The Millennial Woman in Bollywood : A New 'Brand'?

This book is about how and why Bollywood found it worthwhile to explore the reality of the millennial women who are thriving in India - small part of the demographics but very influential. Advertising discovered women as choosy consumers and influencers. The Hindi film Heroine is a brand and a brand ambassador. The market met contemporary women who are independent, with freer attitudes to relationships, including pre-marital sex. Rom coms of the new millennium reflect this new found freedom, defying patriarchy that still defines our society.

With the turn of the century, slowly a change began to come over the women in mainstream Bollywood films. The female lead shed-off her cardboard role of the beloved and gained complexity that reconciled career, ambition, and personal fulfillment, along with an assertion of the right to be feminine. The present work studies this shift and traces the emergence of a new Bollywood brand - the millennial woman - that took its cue from a new globalized India where the educated working woman became more self-assertive and unapologetic about her life choices. Rao argues that contemporary popular cinema has sensed a change in the zeitgeist and worked it into trusted formulaic stories in small safe doses so that the audience continue to take home a feel-good factor without feeling threatened by it. While the success of early films like ''Chandni Bar'' (2001), ''Page 3'' (2005), and ''Fashion'' (2008) with female protagonists emboldened filmmakers and their financiers to venture into a territory previously considered box office poison, the reinvention of the classics by a band of subversive and irreverent filmmakers such as Anurag Kashyap and Tigmanshu Dhulia gave a hospitable home to the new woman in ''Dev D'' (2009) and ''Saheb, Biwi aur Gangster'' (2011). The feisty, independent, and sometimes confused young woman who is comfortable with her sexuality has made her way (and comfortably settled) into the modern romance-comedy as well. With films like ''Kahaani'' (2012), ''Queen'' (2014), and ''Mary Kom'' (2014), that had women protagonists driving the plot, the reins have been handed over to the female lead.