There is a moment in Konkona Sen Sharma’s "The Mirror", one of the four shorts that make up Lust Stories 2 (on Netflix), where female desire finds its full, no-holds-barred expression. It is the moment when Seema didi (Amruta Subhash) realizes that her employer Isheeta (Tillotama Shome) enjoys watching her and her husband make passionate love on her bed in her upper-class Bandra home’s bedroom.
Shock and awe are part of this unacknowledged transaction—but so is acceptance. Isheeta is a middle-aged graphic designer who lives alone, dresses in asexual Muji-style boxy clothing, understands fonts but not the fountains from her broken taps, and sobs in bed alone at night. Seema is her maid who takes care of her home, cooks and cleans for her as if she and the apartment were her own. She has a key to the apartment and has taken a small liberty with it—but it comes at a price.
"The Mirror" is as much a story of class, propriety, separation, social hierarchy and hypocrisy as it is of female desire—it is primarily and wholly a story about two women who feel moved through vision and knowledge, through attraction that isn’t tangible, but certainly “transgressive”. But most of all, it is intent on showing ordinary women acting on entirely commonplace desires that have, for some reason, been eclipsed by both mainstream media and Indian society at large.
Female desire and sexuality has been a tricky subject in Hindi cinema for as long as it has existed. Bollywood has, traditionally and for the larger part, reflected and further enforced the idea of women as receptors of desire. Female characters in Hindi films have, for decades, been objects of desire or admiration. As film critics and academics have noted, the women in Hindi films can be bracketed into four broad roles: The ideal wife, ideal mother, the vamp and the courtesan.
The ideal wife is the foil to the male protagonist: A vehicle of purity and morality who holds her husband to a higher moral ground. The ideal mother is a picture of strength and sacrifice, epitomized in Mother India: she is to be worshipped for her will and ability to surrender her own (limited) yearning for the good of her children, her family and the country at large.
On the other end of the spectrum is the vamp: The Helen character who is westernized or modern, often meaning the same thing which is wearing “revealing” clothes, hanging out at the bar, dancing and singing and speaking her mind with abandon. The vamp is to be cautious of, because she is a seductress, not a companion.
And then there is the courtesan, at whose “kotha” the man can find release: both physical and emotional, ostensibly to escape the pressures of living with the ideal wife and ideal mother—but one who always lives in the margins of society, never to be respected for who she is beyond the service she provides to our heroes.
Of course, a lot of 21st century Hindi cinema has interrogated these tropes, tinkering with the absoluteness they’ve been proposed with in previous decades. Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham’s Poo loves her crop tops and low-slung jeans and has great flirtation technique, but she also understands the gravity of a visit to the temple and praying to the gods for the good of her family.
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’s Laila may be a free-spirited NRI for whom voluntourism is a way of life, but it is that combined with her “wifely” qualities that makes her especially appealing to Arjun. The fact that Alizeh of Ae Dil Hai Mushkil does not yield to Aryan’s charms, even though she does a lot more that ousts her from the family, is perhaps why she remains so irresistible for our man-child hero who can’t take no for an answer.
And yet, in all this time, there has been only a tiny corner of Hindi cinema that explores more fully what a woman like Pooja, Laila, Alizeh (or indeed Saba) really, really want when it comes to men. Until the rise of OTT, which allowed for a platform for a diversity of narratives, stories that considered women as architects of their sexual journey, not simply objects of desire, were few and far between.
In 1933, Hindi film audiences were treated to the first ever on-screen kiss when Devika Rani planted one on co-star Himanshu Rai’s lips in John Hunt’s Karma. The kiss lasted four minutes—which still holds the record for the longest on-screen kiss in a Hindi language film.
In 1996, Deepa Mehta’s Fire incensed the censors and a section of its audience for its portrayal of two women, neglected by their husbands, forming an intimate bond. Loosely based on the story “Lihaaf” by the famous Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai, it presented women who chose to find love, despite their circumstances.
Mahesh Manjrekar’s 2000 release Astitva was not concerned with love. Through its protagonist Aditi (Tabu), it was more directly asking why a woman must settle for a relationship without sexual satisfaction. Nine years later, we watched Dev D’s Paro drag a mattress into the fields to satiate the fire in her loins.
In Sachin Kundalkar’s 2012 romantic comedy Aiyyaa, a cult favourite even today, Rani Mukherjee is addicted to the scent of a man, as it were—a truly rare portrayal of a woman in heat and if that means something more. Leena Yadav’s 2016 film Parched tracked conversations between four women in rural Gujarat and was a far more sombre meditation on the absence of sexual fulfilment (among other things).
That same year, Alankrita Srivastava’s groundbreaking directorial debut Lipstick Under My Burkha arrived, causing the Censor Board to take notice yet again. The tale of Usha Buaji (Ratna Pathak Shah) stood out in particular, for it hyperlinked the idea of sexual desire with a postmenopausal woman—a hitherto unseen thing on Indian screens. For a woman, indeed a widow, to exhibit such untamed desire for a man several years younger was delightful for some, unpalatable for many.
The recent spate of anthology films manage to present interesting tangents on the subject of female desire. Lust Stories (2018) demonstrated a woman in disarray after a one-night stand with a student, a woman who has been involved with her male employer but cast aside, a woman in an extra-marital affair with her husband’s close friend, and a woman who tries a vibrator to satisfy herself when her husband can’t, and is cast aside for it.
Like Zoya Akhtar’s short in Lust Stories, the standout film in the 2021 anthology Ajeeb Dastaans is Neeraj Ghaywan’s "Geeli Pucchi", featuring Konkona Sen Sharma as a lower-caste factory worker who develops feelings for an upper-caste colleague with no technical skills at all. A kiss on the lips is reciprocated, but social acceptance is not. It’s the sort of tragic inherited cruelty that also underlines Sharma’s directorial venture in Lust Stories 2—these are all stories of inequality within a matrix of social imbalance.
What makes some portrayals of female desire and sexuality more nuanced and real than others in the Hindi film industry? For one, it is the intent. Homi Adajania’s latest venture, Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo showed one of its lead protagonists riding cowboy on an unsuspecting servant boy while wearing a VR headset. You’d be hard put to find in that scene an iota of nuance in its depiction of female desire, not presented purely for titillation, especially in a show filled with artificially rapacious, angry women.
For another, it is the female gaze. Rare as it is, there is something about the felt experience of sexual awakening that only a woman can bring to the table (with exceptions, naturally). Because with that experience comes also the endurance of all the societal weight against it—moulding what would otherwise be pure exercises in voyeurism, into monuments of love, empathy and intersectionality. Because only under the female gaze do the worlds of Isheeta and Seema collide—and only there do they return to amicable co-existence, if not something deeper.
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