Indian cinema has mostly used spectacles as a short-cutto more meaningful character delineation
Spectacles in Indian cinema, especially when worn by women, have never really been about acuity of vision, or the lack thereof. They carry connotations about a woman's beauty or intellect or age, or even her capacity to experience all of life. Sometimes, they are markers of repression, of self-imposed gloom, even raging feminism. For instance, in Mr. and Mrs. '55 , a bespectacled Lalita Pawar runs a firebrand women's group. Those she indoctrinates with her anti-male diatribe invariably wear glasses, while the status quo' women content discussing face creams do not. In the film's partisan universe, Pawar and her ilk eschew femininity' for a militancy that is soon brought to heel. It was a stock character Pawar played, with those horn-rimmed frames, in films like Professor andJunglee .
Lens of melancholy
In Satyajit Ray's film, Nayak , Sharmila Tagore plays the editor of a women's magazine trenchantly titled Adhunika (or modern woman'). Once again, her thick black-rimmed spectacles are part of her characterisation as a progressive' person suspicious of a mainstream (and patriarchal) filmstar she's interviewing on a train journey. The glasses represent the intellect of her convictions, but they also prevent her from initially seeing' the finer side of a flawed but genuine human.
Women hardened by circumstances acquire the lens of melancholia. Jaya Bachchan in Kora Kagaz walks out of her marriage, shedding her child-like irrepressibility for a white sari and black frames. Suchitra Sen in its Bengali original, Saat Pake Bandha, made do with just glycerine eyes. Of course, Bachchan took on the mature' part when she was just in her 20s. For younger female actors cast as older women, glasses and stray greys' were preferable to wrinkles; Rekha in Zameen Aasman being a case in point. In Aparna Sen'sParomitar Ek Din , Rituparna Sengupta's large glasses allow her to camouflage her grief at the loss of her character's mother-in-law. She has, of course, aged since she left her marital home, but her eyewear also signifies a self-actualisation arduously earned.
Perhaps the most reductive of cinematic clichs are the young bespectacled women who are characterised as geeky or coy or unpretty' or even sagacious beyond their years (a case in point: Deepti Naval in Angoor ). Countless Cinderella-style tales from Sadhana in Love in Simla to Urmila Matondkar inKhoobsurat have featured women as Plain Janes in glasses who are miraculously transformed into glamorous divas simply by taking them off.
Surprisingly, it took a Nikhil Advani to create a subversion of sorts in Kal Ho Naa Ho , in a scene where Shah Rukh Khan takes off Preity Zinta's glasses only for Zinta to realise how poor her vision is without them rather than awakening to some hitherto concealed allure. While Zinta's character is tellingly called Naina in the film, her spectacles thankfully do not carry too much metaphoric weight in this breezy romantic comedy, although they do add to the general ditziness.
Likewise, Katrina Kaif in Jagga Jasoos , who is accident-prone to a fault, and Kareena Kapoor in 3 Idiots , who makes for a cute drunk, also wear their glasses lightly. Two years after Ray-Ban was founded, the 1939 film, Chasmawali , featured enigmatic action star Indurani as a female Zorro, whose dark glasses and striped headband provides her all the disguise she needs. Although the film is lost to posterity, it's a carefree bespectacled character we could certainly have done with more of rather than the stereotypes Indian cinema threw up with alarming regularity.
