For more than eight years, National Award winning director, Madhur Bhandarkar was haunted by starlet Preeti Jain, who filed a rape case against Bhandarkar, in 2004 in a Mumbai police station. In her accusation, she alleged that she was raped 16 times between 1999 and 2004, after being promised a role in his films. Finally, when the probe was quashed in 2012 by a Supreme Court bench, when Preeti gave up the case, Bhandarkar rendered many soul-stirring interviews to the media saying,”I am numb after the verdict… I have been through trauma and this thing was always hanging over my head.I was never demoralised by these allegations. This is a big relief and I am happy it is finally over. I was told my career is finished and I have no way to go, but I decided to deal with it strongly, and the result is for all to see.”
Bhandarkar’s latest movie, Calendar Girls brings back memories of the case, making you wonder if there was any out-of-court settlement, which brought it to a closure. Because, Bhandarkar takes pride in his brand of real cinema. Even in his latest release, he has brought to light the true life of bikini-clad calendar girls. The movie poster has a bunch of women in gold-coloured bikinis, flaunting their assets. Makes us wonder if Bhandarkar is catering to a sex-starved nation that brutally gang rapes women in moving buses and mutilates her privates, burns its brides and throws acid on the faces of ex girlfriends, and yet is shy and squeamish about basic sex education in schools, a couple kissing on a park bench, a husband hugging his wife in front of his in-laws, a mother explaining birth control to a young college-going daughter, a father telling his son his manhood isn’t going to be diminished by wearing a condom, stressing on safe sex.
Is Bhandarkar simply playing to the galleries or is he symbolic of the average Indian man? The guy who letches at you in a local train, the peeping tom who loves to see his neighbour’s wife change her clothes, the husband who can’t get ‘it’ up, but ties his young bride to the bedpost and beats her up for cheap kinks, the bus conductor who abuses a young child in the back seat – or a telling symptom of an industry that has A-list heroines gyrating to cheap, item songs, that focuses on a leading lady’s weight and her breast enhancement or a lip job, instead of focusing on storytelling, sans the need to be either overtly sensational or covertly stereotypical – a woman a commodity. Her breasts, her buttocks, her lips, her navel, her tattoo, her boldness defined by her body and her ability to abuse like a man or beat up the bad guys.
Our maardangi always a cheap, down market, imitation of manhood the way we see it through an external lens. The physicality of a hero, the superiority of an entire race, the sexual domination. The character who drinks, sleeps around, smokes, doesn’t believe in marriage, indulges in one-night stands, hates kids – always either Catholic (a community somehow always projected as fast/promiscuous/drinking a lot) or the single woman. Our strength never our right to be equal even on an imaginary 70 mm screen.
No wonder then, a recent UN-sponsored study ranked Indian films high in stereotyping of women. Conducted by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, the study examined “the visibility and nature of female depictions” in popular films across Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, the UK and the US. Not only did India fare abysmally when it came to the percentage of female characters in movies and the prevalence of movies with women in the lead or co-lead roles, it also ranked high in the sexual crucification of women measured in terms of sexually revealing clothing, nudity and attractiveness of women characters.
YES!I am a Woman.I have breasts AND a cleavage! You got a problem!!??
— TAMASHA (@deepikapadukone) September 14, 2014
That the battle of the sexes extends to the film industry isn’t new. Remember the time when Deepika Padukone took on the country’s top English daily, when it tweeted a photo of her from an event last year, with a caption – ‘OMG! Deepika Padukone’s cleavage show’, tweeting out to her seven million followers. Deepika’s response – ‘YES! I am a Woman. I have breasts AND a cleavage! You got a problem!!??’
A line that was retweeted more than 7,000 times with the hashtag #IStandWithDeepikaPadukone. It soon grew into a trend and she chose to star in director Homi Adjania’s version of empowerment, for Vogue, that honestly reduced a woman’s rights to a choice of having a one night stand – again a socially construed irresponsible behavior pattern that we almost always appropriate to men. Padukone, her hair being blown to cover her face didn’t care to explain the sheer weight of any tough choice for a woman in a culture that even decides the length of a woman’s skirt and if she should be murdered in broad daylight for marrying outside her caste.
Bhandarkar’s Calendar Girls isn’t the elitist upgrade to women’s lib, it is a mirror to show how we look at women in certain professions – air hostesses, nurses, models, prostitutes, surrogates – our lakshmanrekha the noose not around our neck, but the flimsy bikini strings that offer sexual satisfaction to a mass audience – who need something to jerk off on! A whole film, in this case. Five, ‘fresh,’ faces.
Ever thought how disgusting that line sounds. An everyday objectification that is engrained in our DNA!
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