Beware of the angry Indian feminazi goddesses

I'm not a film reviewer, but when a mainstream Bollywood film tries to make an honest point about feminist engagement, it's hard to resist. Before you yawn, the discussion is as detached from a feminist rant as the movie itself was. There are so many feminists around me who are increasingly getting embarrassed by this ideology's association. "Feminism" is new un-cool, a "turn-off" almost. Men who've been "victims" of the laws which favour women, who've been mentally Kejri-waling against how public transport, marriage laws and even hookup apps are heavily skewed in favour of women, ask why. The people who refuse to think beyond the ambit of mainstream upper-middle class ask why, in this day and age, is there a need to be a feminist. In the wake of the alleged excesses of feminism, why subject yourself to yet another of those feminazi dosages in the form of entertainment that has a title as annoyingly intimidating as Angry Indian Goddesses?

The backdrop, of this context and more, brings me to the need of review this movie. (Susan Sontag, pardon me, interpretations are needed at times).

So I am glad that the movie did not turn out to be a sermonising tirade on feminism in totality as I was fearing it to be. But having said that, it did not break past the foreseeable script requirements of any female oriented film. Here are a few pros and cons of the clichés laid out in the movie.  

From the character of the struggling actress, Jo, played by Amrit Maghera, comes the insinuation on some reel life real problems like unequal treatment and compensation paid to women performers, on how the media industry defines and shoves the male-female roles in India, on how love connects souls and calms hysteria and how it ultimately dies at the altar after stirring everyone up. In those pads extracted from the bra and flung away was once again a parallel to the feminist excess of bra-burning and male-bashing.

From Mad, played by Anushka Manchanda, came the character of the frenetic bipolar artist whose life literally gets saved by a video going viral on YouTube (yeah, videos and media coverage are the indispensable "they lived happily ever after" for movie endings these days).

From Pam, played by Pavleen Gujral, came the predictable character of that one married girl trapped in a loveless marriage. I sincerely hope it wasn't one of those existentialism-triggered escape routes that the corporate slaves (like me) go through when they meet entrepreneurs and freelancers. I hope that like almost any other married woman, who gets these epiphanies to break free, has the courage to act on them when she re-enters her real world from this Bakhtinian carnivalesque utopian ground that these girls try to create in Goa.  As far as the lesbian couple was concerned, art imitating life, one of the partners will always emulate the clichés of a man. Luce Irigaray, a French feminist and psychoanalyst, discussed the presence of heterosexuality in lesbian marriages. This other partner in a homosexual relationship will be intense, fierce, athletic, one who wears thick kohl and fights on the streets. The character of Nargis, played by Tannishtha Chatterjee, reinforces this stereotype of a sturdy-angry person in the relationship yet again. She is less "fluid" vis-à-vis a female, as feminist theorists would see it. Heck, she wouldn't even get rid of her black band that she ties, or should I say that band that ties her.

Further, linguists and poststructuralists who take after Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida have been trying to deconstruct these watertight gender binaries. "Black" is not the reverse of "white"; it could be any colour on the rainbow spectrum; "fact" is not the opposite of "untruth". It's a game of political narratives and history - history of what version we choose to remember. "Feminism" is not the only answer to "patriarchy"; there are invisible threads of innumerable social-economic and political ideologies in between these two. A "book" and its "movie" adaption are not binary opposites to be pitted against each other, both are different art forms. Similarly, "man" is not the opposite of "woman" or vice-versa.

Now, I respect art and the director's creative will to emphasise an all-encompassing female bonding (which, thankfully, was not a mere Indian version of Sex and the City). The thing that bothers me is that while a self-sustained women's world was being created, it either tried to replace the role of a man with a woman or completely banished men. No, the character of a corporate angry snappy working mother ignoring her child does not have to be reinforced. No, the character of Sandhya Mridul does not have to wear a "black suit" to walk the bride down the aisle.

Men and women aren't supposed to be seen as two ends of the spectrum - feminism is about prioritising individualism, both of men and of women, and keeping the humanistic rights and interests of all genders harmonised. And this is precisely the point this movie unfortunately misses. The Amazonian utopia of an only-female world that the movie sketches further misinterprets feminism for us.

The movie's ending was fairly irrational - which only shows that the movie's approach to feminism would topple the moment they go back from this artificial mental and physical space that they created in Jo's house. In the real world, when the police interrogates about the shootings following the rape, people are not going to stand and protest with these girls. There will be legal and ethical debates and by any stretch of imagination, they are not going to go scot free as shown in the movie.

Rather than putting these stereotypical bubbles of drama together, I (and Balzac) would have loved to see some realism in the movie that had so much potential. To see them outgrowing their scripted types and roles. But of course, there are those eternal infinite polemics about how to script a movie or author a book - to make a character relatable and hence massy and commercial, or to let it loose, unleashing the cavernous web of internal conflicts, making it "artsy" in the process. Pan Nalin chose the former with Angry Indian Goddesses, like most others. Clichés, at the risk of turning the feminists into yet not justifiable feminazis. Can't blame him. Box office returns feed stomachs.