FEMINISM WITH A LIGHT TOUCH

Draw of ‘Laapataa Ladies’ lies in its optimistic depiction of a contested milieu

their due. In the 2020 show Panchayat, various harmless men in a UP village calculate “appropriate” demands based on their salaries. Visiting city-slicker Abhishek (Jitendra Kumar) declares he’s anti-dowry. But when a visiting groom demands his new swivel chair, Abhishek has to bend with the bride-givers. Dowry wins.

That spoiled-child dulha is a ridiculous version of the masculinity that arises from treating boys as prizes and girls as burdens. Laapataa Ladies offers a villainous version: A dulha who’s killed one wife marrying a second for a free slave, with a dowry. Because it’s a comedy, we needn’t weep or rage. But also because it’s a comedy, we have the joy of seeing this vile man robbed of social power legally — best of all, by the police he thinks are on his side.

The draw of Laapataa Ladies lies in its sweetly optimistic depiction of a bitterly contested milieu — perhaps deliberate in times when the Hindi belt seems like a war zone. Rao occasionally tempers her Doordarshan nostalgia and almost teacherly tone with self-reflexive humour, like when one character asks another if she’s been watching too much Krishi Darshan. But try as the film might to laugh at it, it is in the state — embodied in Ravi Kishen’s eventually lawabiding policeman — that Laapataa Ladies’ optimism really resides. However fictional, Rao’s film is a throwback to the memory of a more benevolent, constitutionallybound state — as well as an unspoken plea for its continuation.

Gupta is a Delhi-based writer and critic, and Professor of Practice at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication