Enough has been written about the newly-released Bollywood film Pink in the past two weeks. I will therefore refrain from commenting on the fantastic directing, screenwriting, editing and cinematographic and acting skills that the film has showcased. I will also gloss over the many loopholes in its plot. I will instead concentrate on the framework within which Pink works.

The audience here is paramount, since it determines a film’s commercial success. And the alleged fact that ‘the original climax of antagonist and his friends winning the case was modified so as not to hurt the sentiments of the audience’, perhaps, says more about the filmmaking team’s integrity than all that has been written about Pink till date. It is therefore no coincidence that even while plumbing the murky depths of sexual objectification and gender stereotyping within a dominant patriarchal system, the low budget film has gone on to become a superhit. A reversal of the final verdict would have left a gnawing anger in our guts and a more dangerous impression. The unexpected positive verdict lets us leave the darkened auditorium feeling gratified and vindicated.

On one hand, Pink is a celebration of the coming of age of the female, urban consumer. It is mostly this consumer that has aggressively and positively responded to the storyline and the storytelling devices of the film and made it a superhit. Hollywood films in the 1950’s were primarily meant for the well-off, American, suburban housewife, moving away from the struggling working girls in search of a freeing dream of the 1920’s. One was more focussed on the ownership of female sexuality as a passport to freedom, while the other touted an American way of life based on commodities. With us, the process seems to be going in reverse. We are moving from the dream of owning cars/refrigerators/homes towards one of owning our own bodies and sexual freedom.

But let’s get down to the business at hand. Pink is about three professional young women (Minal, Falak and Andrea), who live independent lives in a rented apartment in New Delhi. One evening, they run into a group of young men at a concert

and decide to go out to a nearby resort for casual fun. Drinks and chatter is followed by an offer for dinner and soon the girls find themselves separated from each other, with two of them suffering physical molestation. One of the girls, Minal (Tapsee Pannu), instinctively fights back Rajveer’s (Angad Bedi) advances and ends up hitting him with a beer bottle, nearly taking an eye out. The girls regroup and take a taxi home.  As luck would have it, Rajveer is the nephew of a powerful politician and the men are soon seeking revenge—revenge that includes harassing phone calls, attempts to displace them from their flat, Falak (Kirti Kulhari) losing her job (and later her boyfriend too), and, finally, Minal’s abduction and molestation in a car. She finally takes the case to the police. Enter Deepak Sehgal (Amitabh Bachchan), as the senile neighbour with a fatally ailing wife. A brilliant but retired lawyer, he takes on the case and history gets made in the courtroom as the final judgment comes out in favour of the three young women.

I wonder how well the audience would have received the film had the pro-active, old, male lawyer beenswapped with an old woman suffering from manic depression and latched with a dying husband. And what if the judge was a woman, too? Would the film then be given a derogatory ‘feminist’ tag and been shoved under the box office carpet? Let’s have no doubts here—it is Bachchan’s superhuman presence that lets Pink an ‘in’ into the Bollywood imaginary. The nuanced insertion of his Deepak Sehgal as an iconic, male superhero into an otherwise everyday situation (possibly unfolding in any of the many courthouses across the region) is achieved with great finesse by director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury and his team. In counterpoint standsan equally supportive Judge Satyajit Dutt, played flawlessly by Dhritiman Chatterjee, in a performance that easily outstrips Bachchan’s.

An extraordinary moment in the film is when Deepak whips back the hood that an embarrassed Minal has drawn close around her head after being pointed out by male passers-by as the woman embroiled in the real-life Surajkund case. Bachchan does this with an unexpectedly violent gesture. But what would otherwise have been an act of disrobing is turned on its head for the act implied Deepak’s insistence on Minal’s right to stand up to the people’s ‘gaze’ with her sense of dignity intact. Had it come from her friends Falak or Andrea, the gesture would have been one of self-aware strength and dignity. Coming from Deepak, it becomes a metaphor for the overall structure of handing out small doses of freedom to a new generation of women. It is unfortunate that the structure of Pink makes it almost mandatory that the pulling back of the hood had to come from Deepak, for that is the space and framework within which the film works. In this particular film the voice of authoritative patriarchy is vitally essential for the feminist/humanist stand to be validated. ‘The Girl’s Safety Manual’ that Deepak mockingly distils from the cross-examination of defendants, and the prosecution, is perhaps more insidious than mere mockery?

The act of ‘looking’ is integral to cinema. It defines the medium. In psychoanalytic vocabulary, the ‘gaze’ belongs to the object, it is the look or presence that the object returns to the subject’s eye. In film theory, the ‘gaze’ becomes more one dimensional. It becomes an act of collusion between the film’s overall vision, the camera and the spectator. The history of mainstream filmmaking has been a history of turning women’s sexuality into a spectacle. A spectacle that is created from a patriarchal standpoint and caters to a predominantly ‘male’ gaze. Pink’s storyline pretends to subvert that gaze. I say it ‘pretends to’ because it allows the woman spectators a space to move away from the conventions of Bollywood voyeurism. But what they are handed is only a limited space in which they can find a mirror of their daily humiliations. It is not a handing over of agency but a reiteration of restrictions. Most reviewers of the film sound grateful that the act of molestation was not shown during the film’s actual length but only in retrospect alongside the final titles. As if this gesture of keeping the female body’s humiliation was a metaphor for the way the film was visualised or scripted.  Nothing could be far from the truth. Instances of voyeuristic gratification are sprinkled across the length of the film—the most obvious being Minal’s sexual harassment in a car and the women’s individual breakdowns at the stand—and should not be glossed over because the film sometimes does aspire towards self-reflexivity by unmasking the same voyeuristic tendencies in some of its characters. The slow, relentless dismemberment of three strong women’s egos and identities yield an immense amount of pleasure here. It charts the passage of Minal (the well-off, new generation woman), Falak (inscribed as the self-willed ‘other’ woman capable of having a relationship outside marriage) and Andrea (Andrea Tariang’s presence tweaks the sentiments of ethnic minorities in a myopic, homogenous India)—a trio of ‘normal’, independent, working girls in Delhi—from active agents of their destinies to passive females at the mercy of the social and judicial systems. I have a feeling that the reason Pink has been a resounding success with its male audience is firstly because of the undercurrent of passivisation and domestication of the feminine—and secondly because of the way the male ‘gaze’ is typically inscribed into its screenplay. For it would be unforgivably amnesiac of us to not remember that Deepak Sehgal goes from a voyeur watching a young woman out on her morning runs to a super heroic lawyer with no logical explanation. There is no explanation in the storyline for why his initial voyeurism should be discounted in the light of his later heroic act of saving the damsels in distress. Does this not make the female body become available for visual, if not physical, assault by definition? This aspect of the story might well be the key towards reading the framework within which the film works.

But here I must admit that the stature and allure of Bachchan does serve its purpose. It is his star appeal that gives Pink at least a ‘hear’, like nothing else could have. Words like ‘virgin’ and ‘sex’ would not have fallen with ease on eardrums had they not been uttered by Bachchan’s gravelly bass. Deepak Sehgal transcends the role of a gallant superhero and becomes the face of God. Just as the individual case of the women transcend its limited application and become an overarching reference for all women in Deepak’s closing statement: in which he categorically mentions ‘sex worker’, ‘girlfriend’ and ‘your own wife’ in a near equal footing, cognising for the first time in Bollywood history, every woman’s right to withhold consent. Even within marriage or a friendship. Particularly coming hard on the heels of the recent, real-life Mahmood Farooqui case, the statement is of immense significance. Nepal has had its own law against marital rape for the past ten years, but it is largely ineffective due to cultural taboos. India has repeatedly failed to criminalise the same, and an attempt was shot down as late as July this year. It is Bachchan’s supra-human stature that carves out a slightly bigger lakshman rekha for women in the face of traditions.

I cannot ignore the resonance that Pink brings up as a title and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy (Red, White and Blue). In Kieslwoski’s case, the three films never quite explained the titles, except through their ambient chromatic treatments. But Pink has very little pink in it, except in the t-shirts that Minal wears while out on a run. So we must look deeper, and remain satisfied with the fact that since the mid-20th century, pink has come to replace blue as the ‘feminine’, in which case this would be a waving flag saying ‘power to women’; or more darkly, is it a reminder of the social construct, the susceptibility of the women’s vagina to violence? The camera did pick up the bright pink socks on Minal’s feet and pink stripes on her track pants right after she underwent sexual molestation in a car.

As the film drew to an end, I sat mesmerised by the clever manipulation I had just been put through. Pink is a very clever film. On one hand it pins down the regressive voice of traditional patriarchy. On the other, it does not subvert it but strengthens it from within. No steps are taken to dismantle it. I must admit that I was a little embarrassed by my tears as the auditorium emptied. And it struck me, just as the strategically placed woman constable reached out a hand to congratulate Deepak Sehgal, she represented the other women that was not upwardly mobile but struggling to make ends meet. She is the ‘normal’ underprivileged, discriminated against and hard working woman as opposed to spoilt individualists like Nilam/Falak/Andrea. And her gesture seals our allegiance to the film. But then I couldn’t help remembering something I had read from Milan Kundera long ago: ‘Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!’ Yes, this is probably the first time that Bollywood has faced up to the social constructs or ‘norms’ that delineate women’s behaviour. But it does so from under the umbrella of kitsch and patriarchy. This makes Pink a new step no doubt, even if an ambiguous one.