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Where did Bollywood’s everyday women go? Bring back the messy queens

Today’s films give women two options: look hot in slow-mo or pick up a machine gun, because apparently, normal human emotions are too boring.

Bollywood has found two easy ways to write women: make them desirable or make them formidable. The first gives us women designed to be watched as eye candy. The second allows women to be admired as warriors—survivors of something so brutal that their toughness becomes their whole character.

While promoting her latest film Gandhari, Tapsee Pannu talked about both. First, she said that filmmakers keep blaming the audience when women are objectified on screen. “Janta maang rahi hai (The people are asking for it),” they claim, as if that ends the discussion.

Pannu’s comments come amid the backlash over Buchi Babu Sana’s Peddi and Yash’s Toxic. Peddi got Janhvi Kapoor into an “objectification” row so heated that Sana had to apologise and re-edit scenes. The audience targeted the camera work, and the emphasis on the actor’s body rather than the character itself, reflecting a male gaze narrative need.

On the other hand, in Geetu Mohandas’ Toxic, female characters were criticised as largely existing through glamour, sensuality, and their orbit around the male lead, Yash. 

This portrayal isn’t limited to two films. Similar complaints have followed big pan-India films for years. Box office hits like the Pushpa series, KGF, and Animal (2023) have shown women reduced to songs, lingering shots, or merely the hero’s motivation. The problem is not that a woman cannot be glamorous and/or sexual. It is when that is all the film knows what to do with her.

Meet the damsel not in distress 

The only other way Bollywood seems to know how to show the female is with a focus on the........

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