BackYear-End Issue | The Heroine: 1970-2014
Many lead roles in Hindi cinema went to women this year. As it ends, we look at the Indian film heroine since the 1970s
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Year of the heroine
Women led many film casts in 2014. They led by being unusual, sovereign beings. In Revolver Rani, an unsuccessful but ambitious film, the protagonist Alka, played by Kangana Ranaut, rescues the hero—tied up, as he is, by the villain and his men in a dusty, rocky nowhereland. Like Basanti in Sholay. Alka leaps out of a Jeep, unleashes a barrage of gunshots, kicks men down the rocky terrain and takes the hero home. Despite the obvious lack of thought, this pastiche of militant womanhood was exhilarating to watch.
Queen, Dedh Ishqiya, Mary Kom, Hasee Toh Phasee, Bobby Jasoos, Mardaani, Haider—all these films were about women who defied the stereotypes we routinely see on the screen. The men tragically continued being either testosterone bombs or imbecile boy-men.
In this year-end issue, we rewind to the 1970s and look at the heroine over the next three decades.
The 1970s and 1980s were the heydays of the recalcitrant, law-breaking hero; scripts were written for him. Though the vamp disappeared and the lines between the sinful and the virtuous woman blurred in these two decades, the woman was never grey. She was either sexy and Westernized or innocent and Indian—Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi or Rekha, Jaya Prada and Neetu Singh. The parallel film directors discovered staggering talents like Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Deepti Naval and a host of other actors.
In the 1990s, the decade of Shah Rukh Khan, the heroine running to his arms was a hotchpotch of the sacrificial woman and a creature of the consumerist world. The two who stood out through the 1980s and 1990s were Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit-Nene, who redefined female superstardom by cultivating their signature and solidifying it—what male superstars have always done. All this while, regional cinema, especially in the south and in Bengal, continued to produce complex films that required complex women characters.
The 2000s and beyond has been a decade of the heroine prototype. More or less, she conforms to global fashion trends, is canny and articulate, and can pull off an item number, a sci-fi character or an ornamental girlfriend with equal panache.
This issue celebrates characters and heroines who can’t be categorized—be it Aparoopa from Assam’s tea gardens, Nirupama from a Kochi middle-class milieu or Deepika Padukone, the Hindi film heroine of the moment, on a ride back home from a shoot in Mumbai.
Hope the heroine continues to surprise us well beyond 2015. Write to us at lounge@livemint.com.
Happy New Year!
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‘Objectifying me, that is not done’
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