Portrayal of women in Bollywood then, now and in the past.

Bollywood in the seventies and eighties
Bollywood in the seventies and eighties
Mulling over the portayal of women in Bollywood, one very significant aspect that I thought about was how Bollywood shows the character of women by the way they dress.

When I was growing up in the late seventies and eighties most of the Bollywood movies I saw showed girls in sarees as virtuous and the girls in jeans as naughty, or spoilt. I found this odd because I didn’t see this replicated in society. In fact the most “notorious” girl in our lane always wore a saree and never talked to boys freely in public. She walked with her head down. But her “night exploits” were well known to one and all. On the other hand, my friend and me always walked to college in jeans and a T-shirt and were pretty much heckled on the way, and had to put up with a lot of cheap comments. We talked openly with boys in our college, had coffee with them, but neither of us were sleeping around. In fact we often wondered why society thought girls in sarees were “good.” Why was virtue being confused with dress? Luckily both of us belonged to broadminded educated families and had no problems on that score.

In fact, because of false stereotypes (perpetuated by Bollywood) about dress, people often use attire to deliberately mislead people. For example a rapist could wear an orange robe and pretend to be holy, a woman or a man who lead bohemian lives may deliberately dress mutely to avoid attracting attention, a terrorist might deliberately wear western clothes to dupe the police, a traditional girl might choose to wear jeans to show the world how modern she is. What I am basically saying is, your clothes may be you, or they may not. In any case, everything western is not bad and everything eastern is not good.

Bollywood Recently
Bollywood movies are not so bad today, in this sense. Movies nowadays don’t always show girls in western dress as sluts, but those who are sluts invariably wear western clothes. Funnily, even if a heroine wears mini skirts, she often has to prove her Indianness. One such example is of the movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. When Rani Mukherjee arrives from London in a micro-mini, its alright, as long as she proves her Indianness. And she does this by singing a devotional Hindi song!

Bollywood Now
We have moved on since then. Take Dhoom. Abhishek’s wife is shown to be sexy, dressed in skimpy western attire but hardworking and loving and thankfully does not have prove her Indianness by conducting poojas and dressing in sarees! That was like a breath of fresh air and broke the stereotype. However a lot of other Bollywood movies show heroines who wear western attire, but change it after marriage. As if that ensures their life long devotion to their husbands!

Bollywood nowadays also has girls speaking up and doing their own thing. Like Kajol in Fanaa for example. But there are still too few movies which show women in strong roles.