Feminism Has Become a Brand: Neeraj Ghaywan on Women in TV and films.

After assisting Anurag Kashyap in Ugly and Gangs of Wasseypur, director Neeraj Ghaywan went on to make the critically-acclaimed film Masaan in 2015. Recently, he spoke at Needle 2017, a communication conclave on women and girls, organised by BBC Media Action India. He talked about how the documentary film The World Before Her impacted the way he sees women and gender. He also talked about his mother who, like several Indian women, got married at a very young age and lived her entire life for her husband and her children.

Apart from discussing male entitlement, token feminism, being an atheist, and how his mother's fate fueled a major part of his anger towards the existing gender inequality in our society, he also held the media responsible for portraying repressed and regressive content.

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Read the excerpts here.

On the women of Masaan

"It was not a conscious decision to make them so strong. Me and my writer Varun Grover are both feminists, but we aren't women. We cannot ever experience what women go through, we can only empathise. We cannot actually say this is how women feel.
Here I was making the film Masaan, which opens with a small town girl watching po*n. So, we got a focus group with 17 girls, all of them from small towns. All of them had watched po*n, and most of them had boyfriends. I was delighted to hear this because we always say that rural women are regressive and repressed."

On the current state of TV shows

"My mother and my sister used to watch Udaan (1989), and my sister was so inspired by that TV series. Then my mom would watch Saans, Rajani, and Surabhi. And here we are now, my mother is watching Udaan (2014), but it's a totally different show. We have TV shows like Naagin, which makes me wonder where have we regressed. TV shows are now so regressive that I want to go back and try to understand why this happened. This is my theory that the producers, the content creators, think that the class that we dish to, they like this. Whereas the actual people, they aren't so regressive. They want to see change, but they are like, 'Dikha rahe hain toh dekh lete hain.' This idea of what women are is a figment of the content creator's imagination, they think this is how actual women are like. These women (on TV) are always salwar kameez-clad and sanskari."

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On films that celebrate women

"We are celebrating films like Piku, and a lot of other women-centric films. It's all commerce. Feminism has become a brand, it sells. It makes a lot of sense to make them now."

On the responsibility of content creators

"As content creators in media - in television, in cinema, everywhere - it's very essential to have responsible content creation. It is very essential for us to present women with certain dignity.
There's a film I saw recently, where the wife got raped. After that the husband becomes the victim. She says, 'I totally understand given the things that has happened to me, if you want to walk away from the marriage. That's okay with me.' And there's not a word from the husband! So the next day, she commits suicide. This is why I spoke of responsibility, where they at least show women with dignity."

On presenting women as human beings first

"It's very important that we normalise women. If the woman is going to office and doing great work, and then going back home, please don't say that's the epitome of what a feminist would do. It's normal. That's what a lot of women do. Let's normalise it, let's make them humans, then let's talk of feminism at all."

On presenting women as human beings first

"It's very important that we normalise women. If the woman is going to office and doing great work, and then going back home, please don't say that's the epitome of what a feminist would do. It's normal. That's what a lot of women do. Let's normalise it, let's make them humans, then let's talk of feminism at all."