Like all chronically online people, I succumbed and watched part two of Netflix’s Bridgerton season 4. But the most fascinating part of the “ton” this season wasn’t its lead characters Benedict (Luke Thompson) and Sophie (Yerin Ha), but the matriarch of the Bridgerton clan, Violet and her “garden in bloom”. A mischievous yet important metaphor in the show.
For seasons, Violet has existed solely as a mother, who spent her life and youth raising her eight children and as a widow defined by the great love she lost. Her emotional life appeared complete, sealed in amber. But then, slowly, she allowed herself to want again. Ruth Gemmell’s Violet does not jump into bed; she takes her time to sift through her feelings, and she is hesitant. Years of conditioning do not dissolve in a single glance. But the beauty of her arc lies in the ordinariness with which the show treats it. There is no mock outrage, no gasps or fainting spells from the mere thought of a woman’s sexual needs. A woman in her later years desires companionship and intimacy, and the world does not end.
That quiet acceptance feels revolutionary because, for decades, we have seen the struggle to extend the same grace that men and, to some extent, even younger women enjoy to older women.
Female desire — a Bollywood taboo
It is not as though female desire is a novel concept for Indian cinema either. Bollywood has rarely known what to do with female desire beyond youth. Any older woman who expressed sexuality was often framed as comic, dangerous, or morally bankrupt. Desire was conflated with predation. Agency was rewritten as desperation. Women wanting intimacy is already a scarce commodity as it is, add middle age to the mix, and you have yourself a cosmic event.
Films like Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi (1996) and Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016) sensationalised the older woman with a younger man trope, presenting the couple as a spectacle rather than showing it as a sincere emotional journey. Older women wanting love and intimacy were seen as desperate.
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A changing discourse
But Bollywood, too, is changing. With more female directors and women-focused films making the headlines, ideas that were once considered impossible or even improper are now being shown and discussed. A significant turning point came with Alankrita Srivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016), where Usha Buaji, played with aching vulnerability by Ratna Pathak Shah, became one of the most radical (and controversial) characters in Indian cinema. Usha, a 55-year-old widow who secretly reads erotic fiction, pursues a younger swimming instructor — she is neither a caricature nor a cautionary tale but simply lonely, curious, and hungry for touch. Srivastava’s film does not mock that longing; it dignifies it.
Even the Ayushmann Khurrana-starrer Badhaai Ho (2018), in which Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao play a middle-aged couple whose unexpected pregnancy becomes the source of embarrassment for their adult children. The film’s genius lies in its normalisation; it asserts, gently but firmly, that women over 50 have active sex lives and that this is neither grotesque nor comedic. The discomfort belongs to society, and not women.
Netflix’s A Suitable Boy (2020), based on the novel of the same name by Vikram Seth, offered perhaps one of the most sensual depictions of mature female desire in recent memory. Tabu’s Saeeda Bai shares a passionate and layered relationship with the much younger Maan Kapoor (Ishaan Khatter). Their connection is not just for shock value; it is intense, intellectual, and emotionally charged. Saeeda’s desirability is never questioned; it is embedded in her natural aura.
Others, such as Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (2019) explore sexual monotony and the suppressed desires of a middle-class woman. Modern Love Mumbai (2022) delves into the quiet courage it takes to believe one is still worthy of romance.
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From Regency to modern India
Desire does not evaporate with age. It evolves. It carries memory, grief and experience. When cinema erases older women’s sexuality, it sends the message that a woman’s desirability has a deadline. It tells society and the younger generations that motherhood is the end of a woman’s personal becoming, and that after a certain age, she must exist solely for others.
In a country where women of any age are already expected to be self-sacrificial, a middle-aged woman who has already served her purpose of bearing children and tending to them, desiring love and intimacy, is the antithesis of everything we have been taught about women and society.
Representation becomes more important because we see the inverse of it to be true and accept it as natural.
This is why Violet Bridgerton’s “blooming garden” resonates beyond Regency ballrooms. It echoes in Indian living rooms, where mothers or just single middle-aged women are expected to fold their longings into silence. It challenges the deeply internalised idea that female sexuality must be contained within youth to be respectable. Perhaps not even then.
But even as we celebrate progress, the conversation feels cyclical. We keep returning to it because discomfort persists. We are still not entirely at ease with the idea that our mothers and our aunts, women past 50, perhaps even our future selves, may want intimacy, pleasure, and companionship.
We have travelled far from the days when older women on screen existed only as punchlines or predators. Yet, the distance ahead remains long. The more we tell these stories with nuance whether in the drawing rooms of Bridgerton or the cramped apartments of middle-class India, the more we normalise what has always been true: A woman’s garden does not wither because society wills it to. Sometimes, it simply waits for the right season to bloom again.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)