Are we finally accepting our heroines in lead roles?

Bollywood or Indian Cinema is more than just entertainment for Indians....it is like a celebration of life. People blindly follow their favorite stars ...be it the goatee style beard from Aamir Khan's character in "Dil chahta hain" or the long hair of Salman Khan in "Tere Naam", people have blindly copied them all. It is needless to say that even if real life, people believe and follow their movies and stars very seriously. The "Raj of DDLJ" has been the prince charming of millions of young girls throughout India. Every young girl saw herself as Simran waiting for her Raj to come and rescue her from "saat samundar paar". Basically, Bollywood mostly shows women following norms, values, customs, highly dependent on the approval of the male members in her life (father, brother, husband,son ) who needs to be protected and rescued.

Indian Cinema has always been more of a male dominated space just like the country. Actresses were merely for few dances, skin shows and minor side roles. It is always the hero who takes up eighty percent of the screen space, fights with the villains and wins everyone's heart. It is always his story. Ofcourse some women centric movies like Mother India, Aandhi, Arth were released from time to time featuring some of the best talents the industry has ever seen Nargis, Suchitra Sen, Shabana Aazmi, and many more but the numbers are very less. These movies somehow got lost among the huge number of Hero-dominated movies. 

Times have been changing and our country has been progressing. Our women are progressing in all fields. This change is even reflected in our Indian film industry....movies like Nobody killed Jessica, Kahaani, Mary Kom, Neerja, English Vinglish, Piku, NH10, Queen and many more movies with women is the lead role are rapidly on a rise in India. These movies are being accepted and loved by the audience. The audience is slowly accepting these kind of movies with women lead.

Women-centric movies don’t typically make lot of money as compared to blockbusters starring the biggest male stars.  No wonder, our female leads today complain about unequal pay. As of now, these women-centric movies are mostly low budget movies and are not becoming blockbusters yet but I am sure slowly we'll get there too.    

What we need to understand is that a major section of Indian population is still uneducated but this section have access to cinema. A rickshaw puller from a small town doesn't mind spending a day's income on a Salman Khan movie. Cinema actually have a huge influence on them, on the way they think, the way they behave socially. We can use this media to change the mindset of people and our social condition to make the country a better place for women. Most of the filmmakers are not ready to take this risk of making something different. They are concerned about their movie's profit, they have to enter the 100 crore club. Infact, to make a movie hit, they often add item numbers which mostly objectifies women. This is adding more and more to the already existing social evils. 

Slowly we are breaking the stereotype and heading in the right direction. These kind of movies should be more encouraged . More women centric movies should be made and more money should be invested in them.