Women Do Genre in Film and Television by Mary Harrod Katarzyna Paszkiewicz

Author:Mary Harrod, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz [Mary Harrod, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138695801
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.1 The transnational interfaith Indian couple in Hope and a Little Sugar.

Irani is equally crucial to women’s filmmaking in 1990s Bollywood. Beginning her career as a child actress, Irani went onto become one of Bollywood’s most successful female scriptwriters. A struggling single mother with two young children, after her divorce Irani re-entered the industry when her story template was made into the critically acclaimed film Lamhe/Moments (Yash Chopra, India, 1991), scripted by Dr. Rahi Masoom Reza. Though not a box office success in India, the film was a hit in the overseas market. In 2013, it was declared one of the top ten romantic movies in 100 years of Indian cinema. The film is based on a love story between a young woman and an elderly man, who has been in love with her mother in his early youth (Figure 7.2).

Depicting romance between a man and the daughter of his former love interest was an extremely bold move in the highly conservative Indian social context. Tejaswini Ganti (2012: 306) reports that people from the Mumbai film industry attribute the failure of the film in the domestic non-elite Indian market to this incestuous love-story. Rachel Dwyer (2012) calls it a ‘controversial’ film in her obituary of Yash Chopra published in India Today. Though the film follows the usual Bollywood format of male domination within a feudal social structure, it foregrounds women’s right to life choice very strongly. The characters of the mother and the daughter (both played by Sridevi) exercise choice about their respective partners and lives. Women’s agency remains at the centre of Irani’s film scripts hereafter. Her stories include strong and independent female characters such as Pooja in Moments, Roma in Aaina/Mirror (Yash Chopra and Deepak Sareen, India, 1993), Aashi in Aur Pyar Ho Gaya/And Love Happened (Rahul Rawail, India, 1997), Komal in Jab Pyaar Kisise Hota Hai/When Someone Falls in Love (Deepak Sareen, India, 1998), Neha and Sonia in Armaan/Desire (Irani, India, 2003), Sonia and Nisha in Koi Mil Gaya/I Found Someone (Rakesh Roshan, India, 2003) and Priya in Krrish (Rakesh Roshan, India, 2006). Single motherhood and single parenting are themes that recur consistently in Irani’s stories. For example, Pallavi, the mother of the heroine of Moments, is brought up by her widower father. The male protagonists of I Found Someone and Krrish are brought up by a single mother and grandmother respectively. Irani also addressed the topics of pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy and single motherhood in Kya Kahena/What to Say (Kundan Shah, India, 2000). Despite its radical theme, the film was very successful, becoming the highest grossing Bollywood film of the 2000s. Progressive in terms of its ending, the film closes with the protagonist’s rejection of the father of her child in favour of another man who stood by her at the hour of crisis, thereby putting forward a new norm of ‘acceptable masculinity’. The sensitive and submissive yet ‘hopelessly devoted’ partner is chosen over a macho hyper-masculine man even though the latter fathered her child.

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