'People are hungry for something different': The 'anti-Bollywood' films fighting sexist stereotypes

Sister Midnight, Santosh and All We Imagine as Light are part of a new wave of female-centred Indian films challenging the roles of traditional Bollywood heroines.

They're unpredictable, sometimes humorous, sometimes sexually adventurous, and they're all leading characters, rather than orbiting a man. The heroines of films including Sister Midnight, Santosh, Girls Will Be Girls, All We Imagine as Light and Shadowbox are giving international audiences a chance to see female characters from India who differ from most traditional Bollywood heroines. But do Indian audiences want to watch them – or will they even be able to?

A feral bride in an arranged marriage that neither she nor the groom particularly want, Uma is the protagonist of Karan Kandhari's spiky comedy Sister Midnight, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a Bafta. Well-known Bollywood actress Radhika Apte, who plays her, is shown struggling with household chores. "Men are dim," her neighbour tells her. "They'll eat anything. Just add chilli and salt." Uma informs her awkward groom, who has gone on a week-long drinking binge, that he "stinks" and tells her employers sarcastically when they offer her a cleaning job that she's "a domestic goddess". 

Told through offbeat dialogue, physical comedy and a punkish soundtrack that includes Iggy Pop, Sister Midnight presents a heroine unlike anything else filmed in India, according to Apte. "I'd never read anything like it before and I couldn't put it down," she tells the BBC. "I was completely taken by Uma, she was this crazy creature, and I didn't know why I resonated with her, but I just did. It was going to be a very thin line playing her between it being really cool and it going wrong. And that excited and challenged me. I also like how unapologetic Uma is and the more she accepts herself, the freer and stronger she becomes."  

Uma is the latest character that offers a different kind of female protagonist to Indian viewers, one who differs markedly from the traditional Bollywood heroine. "Bollywood", the name for Hindi-language studio cinema, has historically dominated the Indian box office, making around $1.36bn last year. But it's also been accused of being "sexist and regressive" in its attitude towards women. In 2023, a landmark study in India examined some of the country's biggest hits in of gender representation and sexual stereotyping, and found what they described as a "formula" to many of Bollywood's female characters. 

"The female lead has to be thin and beautiful. She has to be coy and demure who expresses consent through gestures rather than words, but [she] wears sexually revealing clothing and has to be somewhat modern to allow for her to be in a pre-marital relationship which is a transgression," Professor Lakshmi Lingam, the project lead for the study, told the BBC at the time. "There's very little attempt to do something different."

The depiction of both male and female characters on screen is important, she added, because "in India, where families and schools rarely teach about sex education and consent, all our responses are influenced by books and cinema".

By contrast, the male stars of the biggest Bollywood films of 2023 were described as "led by alpha male protagonists with rippling muscles and blazing guns brandished on screen as they went on a bone-crunching rampage to vanquish their enemies". The hit films included Shah Rukh Khan's Pathaan and Jawan, in which he plays a spy and vigilante, as well as the much-criticised, hyper-violent Animal, starring Ranbir Kapoor, a film accused of misogyny and objectifying women. It was made by Sandeep Reddy Vanga, whose previous film Kabir Singh showed the male lead openly stalking and harassing a woman and was the second biggest Bollywood movie of 2019. 

There have been hit films showing women in roles of authority, including female rocket scientists in Mission Mangal, also one of the most successful Bollywood films of 2019, and films praised for a modern perspective on gender roles, such as Karan Johar's Rocky aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (Rocky and Rani's Love Story). But nevertheless Shubhra Gupta, the film critic for daily newspaper The Indian Express, laments the lack of "wriggle room" India's leading ladies generally have in their roles.

"These heroines' overriding principle is demureness," she tells the BBC. "You can have flashes of spirit, or you may speak your mind, but you'd also be just right in of beauty, and you'd be very clearly subservient to the leading man and whatever he is doing. You are pretty much always bringing up the rear, with a few scenes in which you get to shine."

In Sandhya Suri's recent drama Santosh, however, a Dalit woman (from the lowest caste in Indian society) is as a police officer, with the authority that brings. Santosh inherits her husband's police officer job when he dies in service, something that's possible on comionate grounds for government employees in India. Santosh, played by Shahana Goswami, is an enigmatic character who finds corruption in her local police force when a young girl is raped and murdered. She has a female boss, played by film and TV actress Sunita Rajwar, who has learned to compromise to stay at the top.

Suri, previously a documentary maker, says she was influenced in making it by the real-life gang rape and murder in 2012 of a young woman on a bus in Delhi, which made worldwide headlines and led to new laws to safeguard women. (Despite that, sexual violence against women and girls remains high in India, and a 2022 report found that cruelty by a husband or his relatives remained the biggest crime against Indian women.)

"There were big protests at the time [of the rape and murder], and I saw the photo of a female cop being confronted by some very angry female protestors. I saw that image and I saw the expression on the cop's face, and it was so enigmatic that I was just very, very taken by it. It was so interesting. She was at both ends of power. There was the possibility of violence against her, but [it was] also possible for her to mete out violence as well with that uniform," Suri tells the BBC.

"I wanted to know if you took somebody like Santosh, shut up in the kitchen of her house, and you put her in that place, what's her response to that">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });