“Pyaar se de rhe hai rakh lo warna thappad maar ke bhi de sakte hai”, ‘’Akeli ladki khuli tijori ki tarah hoti hai, “ Budhi ho ya jawan, melodrama is duniya ki sari auraton ke khoon mai hai”.
We as a nation have found out ways of going to the moon and other interstitial planets a long time back but even in the 21st century, we haven’t figured out the way of giving women the fair representation they deserve. We still are drowning in the arena of wrong and misled gender depiction in almost every field and Bollywood undoubtedly is one of them. What you read before are some of the famous dialogues used in Bollywood movies.
Bollywood without any doubt has never done justice with its women representation on screen. Bollywood for the longest time has shown women in a light that is either all black or all white. Firstly, the number of movies with women as the main character is way less than men being the protagonist of the story. The portrayal of women’s character has always been ingrained with a hell of a lot of gender biases and stereotypes.
Our society has always been unfair to women in most aspects. Society has always wanted to put a woman in a big box of prejudices, hollow norms, stereotypes, and biases. Women are expected to live, behave and exist in a particular way and if someone tries to break the notion, various tags are given to them. Bollywood for the longest time has been seen to make the situation worse.
Men are represented as “strong” and ‘’brave” and women, on the other hand, are just described with surface-level qualities like being attractive, as if there’s nothing more to a woman than a pretty face and a zero-figure body.
Hindi cinema has always portrayed an ‘’Ideal Woman” as someone submissive, has no voice of her own, self-sacrificing motherly figure, controlled and if a woman possesses traits like having an identity of her own, vocal about her opinions, sexually aggressive or westernized the character is said to be a loose or bad influence on the peers and for the society.
Since the 1950s there has been a change in the way of making movies in Hindi Cinema. Fewer women started working as actors, singers, producers, writers, and so on but still, the male dominance can be seen in the movies of that time and sadly in today’s as well. Ironically most of the women characters written in Bollywood are by none but a male that holds a higher privilege in society just because of their gender. I doubt how the lenses of filmmakers, writers, scriptwriters are this faulty about another fellow human being.
Bollywood and its movies are the biggest influences on society. People might not have three-time of food but mostly have television. This movie of barely 120 minutes creates stereotypes and crimes for ages. We all are pretty familiar with the condition of women in our society. Crime against women in Delhi increased by 63.3% in the first six months of 2021 as compared to 2020. NCRB reported 77 rape cases in India daily in the year 2020. Violence against women in the household scenario is one of the biggest realities of how well society treats its woman.
Influential Bollywood personalities should be more decent toward all gender identities. If they’ll stop making those problematic movies people will eventually stop watching them. Art should be used to bring about a change in society in a positive way. We as an audience should be aware of the content we consume. Women in Bollywood should choose scripts that have portrayed a woman’s character in a valid form and not as how they think a woman should be.
Every passing second is a good time to unlearn our deep-rooted prejudices and biases towards gender and gender norms and make this society a better place to exist for every single person alive.
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