Madhusree Ghosh
madhusree.ghosh@hindustantimes.com
The Bollywood bad girl is still on your screens. If you don’t recognise her, it’s because of how much she’s changed. She used to be a side character; she’s now often centre stage. She used to be bad and sad; now she’s often just being herself, sometimes scheming, sometimes struggling or revelling in her misdeeds, often just muddling through, wondering how she got to where she is. She may be the protagonist, as in the recent streaming shows Bombay Begums (2021) and Aarya (2020), about ambitious women taking on Mumbai’s corporate world and underworld respectively. There isn’t always a foil. Some stories centre entirely on two or more women struggling to define who they are, what they want, or doing what needs to be done, as in the films Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (2019), Andhadhun (2018) and Manmarziyaan (2018).
It’s a change that’s been decades in the making, kicked into high gear by societal flux that goes back decades too.
Vamps were vamps because of Indian society and how it perceived women’s roles in it, says Meenakshi Shedde, film curator and South Asia delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival. In the long decades that stretched from the earliest Hindi talkies of the 1930s all the way to the turn of the century, most heroines were devoid of agency. The vamps had agency but were expected to pay a heavy price for it. They were the gangsters’ molls, the single women in disparaged careers (cabaret singer, bar dancer), invariably dead, alone or in despair by the time the end credits rolled.
“Women weren’t shown as villains in the way men were,” says film critic and writer Anupama Chopra. Where a man could be complex, conflicted and redeemed (usually by the love of one or more good women, typically, fiancée and maa), women in key roles were either beautiful and virginal or sexual and lost beyond redemption.
“It was the same as recently as 25 years ago. Why do you think Simran in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge didn’t sleep with Raj even though they were alone, in a hotel room, in a different country and very much attracted to each other?” says Chopra.
Things began to change in the romcom years of the late 1980s and 1990s, when the bad girl went from vampish outsider to forgivable but flawed stepmother, aunt or college mate in love with the same man. Here, redemption came via failure.
Plots collapsed, the hero chose the heroine, and the aunt, stepmother or jilted woman made her peace with their happy ending. The centre was still holding.
By the late 1990s, in an increasingly wealthy, ambitious and aspirational India, a new generation of storytellers teamed up with a set of A-list actresses looking for more to do than smile and dance. The likes of Kajol and Urmila Matondkar began playing serial killers and psychopaths, with barely a shrug in the direction of their cute-girl images. When these early experiments were hits, it opened the floodgates, and suddenly the bad girl wasn’t a side figure. She was taking up the whole screen.
Fast-forward to the new millennium. A young India in the midst of a societal, sexual and economic revolution was now looking for their stories to be told. They were marrying later than ever, living alone or with friends and partners, earning more and spending more. Mainstream tales began to incorporate their new reality, in all its shades.
Kalki Koechlin played a schoolgirl whose boyfriend leaked an MMS sex clip of her, in Anurag Kashyap’s 2009 adaptation of Devdas, Dev.D. Vidya Balan turned up in Ishqiya (2010), playing a gangster’s wife out for revenge, in cheap synthetic saris and an oily plait. Taapsee Pannu reclaimed explicit language and spoke of sex and consent in Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink (2016).
By the time the streaming platforms Netflix and Amazon Prime arrived in 2016, the markets were ready. Ambitious and talented women had taken on roles behind the camera too, in the director’s chairs, production studios and writers’ rooms. A race began to see who could find the freshest and most relevant stories, and tell them most differently. While it’s hard to say how much of the freshness will give way to sameness of a different kind, the subscription-based revenue model means storytellers can focus on a specific demographic for each kind of project, for the first time.
And so today’s mainstream tales are less predictable. The heroines more temperamental. The heroes less dashing but far more interesting. And the villains and villainesses, well, they’re still there. But now they’re just people, such as you may know, or meet, or be.