Dangal trailer: What Aamir Khan's film can do for Haryana

With the trailer for Dangal out, Aamir Khan's latest film - to be released in December - is likely to benefit from the stellar performance of female Indian athletes at this year's Olympics.

From Sakshi Malik to PV Sindhu to Dipa Karmakar, Dangal - with its rough and tumble of the wrestlers' sand pit - pays a timely tribute to the grit of our woman athletes.

The conversation over women's rights has been ably assisted by films this year. Before Dangal, there was Pink, a remarkable film on consent and choice, its iconic "No means no" becoming a rallying cry in support of a woman's right to her body. Politically too, with the focus on triple talaq and its likely abolition, women's rights have taken centre stage.

Writing in Economic Times today, Prasoon Joshi pointed to the fallacies of the liberal narrative when it comes to feminism: "Let's take women's empowerment… It's a clarion call and rightly so. But often it is reckoned that a working woman alone is the empowered, liberated woman. Do we end up shifting women from one stereotype to another? For a woman who chooses, as a personal right and wish, to not be professionally employed, is made to fall out of the purview of the progressive/ "liberated" bracket. Doesn't true freedom and progressiveness lie in exercising choice?"

Joshi takes issue with what he calls the "bigotry of free thinkers" but in fact, his focus on choice is a common refrain that can be distilled from nearly every liberal argument on female empowerment.

If a woman wants to wear a burqa, that's her choice, and so should be respected, we are told. If a woman wants to observe Karva Chauth, that's her choice, and who are we to call it regressive?

Today choice is the final stop on the journey of good intentions, notwithstanding Saint Bernard's admonition about the road to hell.

The "choice" argument, like all arguments surrounding this emotive issue, is both true and false, and can benefit from nuance. We think of choice as an individualist stance divorced from external forces.

But lives are not built in isolation - they are affected, via the osmosis of influence, by the social and cultural milieu surrounding a person. If covering one's face is marketed as the definition of a woman's modesty, can we truly put down a woman's eagerness to wear a burqa as "choice"?

If a woman is conditioned to think some terrible fate will befall her husband should she not fast on Karva Chauth, does she truly have the freedom to exercise choice in the matter?

Here too, the ideal of the liberated woman comes into play. If there is an educated, what Joshi calls Westernised, woman who wishes to keep Karva Chauth because she remembers it as a time of celebration and festivity from her childhood, perhaps her decision can be put down as choice. Indeed, there are couples in the metros who fast for one another on that day, in keeping with a beloved tradition that they repaint in egalitarian hues.

Consider the burqa. There are some liberals who defend it on the grounds that a woman should have the right to choose her own modesty. True, but how can covering the face be a barometer of modesty?

If we permit the idea of the burqa under the guise of modesty, then are we not ominously branding as immodest those women who choose not to wear the burqa?

Women anyway have to perform to ideas of proper and improper in dress and conduct. Why then should we support the idea of the burqa under the guise of choice?

Dangal is based on the real-life story of Mahavir Singh Phogat who taught wrestling to his daughters Babita Kumari and Geeta Phogat, both of whom went on to win medals in international sporting events.

In one scene in the trailer, Sakshi Tanwar, who plays Aamir's wife in the film, asks him why he is encouraging his daughters to wrestle, when it's a male sport. His answer: "My daughters are no less than my sons." That answer may appear jarring to the liberal, equate as it does a girl's worth to how closely she simulates a boy.

But in Haryana's hinterland, where the film is based, that statement and the idea behind it can do more to shatter stereotypes and attitudes than the liberal's magnificent visions of choice.

Also read - How an Indian wrestler defied gender taboos to make his daughters Olympians