Swara Bhaskar in the poster for the film

At the end of Anarkali of Arrah, a film you should've heard of but may not have, I found myself, surprisingly, crying. Not because it has a sad ending - it has a fantastically rousing one. I realised I had been holding my breath, because ever since Anarkali, played here by a million watt Swara Bhaskar, is sexually assaulted in public by a university Vice Chancellor, played with pitch perfect self-regard by Sanjay Mishra, I was waiting for the film to become yet another excuse for patronising women and flattening them into victims, while lauding male filmmakers and male protagonists as saviours.