A little more than 40 years ago, cartoonist Alison Bechdel formulated The Bechdel Test, which, over the decades, has become an essential metric to evaluate the representation of women in media, with special emphasis being laid on film. The Bechdel Test has a simple ask — to assess whether a piece of performing art has (a) at least two named women and (b) whether the female characters in it engage in a conversation (or more) on a topic which is something other than that centred on a man. Many films, since then, even while not being feminist in the classical sense of the term (or female-centric, according to commonly-used parlance), have proved to be worthy candidates of the test. Many others have not, despite their on-the-surface female presence, been able to pass muster. But no film, at least in recent times, would perhaps have failed it as spectacularly as Dhurandhar: The Revenge.
WHERE ARE THE WOMEN?
The second part of the Aditya Dhar-directed box-office juggernaut franchise — a hit even before the first ticket was sold — is no country for women. For almost the whole of its four-hour-long runtime, we see a testosterone-dominated world in which men — often bearded and buffed up and perpetually frothing at the mouth — strut around, either spewing ear bleed-inducing expletives or mercilessly bashing out brain and gut, and quite often both at the same time. In Dhurandhar 2, men talk to men. Men fight men. Men double-cross men. Men cuss at men. Men mutilate men. Men save men. When men do converse about women, it is only to describe them in derogatory terms, most of which are unprintable. Dhurandhar 2 is a man’s world to which no woman is invited. And no, Ranveer Singh’s lustrous locks in the film — which makes me wonder why there hasn’t been a barrage of shampoo ads featuring him — do not make up for its absence of women.
When women show up rarely in The Revenge, it is only to paint them in the context of men. Women, in this film, are either oppressed, brutalised or absent. Patriarchy is often cloaked as protectiveness. Jaskirat Singh Rangi’s (played by Ranveer) journey to becoming Hamza Ali Mazari includes his bloody and painful personal history in which a once ambitious soldier-in-the-making is forced to go on a prolonged and inhuman rampage after his family, including his two sisters, are gang-raped, with one of them being killed. The surviving sister is not only repressed, violated and held as (fake) currency (pun intended), the brother, assuming the role of a self-appointed custodian, also has to request (more than once) that his best friend promise to marry her. After all, in this hyper-masculine world, the next best step for a woman grossly wronged by a man is to tie her life and destiny down to another man. In the same vein, when Jaskirat’s tearful mother puts in almost daily appearances to see him stand in the dock at court, he asks a man (again the best friend) to not allow her to come henceforth. A woman’s choice, even if she is the “hero’s” mother, is not hers to make.
To be fair, Dhurandhar — that released last December and rewrote every rule of the box-office book — did better than its second outing in this department (and, to be honest, on many other counts as well). The women, even in that part, may have had their destiny — and their screen time, limited or not — tied to the men in the film, but they were still living, breathing characters. An example was Ulfat, played by Saumya Tandon. As Lyari gang lord Rehman Dakait’s wife — grieving the death of her young son at the beginning of Dhurandhar, and given space (and the scope of a memorable slap) to hold her husband accountable — it was Ulfat who humanised Rehman, brought to pulsating life by Akshaye Khanna whose absence makes for a truck-sized void in Part 2. Rehman’s sequences with his wife — even something as simple as she lighting his cigarette, a ritual of sorts before he went out each time to take on his adversaries — not only established the tenderness of their relationship, despite his inherent brutality that was the stuff of legend — but also accounted for a noteworthy female presence in the film. In Dhurandhar 2, Ulfat delivers her now signature slap — this time with Hamza at the receiving end — and is then made to disappear unceremoniously.
And then there is Yalina. Played by a spunky Sara Arjun, Yalin, in the first film, was, well, spunky. A feisty young woman who refused to toe the line, Yalina defied the world for love. Yalina’s scenes with Hamza in Dhurandhar were not limited to just song, dance and romp. She had the freedom and power, even if limited, to think, to speak, to question....
In Dhurandhar: The Revenge, however, Aditya Dhar’s “peak detailing” — a running social media gag used both in seriousness and sarcasm after the first film’s runaway success — doesn’t involve any women in detail. The biggest casualty is, in fact, Yalina. Restricted to playing wife and mother, whose decision to stay or leave is also under duress and not by choice, Yalina is denied the voice of questioning Hamza when she finds out that he isn’t really the man he has claimed to be all along.
Men, in Dhurandhar 2, are referred to as “Babbar Sher”. The women, in the rare occasions that they make it to the screen, whimper and simper.
The tokenism in The Revenge also extends to its much-talked-about female cameo. Yami Gautam Dhar — fresh from a stellar central performance in Haq and strong lead performances in Dhar’s own Uri and Article 370 — walks in for a two-minute special appearance as an Indian agent moonlighting as a nurse. Armed with a toxic syringe, she makes quick work of a man on his hospital bed and walks out victorious, stealing a smirk at a smiling Hamza. Which begs the question: if Aditya Dhar can’t write a proper part for his wife, what chance do the other womenfolk in the film have?
MARD KO DARD NAHI HOTA
Perpetuating its androgenic theme and treatment are the dialogues, mouthed, of course, by the men who make up its cast. In the earlier parts of the film, a top-ranked bureaucrat tells his freshly-minted scout: “Hum mard hain, paida hone se marne tak hamara farz hain ladna.” That, in a single stroke, sets the tenor for the rest of the film, marked as it is by conversation that is more than mere men’s locker room talk. At another point, Sanjay Dutt’s cop — his trigger-happy fingers only matched by his foul tongue — tells a man bashed up black, blue and bloody: “Jahan dard hain wahan mard hain”.
Major Iqbal (Arjun Rampal), an ISI mastermind who largely appears a tad dignified in demeanour compared to the other men in the film despite his undeniably venomous motives and moves, spends his end moments screaming maniacally about what he — and his cohorts — plan to do to Indian women. It is grossly uncomfortable to watch and is yet another instance of a man bringing up the mention of a woman (of a country-full of women in this instance) in the context of sexual violence.
In keeping with the overall tone of the film, it is, therefore, no surprise that the violence in Part 2 is more sadistic, visceral and gratuitous. When they aren’t decimating and decapitating each other, the men in the film aren’t subtle in their gestures — very, very physical ones at that — as a threat of how they are going to screw over their opponents. Which made me breathe a sigh of relief — at least for a bit — that women were nowhere on the screen in front of me.