Window dressing no more. A new wave of female screenwriters is bringing real and relatable women characters to films and web shows
Sonam Joshi (THE TIMES OF INDIA; June 30, 2019)

When Gazal Dhaliwal began working on a film script about a Punjabi girl who falls in love with another girl at a wedding, she took a trip down memory lane. Many of Dhaliwal’s own experiences of being bullied in school for being an effeminate male child, ragged in college, and her father’s support when she came out as a transwoman found their way into the Sonam Kapoor-starrer Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga.

After the film released this year, Dhaliwal received several messages from lesbian women in India and Pakistan. “Many of them had taken their parents to watch the film, and they came out ready to talk to their daughters,” says Dhaliwal.

Dhaliwal is among a growing number of female writers in Bollywood writing stories about real women, and breaking conventions in a film industry that objectifies female actors or presents them as flat supporting characters to the male hero.

In recent years, there have been a growing number of successful films with women screenwriters at the helm: Juhi Chaturvedi for October and Piku, Kanika Dhillon for Manmarziyaan, Dhaliwal for Ek Ladki Ko Dekha..., Nidhi Mehra and Mehul Suri for Veere Di Wedding, Zeenat Lakhani for Hindi Medium, and Pooja Dhala Surti for Andhadhun. “These movies tell women that their stories are worthy of being told. It makes them feel validated,” Dhaliwal says.

“Gone are the days when female characters were just prototypes,” says Kanika Dhillon, who most recently wrote Manmarziyaan and drew upon her own early life in Amritsar to create the spitfire lead Rumi. “The women that I write are real”. One reason for this change is that more actresses are turning producers, says Bhavani Iyer, who co-wrote the 2018 film Raazi. “They want the story to be about them and not just be window dressing.”

The overall representation of Indian women’s stories has been dismal, but there are signs of change. According to a study on gender bias in popular films by the Geena Davis Media Foundation in 2015, only 12.1% of writers in Bollywood were women, lower than the global figure of 19.7%. In 2018, only 19.6 % of the 102 Hindi films released on the big screen were written by women, according to a study by Arre.

These skewed demographics also affect on-screen representations of women. According to a 2017 study of 4,000 Wikipedia pages of Hindi movies released since 1970 by researchers from IBM, The Indian Institute of Information Technology and Delhi Technological University, 80% of movie plots had more mentions of male characters than than female ones.

The credit for change also goes to streaming platforms that offer more opportunities and freedom to women writers. For instance, five out of 11 Netflix Originals and four of the five Hotstar Specials announced so far have at least one woman writer on board.

“The film industry believes they are creating their films for middle India, and most of their audience is male,” says Devika Bhagat, co-writer of the Amazon series Four More Shots Please. Bhagat says it still wouldn’t be possible to make a show like FMSP, which explores themes like bisexuality, one night stands and dating after divorce.

Though a lot has changed, there is still considerable inequality, says Alankrita Srivastava, who co-wrote and co-directed the acclaimed web series Made in Heaven with three other women. “This inequality is systemic and historic. The male gaze has shaped popular culture, the way we watch films, the way films are made,” she says. This extends to the roles women are given and the boxes they’re put in — the slutty vamp, the virtuous wife, or the virginal pure girl — and the lack of interiority in their characters. “The more women there are on set, not just directors but also writers, producers and technicians, the more it will change cinema narratives,” she says.

While OTT platforms are more open and inclusive, women should have equal representation on all mediums, says Srivastava. There remain deep-rooted challenges such as casual misogyny, unequal pay and the pigeonholing of women into certain genres. While the pay gap has been shrinking, Bhagat points out that there is still a 10-15% difference between male and female screenwriters. “I was once told by a line producer that the male dialogue writer deserved more money because he had a family to support and I was single and could just ask my dad for money,” she recalls. Pooja Varma, a co-writer on the second season of Netflix’s Sacred Games, seconds this. “During negotiations, people have asked me to accept a lower fee because I have been assured that I will be protected on set,” she says.

Dhaliwal recalls how a director once refused to hire her for a project though he liked her work “because it’s a man’s story and you wouldn’t be able to write it.” Yet, some writers such as Iyer, who is working on Amazon’s crime drama web series Breathe after Raazi, are breaking this norm. “It makes a lot of sense to subvert the genre if you get a woman writer to do an action film or a male writer to write a saas bahu story,” she says.

Some male directors rely on a collaborative process such as director Sriram Raghavan who worked with writer and editor Pooja Ladha Surti since his debut, most recently in the 2018 film Andhadun. “When we discuss female characters, I rely on her for certain insights I may not have,” he says.

It’s still far from a level playing field but Atika Chohan, who is writing the script for Deepika Padukone’s forthcoming biopic Chhapaak on the life of acid attack survivor Laxmi Agarwal, says there’s a distinct change in what writers like her could have done a few years ago. “It has been a time of transition. Talented female writers and directors who have waited in the wings for a long time are now getting a chance.”