Damsels in distress

Damsels in distress

Even if remuneration doesn't reflect one's talent, top-ranking heroines in 2007 failed to land significant roles, writes
Derek Bose

This has been a not-too-bad year for Bollywood. You can count a couple of good films like Cheeni Kum and Bheja Fry, a few off-beat experiments like Traffic Signal, Metro, Taare Zameen Par, Khoya Khoya Chand… And then there have been the three runaway hits ~ Guru, Chak De! India and Om Shanti Om.

If you were to put your money on one star to have shone brightest through all these films, the obvious choice would be Shah Rukh Khan ~ followed probably by Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan and Salman Khan. Hritik Roshan did not figure in any of this year's releases; else he too could be a favourite.
Where does this place the ladies?

Think of any top-ranking heroine ~ Aishwarya Rai, Rani Mukherji, Preity Zinta, Priyanka Chopra or Bipasha Basu. You would be hard-pressed to connect her to a single role of significance in 2007. It would seem as though roles are no longer written for our leading ladies. Substitute any of them with a middling Kangana Renaut, Ayesha Takia or Deepika Padukone and it would make no difference to the public perception or box-office prospects of a film.

Little wonder, all of Bollywood's senior glam girls are suddenly finding themselves under-worked and under-paid. While the remuneration of heroes has more than doubled during the past one year, the heroines remain where they were in 2005. Some like Urmila Matondkar have reportedly slashed their rates, but are still without any takers.

In contrast, no top actor today in Bollywood charges less than Rs 15 crore if he has to shoulder a film solo. If he happens to be an Akshay Kumar or Ajay Devgan, the charges are Rs 17 crore. For Saif or Salman, it would be Rs 20 crore. Hritik is already past the Rs 25 crore mark. And as for Shah Rukh, well, not even the sky is the limit!

Now, all these gentlemen were working for Rs 5 to 7 crore per film till last year. Aamir Khan was the first to raise the bar to Rs 7 crore when Bobby Bedi signed him for Mangal Pandey: The Rising. Taking the cue, co-star Aishwarya tried to push her price (and luck) to Rs 2.5 crore, only to be summarily replaced by Amisha Patel. The message was loud and clear: No heroine in Bollywood is irreplaceable.

Only now, after Guru, has Aishwarya managed to cross the Rs 2 crore mark while all those next in line like Kareena Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra are in the Rs 1 to 1.5 crore range ~ effectively, what Rajpal Yadav, Vinay Pathak and other comedians are getting these days. Even a dog, currently shooting for Siddarth Jain's Ronny N Rocky is being paid Rs 1.2 crore!

The last Bollywood heroine who could single-handedly carry a film through was Kajol and that, to a large extent, was because of the string of hits she pulled off, notably with Shah Rukh Khan as her co-star in the initial stages of her career. Before her, there was Madhuri Dixit who built her fan base by pairing with Anil Kapoor, till she became capable enough to deliver hits on her own. Later, she was to return the favour by sharing screen space with Anil's younger brother, Sanjay Kapoor in Raja.

To make matters worse, standard clichs and constructs of the Bollywood narrative began to be demolished. Traditionally, the Hindi heroine ~ regardless of whether she played a mother, sister, daughter or wife ~ has been cast as a Sita persona from the Ramayana myth. (For that matter, the hero always represented Lord Rama, Hanuman and the villain, Ravana.) She epitomised beauty, poise, sacrifice, virtue and all things good on an Indian male's wish list. Any female character who did not conform to these ideals would be promptly sidelined as a vamp, comedienne or shrew.
The formula worked brilliantly towards ensuring instant identification and empathy with audiences, till suddenly, the heroes got adventurous. In a bid to showcase their versatility, they started reinventing themselves in shades of grey, distinct from the sanitized param-purushottam Rama image they personified earlier. The baddies and funny men were sent packing as heroes began playing villainous and comic parts. The public applauded. But when the heroines tried to follow suit, everybody was confused.
This has something to do with the way we like to see our men and women on screen. We can accept a Shah Rukh Khan or Bachchan fooling about as a drunk, or gambling, womanizing and slitting throats with impunity. But when a Kareena Kapoor or Bipasha Basu, as much as performs an 'item' number, we take her to be a "fallen woman". From there, to redeem herself as a suffering, self-sacrificing devi just wouldn't work. Clearly, playing about with moral ambiguity is a prerogative men enjoy and no heroine can afford to take liberties here.
Even then, this can be taken care of, the way Rani Mukherji and Preity Zinta have done in managing their careers. But what is completely beyond anybody's control and has effectively sealed the fate of all heroines is the multiplex boom. Filmmakers now recognise what they call a "multiplex audience" (distinct from "family audiences" of the single screen theatres of yore) and films are made specifically targeted at this viewership segment.
The peculiarity about the multiplex audience is that this is a predominantly young, urban and upwardly mobile generation, having high expendable incomes. More often than not, when it comes to selecting a film from the multi-screen options in a theatre, it is the woman in a group who takes the call and the men simply go by her decision without questioning. Now, women can never connect with another woman, no matter who she is, the way a man does. It is inevitably the male lead star who influences her decision. And that has totally tipped the scales against the so-called leading ladies.
Today, if films are being made without heroines, or that they are having to make special appearances as "item girls", or that they are being crowded out with multi-starrers… The reason is obvious: they have become irrelevant. They have simply reached a point of no return

hmmm.. this article has got some hard facts in it. but once the audiences forget you, it's hard to gain back the place in their hearts again.