Commercial ‘woke’ films favourites now

Vasan Bala’s fantastic ‘Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota’ is out, and it is a film for our times.

The title is a subversion of one of Hindi’s most sexist proverbs of all time, as the film tells the story of a man who suffers from congenital insensitivity, that is, he literally cannot feel pain.

MKDNH is just the most recent in a series of films that gets its gender politics just right, something commercial cinema has been slow to warm up to.

The film review website ‘Film Companion’, in a recent set of articles on the great film decades in Bollywood, had its critics highlight what was great about the movies from the 70s, the 80s and 2000s.

Which sets you thinking: if the 70s had the ‘Angry Young Man’, if the 80s is the decade when the tone of commercial Hindi cinema got modern and the 00s, sometimes called the noughties, made Hindi cinema darker: what does the (20)10s offer?

The answer seems quite apparent. It’s the decade when Bollywood and Indian cinema became ‘woke’.

Merriam Webster defines ‘woke’ as being “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues”. In the US, where the word was first used, it referred mostly to issues of racism and sexism.

When the word crossed the seas and reached India, the ‘sexism’ quotient remained, while ‘racism’ was replaced by caste discrimination.

Not that earlier Indian commercial films have not spoken about social injustices. But the films’ calls for injustices were seldom holistic. You would often hear even the “good” characters in these films pontificating on how women should behave.

But today, even in action-comedies like MKDRH, issues like sexism in the domestic space are spoken against. It’s not a simple victim narrative either, the film’s finest action sequences are done by Radhika Madan.

The commercial woke film is very much a part of Southern cinema today, too. One prominent example would be the 2018 Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal, which dealt with the trials of living a Dalit life.

What films like MKDNH and Perumal show is that a holistic progressive view is not just something for arthouse films, where films are made for a niche, supposedly progressive audience, without wider dissemination of the message.

Indian commercial cinema, having taken on the mantle of a social justice warrior, has seldom been more relevant.