Until a few years ago, films centred on women characters were described as 'women-centric' cinema. At the time, this often meant that the film was for a niche audience, dealing with issues that would only be of interest to women. But now, with the emergence of stars such as Vidya Balan, Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt, Manju Warrier, Nayanthara, Anushka Shetty, Samantha, Trisha, and Taapsee among others — all actors who have single-handedly shouldered films across genres — the term 'women-centric' cinema is becoming obsolete. The mushrooming of digital streaming platforms, which have brought out several originals with women in the lead, has also been a considerable influence. A film told from a woman’s point of view is now considered mainstream, even if the percentage of such films remains low in comparison to those with male protagonists.
In tandem, issues typically considered to be 'women's issues' have also found their way to the mainstream. After the Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case in 2012, there were several films on sexual assault that came out in Indian cinema. Most of these were either courtroom dramas like Pink (2016) (remade in Tamil and Telugu) or revenge thrillers such as Angry Indian Goddesses (2015), Jazba (2015), Mom (2017), Puthiya Niyamam (2016) and so on — films typically about women facing violence from strangers. But more recently, patriarchal families where women undergo domestic violence have also become of interest to mainstream filmmakers.
In fact, in three weeks, Malayalam film Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey has made close to Rs 30 crore at the box office. That’s no mean feat for a small budget film on domestic violence. Directed by Vipin Das and starring Darshana Rajendran and Basil Joseph, the black comedy is about a toxic marriage and the wife’s unusual strategy to combat it.
Jaya comes from a patriarchal family that is only interested in marrying her off to any man who will have her. That man happens to be Rajesh, a poultry farm owner. Her hopes are dashed to the ground when she discovers that Rajesh doesn’t think twice about slapping her whenever he loses his temper. In a depressingly familiar turn of events, Jaya’s family washes their hands of the situation, asking her to adjust with the violence.
There is nothing new about the story so far. We have seen it in the news, we have seen it in our own family and social circles. But with an unexpected role reversal, the film becomes rip-roaringly funny. It may even be considered problematic if it wasn’t so absurd, but the appeal of the material to a wide audience cannot be questioned. By choosing the black comedy genre and executing it effectively, Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey manages to make several important points about domestic violence in a wholly entertaining script.
In August this year, we had Jasmeet K Reen’s Darlings, which again uses humour to talk about domestic violence. Darlings is centred on a Muslim couple that falls in love and decides to marry. Featuring Alia Bhatt and Vijay Varma in the lead, the film takes us through a violent marriage and the desperate acts of a terrified Badru (Alia). Unlike in Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey where the woman has no support from her birth family, Badru in Darlings has a supportive single mother who encourages her to walk out of the marriage. In fact, everybody around Badru – from her mother to the neighbours and the police – wants her to break up with Hamza (Vijay), but she keeps giving him one chance after another. If the Malayalam film projects a cathartic fantasy to draw the audience in, the Hindi film paints an ideal fairytale-like situation for Badru to take that vital call.
According to Ormax Media, a media consulting firm, Darlings was the most viewed among shows and films from the Indian streaming space in the week of August 1 to 7. With 6.7 million views on Netflix, the film beat Janhvi Kapoor’s Hindi comedy Good Luck Jerry (Disney+ Hotstar) and Karan Johar’s Koffee With Karan that featured Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor.
Ammu, a Telugu film that was released on Amazon Prime Video in October this year, is a thriller about a domestic violence victim who tries to entrap her policeman husband. Aishwarya Lekshmi plays the titular character, a young woman who is in a seemingly loving marriage, only for the tide to turn over a minor incident. Directed by Charukesh Sekar, the film presents a disturbing portrait of gaslighting, humiliation, verbal, and physical abuse. Like Badru, Ammu too is reluctant to leave Ravi (Naveen Chandra), but the obstacles in her path are much more realistic than what’s shown in Darlings. The film loses steam in the second half, thrusting a male saviour into the story in a part-comic, part-thriller plot thread that dilutes the material; but it’s still worth a mention for the myths it shatters about domestic violence.
All three films have mothers who have experienced domestic violence themselves – in Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey, the mother tells her daughter that there is nothing unique about a husband behaving like this. “He doesn’t have any other problems, right?” she asks. In Darlings, the mother has turned to violence herself to get rid of the husband. In Ammu, the mother’s confession that she has been hit by her husband comes as a surprise to the daughter. The fact that domestic violence counts as intergenerational trauma is hardly ever acknowledged in a society where the family is considered to be a sacrosanct institution.
Jeo Baby’s hard-hitting Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) rips apart the notion of the ideal family, revealing the abuse that lies at its foundation. The camera relentlessly follows the labour of a nameless woman (Nimisha Sajayan) as she slogs day and night to cook and clean for her household. The dripping sink in the dreary kitchen acquires a character of its own – she has been asking her husband to get it fixed but he keeps putting it off. The bucket kept under the sink to catch the water is witness to her mounting frustrations. In the climax, she flings the dirty water on her husband and father-in-law, fed up with the patriarchal family life that she was pushed into.
The abuse in The Great Indian Kitchen (TGIK) is so common that it’s only because of the camera’s focus that we even become aware of it. Despite the oppression that it depicts, the film is frequently funny and was widely watched on Neestream, a relatively new OTT platform. The response to the film was so tremendous that OTT giant Amazon Prime Video, which had previously declined to buy it, acquired the rights for streaming.
These attempts to portray domestic violence in a more mainstream and entertaining format should be seen in continuation with films that brought the issue to the screen with the gravity that it deserved. For instance, Rahul Riji Nair’s award winning film Ottamuri Velicham (2017) is a brutal and unflinching representation of domestic violence, where a wife (Vinitha Koshy) lives in perpetual fear of her husband (Deepak Parambol). This is among the few films to identify marital rape for what it is.
Vasanth S Sai’s Tamil anthology film Sivaranjiniyum Innum Sila Pengalum (2021) follows the lives of three women who live in ‘normal’ families, experiencing the ‘normal’ abuse that’s meted out to women — from physical violence to invasion of privacy and the gradual erosion of their dreams and ambitions. A predecessor to TGIK, the film won Lakshmi Priyaa Chandramouli a National Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Anubhav Sinha’s Thappad (2020) is another sensitively made film where an innocuous homemaker walks out of her marriage after her husband slaps her at a party. Most people – including her lawyer — ask her why she wants to file for divorce over just “one slap”. But until that moment, there are many ways in which Amrita (Taapsee Pannu) had been experiencing abuse. The film also portrayed the ubiquitous nature of domestic violence, showing that women from all social classes undergo it.
Most importantly, these films do not offer reconciliation as a “happy ending”, as was the norm in family dramas of the past. In Sibi Malayil’s Malayalam film Kaliveedu (1996), for instance, the husband (Jayaram) is deeply resentful of his independent and assertive wife Mridula (Manju Warrier). He even gets his friend’s wife to act as a maid in the house to teach Mridula how to be an obedient and subservient wife. However, the film ends with the separated couple reuniting after learning the importance of “adjustment” in a marriage.
Even as recently as in 2017, we had Mani Ratnam’s Tamil film Kaatru Veliyidai in which the woman goes back to her abusive partner. Leela (Aditi Rao Hydari) is a doctor while Varun (Karthi) is an Indian Air Force pilot. He humiliates her, twists her hand, is unsupportive when he hears of her pregnancy, and is clearly a misogynist — yet, the film will have us believe that his experiences as a prisoner of war would have reformed him. This is among the few portrayals in cinema where the violence committed by the hero against the heroine has been recognised as such and isn’t glorified or romanticised as love (as was the case in films like Arjun Reddy that released the same year). Still, walking out of the toxic relationship wasn’t considered to be the right on-screen choice.
The protagonists in Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey, Darlings, Ammu, and Thappad become pregnant, but the films do not use this as a plot point to make them stay in the relationship. This is a marked departure from earlier films that have used the ‘think about the children’ argument to preserve toxic families.
While films on domestic violence have been made in the past too, they never quite managed to win over a mass audience. The interest in turning these all too common stories into mainstream cinema, and the box office success and critical acclaim that many of them have enjoyed, show that the audience too has evolved over the years to embrace different kinds of narratives. Cinema can’t and needn’t reform society single-handedly — that isn’t its purpose. But as an art form, it will certainly benefit from becoming a more democratic and inclusive medium. After all, 50% of its audience is women.
Sowmya Rajendran writes on gender, culture and cinema. She has written over 25 books, including a nonfiction book on gender for adolescents. She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar for her novel Mayil Will Not Be Quiet in 2015.