It goes without saying that popular Hindi cinema serves as a medium to convey cultural meaning and identities. For over a century now, commercial Bollywood cinema has been a primary agent of socialisation for the masses, transmitting, reiterating and reinforcing stereotypes about gender roles, behaviours and identities. Women have been, and still are, objectified, and are glamourised on a canvas to satisfy the ‘male gaze’. With time, men too have been sexualised, but women continue to remain central to on-screen titillation.
In this respect, “Manikarnika” carves a new niche in Hindi cinema. For, this is a woman who titillates not just with her superficial glamour, but with sheer intellect, shrewd statesmanship and bravery, quite beyond imagination.
As a film, “Manikarnika” disappoints. This is a film that is structured solely to glorify a persona, and not to narrate the story of a life. From the very first frame, we know that “Manikarnika” is not a woman like any other, for she hunts tigers all by herself, not to kill but to save. Then off she rides into the distance, with her pallu trailing behind her, which tells us that while she is fierce, she is still vulnerable.
At any rate, she is not to be toyed with. But as the film progresses, the script takes a backseat, as it so often does in commercial cinema, and the spectacle takes over, so much so, that by the end of the film, we know very little about Rani Laxmi Bai, except for what we already knew from our textbooks and myths that spoke of the legend of the Rani of Jhansi. What we do know though, is that she is the mortal representation of the Goddess on earth, a force so powerful that her very thought makes pompous officers of the British military break into cold sweat in the middle of the night.
Some might point out that “Manikarnika” is a glorification of the woman, the actor embodying the character. There is truth in that, for sure enough, every frame in the film is constructed to emphasise the hero, catapulting her into a demi-god status. And while the heroism might have come at the cost of what could have been a rich, well-researched biopic, it does not fail to inspire.
As the queen slashes her way through a number of British soldiers single-handedly and stands in front of an idol of Kali, she infuses into the actor playing her, rather than the other way round. Here is a clear statement – Kangna is quite literally the Rani of Jhansi, and members of the film industry better beware. But statement or not, she motivates, and takes feminism in popular cinema to a different level altogether.
Star-worship is an intrinsic part of the Indian culture. It is the lifeblood that makes cinema in this country as strong an opiate of the masses, like religion or cricket. While the idolising of an actor, who is also the director of the film, could be problematic on some level, the fact remains that for once, here is a film where the hero stands tall, towering over the actors, and indeed dominating the script as a whole, and that hero is a woman.
We have seen quite a few women over the past decade or so, who have driven the popular film narrative single-handedly, not relying on men to be their raison d’etre. Actors like Tabu, Vidya Balan, Rani Mukherjee, Kangna Ranaut, Anushka Sharma, and Priyanka Chopra have experimented with roles in women-centric plots, yet, a lot of these films have not been commercial per se, leading the common man on the street to equate women-led narratives with parallel rather than popular.
“Manikarnika” is a clear break from that pattern, for it does not pretend to be anything more than commercial. It is meant to be larger than life, a feminised “Baahubali” if you will, with a stunning woman, and her loyal battalion of female followers, leading from the front. A better script would have brought the audience down to its knees, but maybe, just maybe, we can forgive the amateurish handling of the film, to look at the larger picture.
Bollywood, that reaches out to millions of people around the world, and what is the main means of culturally educating, at least, the urban and the rural-urban masses in this country, desperately needed an uncompromising female hero to penetrate into the popular psyche; for too long have we bowed down to the macho man with the bulging muscles, or the misogynist hero with the stylised swagger. Kudos to “Manikarnika” for giving us a different mental image!