Let’s be honest about what Bollywood did for a very long time.
It gave us the manic pixie dream girl in a lehenga. The mother who existed only to die or to weep. The love interest whose interiority extended as far as the song sequence required and no further. It gave us, with remarkable consistency, a vision of womanhood as decorative, peripheral, and fundamentally defined by her relationship to men.
It also gave us, in the same breath, Smita Patil. Shabana Azmi. Nandita Das. Konkona Sen Sharma. Women who burned through the frame and refused to be decorative. The tension between these two Bollywoods has always existed. What is changing is which one is winning.
The Films That Shifted Something
Queen (2014) did not seem, on paper, like a film that would matter. A jilted woman goes on her honeymoon alone. And yet something about watching Rani navigate Paris and Amsterdam by herself — finding herself, finding joy, finding the radical discovery that she was interesting and worthy of her own story — resonated with audiences in a way that no prediction had anticipated.
Dangal, Raazi, Thappad, Jalsa, Darlings — each placed a woman’s interior life at the centre of the story. Each performed well enough to make the business case for the next one.
The Directors Changing the Conversation
What gives genuine cause for optimism is the filmmakers. A generation of women directors — Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti, Alankrita Shrivastava, Rima Das, Payal Kapadia — are making films of real ambition and honesty. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light winning the Grand Prix at Cannes was not just a triumph for Indian cinema. It was a statement about what Indian cinema looks like when women are behind the camera as well as in front of it.
Why It Matters That We Keep Watching
The films women choose to support with their time and money send signals that the industry reads. Every ticket bought for Thappad, every stream of Delhi Crime, every conversation generated by All We Imagine as Light is a data point that argues for the next honest film about a woman’s life.
Bollywood has not arrived. But it is, finally, moving. And the women watching — and increasingly, the women making — are the reason why.
