In Lipstick Under My Burkha, the 55-year-old widow played by Ratna Pathak Shah is an avid reader of erotic novels

The first time we see Sandhya in the Sanya Malhotra-starrer Pagglait, she’s yawning, as she scrolls through Facebook messages condoling her husband’s death. When her mother-in-law offers to send tea, she demands a Pepsi instead. Malhotra’s Sandhya is bewildered by why she can’t cry at her loss after a five-month-long arranged marriage. Even as her family heatedly debates her remarrying and what she inherits from her husband, Sandhya, a MA topper, discovers her own identity and freedom.

Many films like Pagglait are now stepping away from the traditional stereotypes of the widow as a tragic, melodramatic and motherly figure. Widowhood becomes a trigger for women to rediscover themselves, and find out what it means to live life on their own terms.

Pagglait’s lead character was inspired by the women in his family, says director Umesh Bist, especially an aunt who took up a job in her late husband’s company despite not having studied much. “After my father’s death, I remember telling my mother I wanted to see her as my mother, and not a widow, that she could continue to wear bangles or coloured saris and enjoy the food she used to rather than give it up,” he says. “I didn’t want to see widowhood as a defining character trait but just one of the circumstances in life.”

If Pagglait’s Sandhya discovers her agency only by the end of the film, the young widow Ratna in the film Is Love Enough - Sir exercises hers at every step of the story. After her husband’s death, Ratna leaves her village to work in Mumbai as a domestic help, trains herself in tailoring and dreams of a better life for herself and her younger sister. Though the film addresses the class divide through a love story between Ratna and her employer, it also follows her journey. “She turns extreme adversity into an opportunity for herself, telling her boss: ‘life khatam nahin hoti’,” director Rohena Gera says.

Something similar happens in the film Once Again in which a financially independent middle-aged widow who runs a restaurant in Mumbai starts a telephonic romance with an ageing actor. “We as a society are far ahead of our storytelling — so many women live like this and we are not being told these stories,” says director Kanwal Sethi. “It was important that the woman wins on all fronts, as a lover and as a mother…She can finally feel the sensuality of her person and focus on her needs,” he says.

Other films are more direct about the question of sexual desire. In Lipstick Under My Burkha, the 55-year-old widow played by Ratna Pathak Shah and addressed as ‘Buaji’ by all her neighbours, is an avid reader of erotic novels who begins to fantasise about her swimming instructor. Similarly, the Kannada National Award- winning film Nathicharami (left) follows a young widow Gowri, struggling to fulfill her physical desires — ordering a sex toy for herself online in one scene — while dealing with social censure. “She has a good job, lives alone with no one to control her but finds it hard to talk to a man about desire,” says director Manso Re, adding that he consciously chose to dress the character in “all colours except white”.

Other portrayals take a more subtle view of freedom. In the film Aise Hee, an elderly widow in Allahabad who we only know as Mrs Sharma suddenly gets the freedom to do little things, like eating ice-cream at the mall, getting a pedicure, learning embroidery and walking by the river. “Her husband’s death gives her the space to think that there are options which she never thought of earlier,” director Kislay says. “In real life, widowhood marks a break, where a lot of women change because they are forced to be more independent.” Mrs Sharma wants to preserve this new freedom, refusing to let her granddaughter move in because she likes being alone.

Kislay says that the film is a departure from the 1957 film Mother India, which in many ways is the epitome of the tragic, sacrificial widow in Hindi film. In one scene, the TV screen in Mrs Sharma’s house literally plays a scene of Nargis saving her children from floods. “Mrs Sharma could have been a Mother India, but what if the person doesn’t want to,” asks Kislay. The role has been essayed by septuagenarian Mumbai-based actor Mohini Sharma, who lives alone herself. There is a similar tone of independence in Tanuja Chandra’s documentary film Aunty Sudha, Aunty Radha, on her elderly widowed aunts who give each other companionship in their sunset years.

Gera, who got many messages from many women struggling with social judgement after their husband’s deaths, says it is important to depart from patriarchal norms. “We are still far from being an egalitarian society,” she says. “It’s great if filmmakers can show what we can aspire to: encouraging women to move on, rather than idealising a tragic figure who has given up on herself.”