Give any half-baked idiot a camera, two hangers-on and enough money, and what you get is the shady world of B-grade cinema. The wonder is not that it exists, but the legitimacy it is accorded as somehow representing the “voice of the masses”. When director G. Suraj recently proclaimed that his “low-class” audience pays to see half-clad women, the only difference was he said it on camera. The words are echoed in private by every one of these filmmakers and seen clearly in the cinema they make, but nobody calls them out.
If we take only southern regional cinema, it is nothing more or less than the testosterone-fuelled wet dreams of male filmmakers — fast cars and guns, swagger and gore, and masses of acquiescent, bare-all women. Wearing thin disguises, the same imagery runs through them all. Director Suraj used a telling word in his crude interview — pasanga or ‘boys’. The pasanga want to see skin, he said. He instructs costumers to slash hemlines, he said. He gives the ‘boys’ a good time, he said. Obviously, these films don’t pretend to be much more than mild porn and masala. With fewer laws, they would simply be explicit pornography. Because, pasanga.
Tamannaah, the star named in the interview, protested, and Suraj duly apologised. But that’s hardly enough. All the industry’s women should have united and objected strongly. Which leads to the bigger question — why aren’t enough women putting their foot down in the first place? Of course, the economics makes it hard for actors to walk out of films. But that’s precisely why some sort of association or union is needed to protect female actors from exploitation. Without that, directors, producers, critics and audiences live in an incestuous, unquestioned paradise of mutual back-scratching.
Unless we create a critical mass of women who refuse to participate in these male fantasies, nothing will change. For now, women are trying to reclaim agency by professing that exposing their bodies is a statement of empowerment. In reality, saying no to the couch or to décolletage means endangered film careers. In other words, thereis no agency — they participate in their own objectification because commerce dictates the agenda. This will not change until enough women band up and speak up. The line between empowerment and self-objectification is thin but vital. Women can choose to show off their breasts, waists or legs — as long as there is no economic, social, peer or even fashion pressure to do so. Once these come into play, power structures are immediately skewed.
To come back to those pasanga whose needs film directors are so assiduously fulfilling. They are the same boys who molest women on buses and trains and during New Year’s Eve street parties. Someone posts a video and all of us get duly outraged. But, it would be useful to try and decode the psychology that feeds their frenzy. There is an obvious sense of impunity and entitlement with which they molest women. There is bravado and bluster and desperation to touch a female body. There is macho talk of “teaching her a lesson” for, well, being there.
This year, the videos are from Bangalore, but it is an everyday affair in India. It is a given that young men of a certain kind will molest women whenever they can — it’s practically a national trait.
What feeds it? Everything — there is no sex education in homes and schools, no books, no social frankness about or even acceptance of sexuality, no healthy intimacy between boys and girls. College-going kids, driven mad by hormones, are not allowed to talk to each other. These are classic signs of a deeply diseased society.
In this setting, popular cinema has provided a single unifying, overarching, highly influential and accessible narrative for their consumption and inspiration. And what cinema supplies is this — that women are present for the entertainment of men, they dress provocatively to titillate men, and they deserve to be treated with contempt. It’s a lesson our pasanga have only too happily internalised.
