan, and suggests that “batwara” is the only option. The men are mere bystanders to the two sisters’ saga, with only one, the amiably wicked Dipper, providing the occasional spark.

In Stree, the men are running scared of a visiting witch who, according to folklore, leaves nothing of the men she encounters except their clothes.

The delicious twist on the 1970s angry young man was embodied in 2018 by a series of women who reflect the churn in society. Millennial women are far less tolerant of patriarchy than the generation that preceded them. In Mulk, the young Hindu lawyer married to a Muslim businessman cannot understand why her husband suddenly wants to affix the religion of their unborn child. Equally, she cannot bear the injustice of her Muslim father-in-law being questioned for his patriotism. She fights for her family and its honour, against the advice of her parents and her community at large.

In 2018, women in Mumbai movies made one thing clear. Yes, they would play the game invented by men. But they wouldn’t necessarily play by the established rules. In a pivotal scene in Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi, super patriotic student-turned-spy Sehmat tells her handler: “Nahin samajh aati aapke yeh duniya,” when he explains the collateral damage that war causes. “Rishton ki kadar hain na jaan ki,” she screams.

In a war of another kind, the daily battle of being in the public eye 24X7, Katrina Kaif plays Babita in Zero, a stoic and permanently drunk superstar, repeatedly let down by the man in her life, an actor named Mr Kapoor (ahem!). She flips the bird at an adoring audience that is waiting for her, kisses a random man on the highway and throws out her boyfriend when she hears, yet again, of his errant ways.

Kanika Dhillon, who wrote Rumi’s character in Manmarziyaan and Mukku’s in Kedarnath, says she would hesitate to describe these women as angry. Instead, she says, they are just “not afraid to make their own choices, personal, sexual or professional. They are unafraid to demand or put themselves first. The role of the sacrificial lamb for women holds no appeal or credibility in reel life for many storytellers and I hope it translates into real life scenarios in larger numbers”. Or, the other way round.

I’m mad as hell and not going to take this anymore, said Peter Finch’s newsman, Howard Beale, in the 1976 classic Network. “Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!”

He may well have been speaking for the angry young women in India, onscreen and off it.

The writer is a senior journalist and was Editor of India Today between 2011 and 2014.