That telling moment in Naam Shabana about freedom that women need to fight for
There’s a telling sequence in Naam Shabana. When Shabana Khan (Taapsee Pannu) tells the man from the agency who has been tracking her movements, played by Manoj Bajpayee, that she wanted to do India proud in sports by winning medals, he tells her, you were made for less ordinary things.
By that, of course, he means that she is made for spying for her nation, joining the breed of silent sentinels who get no glory and no fame, but who work as hard as soldiers on the border to keep the country safe.
It’s telling because even as Bollywood discovers woman power, and tries to give women autonomy, it can only find limited ways to grant them that. Sport, yes. And increasingly, through fighting crime and terror.
“I had almost given up on your generation,’’ says Bajpayee’s Ranvir Singh. “It’s nice to hear revenge in the voice of pain,’’ he adds as he tries to recruit Shabana, who has just lost her boyfriend, and is looking for vengeance. That she is a Muslim is a perk, he says, making one of the most loaded statements in the movie —which assumes that all terror is Islamic in origin.
Like the girls in Dangal, who could get away with short hair, eating chicken, beating boys and yet not compromising the “izzat” of their Jat community, Shabana can get away with enormous freedom, including not answering any of her mother’s questions and walking in and out of her home at will, because she is a sportswoman-turned-special agent.
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| Akshay Kumar (Ajay) has a habit of turning up and dragging her about by the elbow in the most unseemly way. |
This is a genre of female hero that American TV revels in. In Homeland, and less so in Quantico, the special agents are above and beyond the law. Carrie, played by Claire Danes, grapples with bipolarity and now the travails of single motherhood, but still manages to keep national interest first. In Quantico, Priyanka Chopra is athletic, intelligent and enigmatic, as she uncovers plot upon plot to keep America safe.
Shabana Khan, twice marginalised as it were — first as a Muslim, then as a woman — has a dual burden to bear. Like her eventual superior, Feroze Ali Khan (played by Danny Denzongpa, she has to prove her loyalty to the motherland). And as a woman, she has to prove she is the man’s equal, even though her handler, played by Akshay Kumar (Ajay), has a habit of turning up and dragging her about by the elbow in the most unseemly way.
Shabana’s athleticism is important. She is excellent at Kudo, trim and fit, a lean, mean fighting machine who only needs a go ahead. Her body is not made for titillation and she spends most of the film dressed in sportswear and in running shoes, when training, and in asexual pants and shirt while on duty.
It’s in stark contrast to the way other women are portrayed. There’s Ajay’s wife, in a gag now running thin and carried over from Baby, who always manages to call her husband while he is in the midst of some nation-saving task. There’s the villain’s foreign girlfriend whom he escapes to meet, dressed in a bikini throughout her appearance on screen, simpering when she is gifted a string of pearls.
There are some Russian girls in Goa, keeping rich boys from Delhi company, happy to offer sex in return for free drugs and free food. And there’s another escort type who quite happily offers a back rub to Ajay in a bathtub (don’t even ask) and is then trussed up for her troubles.
The lesson in this is clear — women are secondary characters, who acquire some importance only if they decide to engage in nation-building acts. Otherwise they are, like the forthcoming Begum Jaan, so independent that they are completely outside the pale of society — their bodies meant for the pleasure of men, they have no social standing and no social sanction.
There are some minor joys in the Naam Shabana genre of screen women. It is a relief to see the woman’s body as an object of aspiration rather than sexual stimulation. It is equally a pleasure to see a man telling a woman he feels safe around her (presumably because she will defend him). And, of course, nothing can beat the thrill of watching Taapsee Pannu cracking bones and smashing skulls with her bare hands — there is a satisfying crunch to her punches and an abandon with which she throws them — much like the swagger in the Dangal girls’ wrestling moves.
But it is also telling that the freedom of a woman has to mean something, has to have an end, has to be for a greater good. Freedom, in itself, the kind that men and boys enjoy, is still something that women on screen and off it, need to fight for.