This Friday’s release Dum Laga ke Haisha has suddenly brought back old buzzwords of “fat” and “beautiful” and put them together in a non-academic non-revisionist or even non-feminist sort of a way, making even the ordinary Pammi Aunty living next door to me wake up to the possibility that she could be attractive, love handles and muffin top notwithstanding.
So, Yash Raj Films takes a break from all the mainstreaming in designer chiffons against the backdrop of the Swiss Alps and instead presents a gem of a film set in small-town India and featuring an unlikely heroine — Bhumi Pednekar. This sassy plus-sized actress has all the right lines and even her groove is unbeatable as she moves to the 90s beats with confidence. Bhumi is no stereotypical Bollywood stock character but a heroine of our times who like the rest of us mere mortals is not blessed with a size zero body and yet has a fair shot at being strong, successful as well as winning for herself a legit Prince Charming along the way.
We are a fairly unforgiving species, quick to judge, label, categorise and point out flaws of those who live under the harsh and already judgemental limelight. We turn into twitter trolls and feast on easy moving targets — women struggling with the physical baggage of their body weight. Thus the obsession with the magnitude of Aishwarya Rai’s post baby fat and the ruthless comparisons to her Dhoom days, the constant need to fit Vidya Balan’s very Indian body type into entirely inappropriate western norms and more recently to try and understand exactly where Bhumi Pednekar will fit in in a celluloid universe obsessed with chiselled bodies are needless to say regressive as well as dangerous for a society which needs icons who can deliver their substance both of body and mind to the impressionable populace who looks up to them.
While we have gone from worshipping the ample-hipped powerful fertility icons of ancient times, doing the twist with the equally endowed 60s and 70s Bollywood actresses in their figure-hugging churidar kurtas and bouffants to coveting the lean adolescent boy look, we continue to be held captive by representations of female beauty all the way from ancient rock art to modern day cinema, trying valiantly to keep up with these liminal images.
Part of the constantly changing definitions of beauty and femininity, the ideal body image is a shape-shifter, constantly expanding or reducing as per the diktat of the times. This idea of the body percolates from the top of the celluloid pyramid influencers to the bottom-rung followers from the ordinary milieu. Like visitors to the funhouse distorting mirrors, we search for our true reflections. Failing to find an approximation of our silhouettes, we crop ourselves through rigorous and unreal diets and constricting corsets and shapewear. We become overstuffed reflections of our style icons, deluded and miserable, shrinking away from revealing our dimples, our wrinkles, our stretchmarks and our little jiggly bellies, hiding it all in shroud-like sacks masquerading as dresses.
Women need to hear more of “fat is beautiful”, not as a political war cry of the angry bra burners or emblazoned on the hoardings for miracle diet foods, but from their friends and family and the men in their lives, who love them in all their plus-sized glory.