Only 23 per cent of character roles are played by women in Hindi films: Report

What if nonbinary trans and queer characters are featured in all kinds of films and not necessarily only in films on sexuality What if one regularly saw characters with nonupper caste surnamesWhat if films routinely featured a disabled banker a trans doctor a journalist from a socially disadvantaged caste or a darkskinned model or a woman police officer from an ethnic minority backgroundmdasheven when the film is not necessarily about their marginal identities These questions are so obvious that you might chide yourself for not thinking of them first And yet it took an 83page report analysing hundreds of portrayals of women in Hindi cinema to raise themIn their report titled Lights Camera and Time for Action Recasting a Gender Equality Compliant Hindi Cinema the School of Media and Cultural Studies of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences TISS brought to light the fact that gender representation in mainstream Hindi films is skewed towards maleoriented stories and narrativesThe central finding of the study was that only 233 percent of characters in films released over seven years are played by women with males dominating 764 per cent of the roles Even this low representation of women is fraught with problems The characters are always fairskinned with a lean body type and were more often than not showcased through voyeuristic camera anglesThe research looked at films like Kabir Singh which received backlash over the titular male characterrsquos treatment towards the female protagonist as opposed to womencentric movies like QueenThe 18monthlong study evaluated 35 films 25 of which were the highestgrossing theatrical releases of 2019 as well as 10 womencentric films between 2012 and 2019 The year 2019 was chosen as the base year of the study because it was the last year before major theatrical releases were impacted by the pandemic This time frame also witnessed significant events changing the landscape of the film industry such as the Nirbhaya rape case the Me Too movement and amendments to laws against sexual assault and harassmentldquoA lot of what we view is already conditioned by our upbringing so we donrsquot lsquoseersquo many thingsrdquo says Dr Lakshmi Lingam retired professor and dean of the School of Media and Cultural Studies who spearheaded the research ldquoWe have a lot of normalising of bodyshaming gaslighting and negativity which are part of the dialoguesrdquoFrom the muchhatedKabir Singh to the widely hailed Queen TISSrsquo researchers studied 1930 speaking characters on the basis of 50 subparameters such as appearance types of roles clothing sexualisation consent and intimacy and sexist humour among others Interestingly the four researchers analysing the charactersmdashall womenmdashwere initially unable to recognise the presence of sexism and stereotypical humour in the dialogues and had to be trained to discern hints of subtle sexismLingam adds that womencentric films ldquofocus on issues dealing with family sexuality and mental healthrdquo while boxoffice hits deal with war stories crime and the underworld politics and actionoriented narratives Speaking at the launch event of the report on Wednesday actress and filmmaker Nandita Das said that womenrsquos stories are a space for exploring the rich world of womenrsquos inner lives However she said that can become problematic when viewed as the only types of stories ldquoallowedrdquo to be told about womenThe research team also evaluated the films on the basis of the BechdelWallace test which is a measure of the representation of women in films and other works of fiction The test seeks to check whether a film features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man In this case the results were hardly surprisingWhile 100 per cent of womencentric films passed the Bechdel test only 36 per cent of box office hits made the cut Lingam noted that in the boxoffice films the topics that female characters discussed veered towards the domestic realm including themes of cooking religious rituals dressing or issues of infertility while in the womencentric films critiques of patriarchal values and systems cropped upldquoCinematic voyeurism of women translates into thirdrate dialogues that are an outcome of the male gaze even when directed at working women characters in roles of doctors engineers or journalists Men in films tend to see a woman more as a body than as a person holding a professional positionrdquo Lingam saysShe explains that while the percentage of working women in films stands at 42 per cent as opposed to the real life national average of 294 per cent it is a doubleedged swordldquoIf we work towards changing the representation of women minorities and persons with disabilities behindthescenes onscreen stories too are bound to changerdquo she says ldquoProduction houses need to showcase more variety in stories We canrsquot have a cosmetic change on the screen while at the backend things continue to be the samerdquo3637Box office films that passed the Bechdel test as compared to 10037 of womencentric films