The predicament of a sexist and deeply patriarchal Telugu cinema has been talked about ad nauseum. Fixed gender roles, aggressive and abusive masculinity, and a pungent male gaze are written all over the standard “masala screenplay”; and little new needs to be said. If ‘find a strong woman character’ were a drinking game, the Industry would be a boring-sober party. The position of the female lead is not all that distant from the erstwhile-vamp and the current “item dancer” (perhaps why the institution of the specialised dancer has been purged of and replaced with the ‘heroine’) – that of an object exuding sex appeal. The phenomenon of the item number, an essential component of mass cinema, a signature of TFI 101, does not do much more than trivialise sexual harassment explicitly in its lyric. Finally, the biggest issue has been the hero – a repository of compulsive desire and unstoppable male ego.
Sadly a jaded audience and film-world have mistaken two things for a strong female lead. One, she must kill – literally; violence and ferocity by the heroine are read as signs of progressive screenplay. The obvious issue with such a view is not that stories of strong women who fight wars, shed blood, and enter the bloodied world of male politics are not interesting. It is rather that neither do they necessarily signify a strong woman character nor is it the only refuge therein. Secondly, politics and violence are supposed at the onset itself as entirely and unequivocally as men’s arenas so much so that the only way to challenge the masculine narrative is to force a woman into it. The stark assumption is in need of revamp.
The other pseudo-strong female lead role is one which either lends a dialogue-heavy or more fundamentally acting-heavy meaty part to the hands of the heroine. What is flustering is the wide currency this fallacy has managed to earn. Films like these too get slotted as ‘heroine-oriented films’. The simple fact remains – long lines and powerful histrionics have no correlation with reasonable, interesting, and realistic women characters.
In other words, as much as Nilambari may be an epic character in South India’s glorious history, the film Padaiyappa/Narasimha has only buttressed the feared image of the untamed and desirous woman, the trope of femme fatale. Majili and its lead Samantha only glamorise patriarchy, social expectations around marriage, and toxic relationships. Arundhati’s well, Arundhati has little to do with feminism.
What we need instead is far simpler – a woman free from male gaze, in essence a human being who is not stripped of their humanity. .
And here is a list of some such well-written, inspiring female leads from the last two decades.
Roopa from Anand: In the world of Telugu cinema, the movie is a miracle, a magic spell, a feat that is seldom achievable and one that has not been pulled off since! Starting with a humble twenty screens in the city for two weeks, it has come today to become one of the most memorable “morning coffee-like” experiences to laidback watchers and film-buffs alike. Few people realise while watching this delicious, soothing and gentle drama, that its run-time is abnormally high for the era it was released in. And what holds the film together – is the way the character Roopa is written. Filmmaker Sekhar Kammula has recollected that the film was based on the thesis submitted at his film school in the US. The one snippet he added to it – the female lead jeopardising her wedding on account of a dispute over a wedding saree is one of the most defining cine-moments of the 2000s. The film’s brilliance lay in the coherence that this apparent act of obstinacy can have with the rest of the heroine’s character make-up. She is someone who stands on her feet and refuses to budge for other men’s whims. Anand made Anands out of all of us – like him we too fall head over heels for her uncompromising confidence, sensibility, and humanness. The film is all about her expressing her love, revealing her warmth for something she truly desires and longs for – Anand.
Janaki from Gamyam: Yet another solid delivery from Kamalinee Mukherjee. This movie proves that it does not take longer screen-time or loftier lines for someone to be given a rightful seat in the centre of the film. All Janaki needed to be the film’s lead was the line “premanu preminchina prema premakai preminchina premanu premistundi” that inebriated the day’s young audiences. Janaki is not a multi-faceted figure with glaring gaps and a profound character arc like several of the others in the list; she is but a muse that stirs a change in the “hero” and pushes him to tap within himself the spirit that can care. She is however a beautiful muse, spectacularly tantalising, and richly mysterious. Never reductive and enticing in all the perfect ways.
Lavanya from Ashta Chamma: Now what is sensibility? To be sensible means to be cohesive within the structure of rationality that a character or a community comes from. It does not mean always that one should do the right thing at every moment in time. The world is too rich to be stoic and too meaningless to be driven. One could be goofy and be superbly intelligent. This is a lesson that Telugu cinema needs to learn (NTR Jr and Mahesh Babu films deserve remedial classes in this lesson too; the eyelids being strictly parallel to one’s eyebrows). None can teach this lesson better than Lavanya from Ashta Chamma. The film as much as begins by setting up the absolutely ridiculous premise of a girl who is hellbent on wedding a man named Mahesh, from dejection over his wedding with his then-co star Namrata Shirodkar. What follows is a rollercoaster ride of a film screen-written, earnestly inspired from Importance of Being Earnest. Few actresses have displayed the kind of timing that Swathi in this film has; few ever had the opportunity to. The film is nothing short of a contemporary comedy classics standing proudly alongside the gems of Jandhyala with its timeless and clever references to Telugu films, lines from popular parlance, and unstoppable wordplay. Whoever thought a scene featuring a school-girl being an inspiration to Puri Jagannadh would crack up an entire audience! If not anything else, this must be watched to see Swathi inhaling deeply and uttering the name ‘Mahesh’ with a relieving gasp.
Saroja from Vedam: “We sell ourselves with clothes off, you sell yourselves with clothes on. That is all.” Saroja, a sex-worker mutters these lines in a police station with a cop. There are few films that rage with courage like Vedam – and the final straw in breaking all taboos is putting up Saroja played by an inimitable Anushka as lead, and one without a love-interest. She loves herself in all her scintillating glamour, the hardships of the trade and the challenges therein. She loves her ever-elusive freedom for which she sings “egiripothe entha baguntundi” (how nice it would be if I fled!) In a value system where a woman’s self-love is read purely as unquenchable ambition and selfishness, every stride of Saroja is a breeze of hope and bliss. In the walk to start her own business, she stumbles at several pitfalls; in a very subdued climax she remarks that she can trust no man in this cruel system and hence liberates herself and her best friend, Karpooram, a Hijra.
Anandhi from Yevade Subrahmanyam: Telugu cinema has been obsessed with the ‘pichi pilla’ trope, a female lead filled with a single solid hue: whimsicality. Yevade Subrahmanyam takes this trope and twists to make its audience realise the virtue that living life to the fullest and yes, with whimsicality is. One of her life’s dreams is to see a butterfly unfurl from its cocoon. Her profession however is training little children and ‘house-wives’ in karate. Since she has had no friends she adopts an old woman and gets herself a grandmother. It is unlikely that one run into such a woman in real life; the essential strain of her living is unpredictability. No two days of your days are to be lived the same way. However it is precisely this way of life that transforms Subrahmanyam, the cut-throat “practical” investment-banker (who by the way uses SWOT Analysis to choose his match) into a life-affirming, embracing life-force. If only we could all live like Anandhi for a moment in our lives.
Chitra from Pellichoopulu: Pellichoopulu is one of the films where the present is conscious of history-making in progress. Preyadarshe’s mumble “naa saavu nenu sastha neekenduku” took filmgoers by storm. Yet again this is the story of a girl being an inspiration for a healthy change in a boy; except she is not a mute muse but one with the power of initiative. She is a dignified woman who takes the man who deserted her with a pinch of salt. She finds no inhibition in being a boss – for that is what the “hero” needs, a boss who exposes his flaws and glaring failures to him by leading with example.
Bhanumathi from Fidaa: You knew Sekhar Kammula was back in full form when Roopa got slightly overshadowed with a new thug. Except now the lead is conscious of her rebelliousness and force and is unafraid to garner attention to it – “Bhanumathi, okate piece. Rendu kulalu, rendu mathalu. Hybrid pilla!” The filmmaker in scripting the racy, ticklish sequences of the fantasy that Fidaa is, puts a mirror before the toxic stories that all stalking boy-loves-girl romances are. The creepy things that boys do to girls in all films, Bhanumathi does to Varun but now, it is much more sensitive. It is playful, not predatory. It is fun, not raunchy. Learning that Varun fears lizards, she drops them in his room. She clicks photographs of him dressed in a Dhoti, shivering after an early morning cold water bath. She also does the undoable and breaks the holy covenant of traditional cinema – she desires him and worse, with a caveat! As we all know right from the beginning, Bhanumathi is the winner.
Anjali from Chi La Sow: While maturity is always a badge of honour and especially in the case of women, this film is quite in-your-face about maturity and conversely, the childishness of its heroine and hero respectively. While being the working woman to pay the bills for her mother, Anjali also has to shoulder the burden of marrying – a clear inconvenience that she is squeezed into by the unhealthy and demeaning expectations of tradition and popular civility; a social fact that the film does not shy from. Yet, again, Rahul Ravindran paints the avastha of Anjali with decency and never for a moment allowing sympathy to swamp the character. Anjali complains for a few moments here and there but challenges these societal demands with largesse; she is always a greater character than the crookedness of the community she is surrounded by. As if the canvas that Anjali is was not sufficient, she has the man-child, Arjun to marry apparently.
Saleema from c/o Kancherapalem: If one film had to be chosen to represent the ongoing renaissance of Telugu cinema, I always wanted it to be c/o Kancherapalem. And no other character in this movie is as unforgettable as Saleema, despite her fleeting screen time. The audacity of the film maker to take a character, an abject object of patriarchy (prostitute in this case) and recast them in the glory of their essential humanity is no less feat. When the protagonist asks for her hand, she dares him if he thinks of himself as a male savior. However he persists, agreeing to all her conditions assuring her freedom. He confesses to her later, ‘You live on your own terms. And that is why I fell for you”. In a world of objectified and assaulted female identities, acknowledging their free spirit is the quietest act of rebellion.
Bebakka from O Baby: I always felt that Nandini reddy bears the onus of being the only non-male director in TFI. Yet she pulls off her movies so gracefully, subtly breaking stereotypes. The film has two things to do – paint a bleak world, with relentless humour always and lightness of being, where younger generations get tired of old people, and make one sensitive to women. How the latter? The film takes a complicated route. Bebakka is barely kind. Her meanness is hardly likable (she therefore lacks the charms that Anjali, Roopa, and Bhanumathi, the feminist icon of Telugu cinema so-to-speak are embellished by); only her childhood friend Rajendra Prasad has had a lifetime to master the patience needed to deal with her. Yet, she is human. Meanness is her human way of expressing love. At the end respecting women is no specialisation, no sui generis aim – but respect for all humans and their humanness. This film’s bonus is of course amazing for giving us two Bebakkas – the unparalleled Lakshmi being unmatchably sassy and a young Samantha being raunchy in impersonating a geriatric.
Honourable mentions:
Meghana in Missamma
Divya in Naa Autograph
Jessie in Ye Maaya Chesave
Catherine in Gentleman
Pallavi in Ninnu Kori
Kali in Awe
Sameera in Sammohanam
Sarah in Jersey
Mitra in Brochevarevaru Ra
Chitra Sagarasangamam 