Bollywood film tackles taboo of menstruation
NEW DELHI: It’s an unlikely scene in deeply conservative India: A popular Bollywood male star grinning widely as he holds up a sanitary pad and talks of menstrual hygiene.
But that’s exactly what action hero Akshay Kumar did as he promoted his film Pad Man, which opened in cinemas yesterday.
Akshay plays the lead role of a man who starts manufacturing inexpensive sanitary pads after he discovers his wife’s lack of access to them in a small town in India.
The subject of menstruation and menstrual hygiene is rarely, if ever, discussed openly in Indian homes.
At pharmacies and department stores, tampons and sanitary pads get the same treatment reserved for condoms – they are handed to customers discretely wrapped in black plastic bags to save them from any embarrassment.
In many homes, women are barred from temples and religious rituals as well as cooking or entering the kitchen when they have their period.
So Akshay and his film are definitely breaking ground in cleaving through the layers of taboo.
“Yes, these are pads. Yes, they belong to these amazing women. Yes, they were happy to lend me one so I could support this much needed initiative,” upcoming Bollywood actor Siddharth Malhotra tweeted yesterday along with a photo of him surrounded by female fans as he held up a sanitary pad.
The film is loosely based on the life of Arunachalam Muruganantham, who invented a machine to make sanitary pads at a fraction of the cost of most commercially available products, when he found that his wife was forced to use rags and newspaper during her period.