‘BASANTI’ TO ‘BILLO’?

It is indeed true. Movies have moved on from “Basanti” who used to be an “abla naari” (a gullible women) who falls prey to every other villain in a movie. Now women are stronger and avoid the general stereotype which has been attached to them since times immemorial.

Talking about stereotyping, a stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. This is given in such a way that people who wish to escape also can’t manage to do it. Because of the beauty of it being tagged to the whole group, individuals suffer its wrath. Now not all Arabs wish to bomb the world. Do they?

As I am covering gender stereotyping in movies, I shall be talking about the shy women who constrained themselves to the kitchens, cooking in the hot “chullas” to the women who went out killing their husbands, there by standing against social evils (at least this is what the movies show!).

Gender stereotyping began with civilization itself. It is a known fact that women are physically weaker than men. Probably that is the only field where they lack. Due to this women have always been restricted to kitchens and taking care of children at home. Even during the early man stage, women stayed back to look after the children where as men went out to hunt.

This idealism and thought has been carried forth to centuries. With the advent and growth of generations and mankind as such, there wasn’t much change to this theory. However, only recent five or six years see a change in the society where women are given importance too.

As movies and films came into being, their stories revolved around the society. Hence, most of these presented the same theme of women being the weaker sex. Unfortunately in the rush to bring out that women are weak and had to be contained at home, atrocities and oppressions against women became a major sub-topic.

Movies always reflected the society, even to this day. It became a habit to every director and script writer to include violence against women in movies. This grew and some of the best movies came out of this. The list includes Daman (starring Raveena Tendon), Lajja (starring Madhuri Dixit, Manisha Koirala), Mehndi (Rani Mukherjee). All these movies show the violence against women but end on one note- the victory of women over men and the evil social customs.

But this transformation came in much later. Prior to this, women were still featured as sorry figures. They were not only restricted to kitchens but were withheld on the grounds of dowry, non marriage of widows, no freedom to women to express views etc. Water and Paap amongst others are some of the movies which feature this. Then came the women who worked in industries, offices at respectable positions. But there was a catch there as well. In the movie Corporate, Bipasha Basu is a well to do woman but she lands up as a scape goat in a corporate scandal.

The evolution wasn’t complete and neither did it stop here. I am sure the growing and developing society and mentality of people was tired of watching all this negativity. As they say ‘born out of ashes’, then came along a line of movies showing strong women in strong roles like Khalnayika- a strong vamp, Fiza- a strong sister, Chak de India- strong bunch of sports women, changing the definition of women and taking it to its best.

Movies currently feature item numbers. And with Bollywood trying to ape Hollywood to the core, with vulgarity and nudity increasing, rather than sensual and beauty, the poor ‘‘Basanti’’ is now transformed to a ‘‘Billo’’. This has not only lost the respect towards the female gender but also has left her to an object rather than human. She is now a showpiece to draw on or an unwanted sexual (not sensual) element in a mattress advertisement.

Men however, have moved on from being the heroes to villains but maintain their ego and position in movies- villains because, anything that goes wrong, is blamed on the man. He is responsible for all the wrong and evil in the society and he is the one who always commits all the atrocities.

I am not trying to draw conclusions. The society has been carrying this thought and has been molded in this way. Though for the past few years (I dare say), the society is changing its thought process. How good or bad it is I have no idea but it has its own repercussions.

Unfortunately the woman who was a mercy creature earlier has now been reduced to an item girl with men more or less the same.