In Bollywood, Women Get Screen Time But Very Little Talk Time

Study of box-office hits reveals female characters get 25 mins of speaking time in 2.5-hr movie

- Mohua Das

The year 2020 wrapped up what you might call a good decade for women in Bollywood with many steely, witty, sharp, cute, fun and badass female characters in leading roles. Think Piku. Sulu. Padmavati. Shivani. Sehmat. Rani. Kalindi. Phogat sisters. It felt like the narrative was changing, and women had become more than accessories.

However, research tracking speaking parts in the world’s biggest movie-making industry reveals that in the biggest pan-national box-office hits from the past five years — on an average, “women have less than a third of the dialogue”. In other words, men significantly out-talk the women.

This data measuring dialogue share of women in popular Hindi films comes from Shrayana Bhattacharya, a Delhi-based economist who, while researching for her book Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh that releases in October, stumbled upon this irony of Bollywood’s box office hits largely featuring what she calls “gorgeous mute women.”

“Since 2006, through various research projects on women’s employment and labour, I’ve met working women across India. During breaks, we would talk about our favourite movies and film stars which introduced me to Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) fangirls from diverse communities,” recounts Bhattacharya who followed several such fangirls for more than a decade to realise that one reason why the actor appealed to women from Jor Bagh to Jharkhand was how his on-screen characters would talk to women — lovers, mothers, friends and sisters — unlike films with other male actors. Bhattacharya decided to back this anecdotal evidence with data. “The only way to do this was to measure what share of dialogue was spoken by men and women in popular films.”