Spectacles in Indian cinema, especially when worn by women, have never really been about acuity of vision, or the lack thereof. They carry connotations about a woman’s beauty or intellect or age, or even her capacity to experience all of life. Sometimes, they are markers of repression, of self-imposed gloom, even raging feminism. For instance, in Mr. and Mrs. ’55 , a bespectacled Lalita Pawar runs a firebrand women’s group. Those she indoctrinates with her anti-male diatribe invariably wear glasses, while the ‘status quo’ women content discussing face creams do not. In the film’s partisan universe, Pawar and her ilk eschew ‘femininity’ for a militancy that is soon brought to heel. It was a stock character Pawar played, with those horn-rimmed frames, in films like Professor and Junglee .
Lens of melancholy
In Satyajit Ray’s film,
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Women hardened by circumstances acquire the lens of melancholia. Jaya Bachchan in Kora Kagaz walks out of her marriage, shedding her child-like irrepressibility for a white sari and black frames. Suchitra Sen in its Bengali original, Saat Pake Bandha, made do with just glycerine eyes. Of course, Bachchan took on the ‘mature’ part when she was just in her 20s. For younger female actors cast as older women, glasses and ‘stray greys’ were preferable to wrinkles; Rekha in Zameen Aasman being a case in point. In Aparna Sen’s Paromitar Ek Din , Rituparna Sengupta’s large glasses allow her to camouflage her grief at the loss of her character’s mother-in-law. She has, of course, aged since she left her marital home, but her eyewear also signifies a self-actualisation arduously earned.
Perhaps the most reductive of cinematic clichés are the young bespectacled women who are characterised as geeky or coy or ‘unpretty’ or even sagacious beyond their years (a case in point: Deepti Naval in
Surprisingly, it took a Nikhil Advani to create a subversion of sorts in
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Likewise, Katrina Kaif in Jagga Jasoos , who is accident-prone to a fault, and Kareena Kapoor in 3 Idiots , who makes for a cute drunk, also wear their glasses lightly. Two years after Ray-Ban was founded, the 1939 film, Chasmawali , featured enigmatic action star Indurani as a female Zorro, whose dark glasses and striped headband provides her all the disguise she needs. Although the film is lost to posterity, it’s a carefree bespectacled character we could certainly have done with more of rather than the stereotypes Indian cinema threw up with alarming regularity.