20 Years Of Gadar: Ek Prem Katha And Lagaan- How The Two Films Portrayed Women

Women of Lagaan and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha: Raise your hands if you walked with your head held high before your classmates having watched two of the biggest releases of 2001- Gadar: Ek Prem Katha and Lagaan over the weekend. Mind you, these two films released on the same date and that's why watching them both back to back was an achievement that gave you bragging rights. What else did middle-class millennial kids have to boast of back then? We had dial-up internet for god's sake.

If you choose to watch these superhit films today, to mark twenty years of their release, then you may observe a stark difference in the way women are portrayed in both. Both are period films, dealing with the mess created by British Raj. Both the films broke box office records, with Lagaan securing an Academy Award nomination in the Best Foreign Language Film category. But this is where similarities between the two films end.

Directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, starring Aamir Khan and Gracy Singh, Lagaan was a sports film set in the pre-independence era. It spoke of British tyranny, back-breaking agricultural taxes and Indian resistance. It was artsy and commercial at the same time. Gadar, starring Sunny Deal and Ameesha Patel was about wounds of partition and patriotism, all told to us through a cross-border love story.

In Deol's Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, the heroine Sakina finds herself at mercy of a truck driver named Tara Singh, who marries her to protect her from a blood-thirsty mob. Sakina eventually falls in love with Tara, has a kid with him and then gets grounded by her dad in Pakistan. For most of the film, Sakina is shown to be at mercy of either Tara or her father. She is taken by force by her father against her will and her husband rips of handpumps from the ground in a bid to free her. In a way, it feels that her character was written to make our hero look braver and her father look meaner.  The only thing that stays with you about Sakina after watching Gadar: Ek Prem Katha is her helplessness in every situation that she finds herself in.

In Lagaan on the other hand, we see strong-minded women from the pre-partition era who are well in tune with their sense of agency. Gracy Singh's Gauri refuses to sulk in silence and lets her lover know that she is jealous of his growing proximity with another woman. "Radha kaise na jale?" she demands to know. She puts her foot down until he assures her about where his loyalties lie.

The other woman in question here is Elizabeth Russell, played by Rachel Shelley, who goes against her brother, a British Officer who coerces Champaner farmers into a cricket match. Elizabeth teaches the sport to villagers. She does so out of empathy for the farmers, realising how unfair the bet is and her feelings for Bhuvan come into play much later. Despite being driven predominantly by men, Lagaan doesn't do disservice to women. Women of Champaner are not helpless, or subservient.

On the other hand, Gadar: Ek Prem Katha seems to be about a man's love for his wife and country, and not a love story between a husband and wife. The woman at centre of this prem katha is there to just further the plot - get chased by a mob so that the hero can save you, get kidnapped by your dad so that the hero can save you. That could be the reason why Gadar makes for a difficult viewing years later, it just doesn't appeal to our reworked sensibilities. We are so done with heroines only existing in films to be rescued by heroes. But strong-minded women who are lovers, friends and allies? Sure, we can still be onboard with that.

The views expressed are the author's own.