#MeToo: Film Industry Lifts Sexual Abuse Taboo
When the 2005 Bollywood drama Aashiq Banaya
Aapne (You have made me your lover) was released, it was not common to see physical intimacy on screen in Indian cinemas.
In the film, the cental characters are seen kissing in a now famous song sequence.
After the film, its lead actress Tanushree Dutta, a former Miss Universe finalist, was cast in several movies where her characters were expected to wear revealing clothing and dance suggestively.
“I’d often wonder, Angelina Jolie can be a sex symbol in a film like Gia and yet win awards for it,” she tells Al Jazeera. “Why don’t these morons get the point?”
In 2008, one of her co-actors allegedly touched her inappropriately while shooting a dance scene. She complained to the director and choreographer, but they insisted that she continue with filming, threatening consequences otherwise.
Dutta left the set, only to be berated by the director and choreographer as “unprofessional” and “uncooperative”.
A right-wing politician, reportedly close to the perpetrator, called for Dutta to be blacklisted as his henchmen vandalised her car. Dutta quit acting soon after and spent years recovering from the trauma before eventually moving to the United States.
This September, while on a trip to India, Dutta recalled the incident to a few journalists.
Her interviews went viral. Social media users and many of her peers expressed solidarity and recounted their own experiences of abuse, intimidation and widespread sexism.
The media industry was hit the hardest. Several actors, comedians, journalists and filmmakers were “outed” for their misogynist, predatory ways.
High-profile actresses, from 1970s superstar Zeenat Aman to 1994 Miss World Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, had shared harrowing personal accounts years before Dutta. These stories prompted heated debates at the time but little corrective action - Rai Bachchan’s former co-star and partner Salman Khan, who had allegedly assaulted her, remains one of India’s highest-paid actors.
‘Women’s experience is undervalued’
An analysis of Wikipedia entries on 4,000 Bollywood movies between 1970 and 2017 by IBM and two Delhi-based organisations showed that male characters are mentioned nearly twice as many times as their female counterparts. Female characters are mostly described as “beautiful” and “attractive” whereas men are called “strong” and “successful”. While most women go on to marry or love, men were likely to kill or shoot, the study found. A popular trope of romantic stories features the male character stalking, bullying and berating his paramour, after which they live happily ever after.
Rachel Dwyer, professor of Indian Cultures and Studies at SOAS, University of London, told Al Jazeera: “One of the big shifts in the recent years is that a Bollywood heroine can be now seen as much more sexually active. She has multiple partners, goes partying and makes mistakes. She’s not seen as a bad character.”
In other Indian films, there are also strong female leads in historical fiction features and stories about female sporting talents. Dutta says a lot has changed since she stopped making films.
But the wage gap continues to be gendered, most top actors still get to choose which actress they work with and hit song sequences, known as “item songs”, in spite of featuring several mainstream actresses, continue to objectify women.
“An actress can run around trees, do an item song and also have a [serious] role in the same film,” says Dutta. “Everything has its own place. You don’t have to judge.”
Al Jazeera News