Kusu Kusu Song: Bollywood Is Back With A Regressive Bang As Theatres Open

Nora Fatehi and John Abraham are to modern-day Bollywood action films what Abhijeet Bhattacharya and Shah Rukh Khan were to 90s film songs. Partners in both pairs complement each other well, the audience says. When Khan customarily spread his arms, Bhattacharya's voice gave the melody. Now, between Abraham landing punches, Fatehi gives the "item" dance interlude. Both couples have appeal. Only one has objectification.

A teaser for the Kusu Kusu song from Satyameva Jayate 2, which releases November 25 starring Abraham, dropped today. The 22-second preview is picturised around Fatehi and her free-flowing belly. Referring to its predecessor Dilbar from the first film, the captions on the song video read, "After Dilbar, now comes Dilruba."

And after a slow run at the theatres at the peak of the pandemic, now also comes &t=3s">Bollywood's regressive offering of song, dance and film.

Through the last year, the small screen format that gained predominance in film and entertainment had more or less restricted the inflow of larger-than-life dance sequences jacked up on drama, glamour and masala. OTT platforms have adapted to and found footing in grittier slice-of-life stories that are more intent on plot than prance.

Kusu Kusu song: Is Bollywood back to returning the call of sexism?

As a result, moviegoers locked down inside their homes were gradually (and thankfully) being distanced from old patterns of film-viewing that sought pleasure solely from women grooving their scantily clad bodies to the beats of a Badshah song. Had this arrangement persisted, could it have brought a change in our film-watching preferences? Would we possibly have moved into a better era with better options, urging filmmakers to ditch the formula of using women as decoration in "item numbers" between plots?

Well, we'll just have to wait to see if a world like that could really exist. Given that theatres and cinemas are calling audiences again, it seems Bollywood too has returned the call of sexism.

The recently released Sooryavanshi, starring Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif, is another example of Hindi films recycling dated ideas of objectification for the average starry-eyed fan who is more than content seeing their favourite actors come back to the big screen in any way, shape or form.

In the film's recreation of the Tip Tip Barsa Pani song from the 1994 film Mohra, Kaif replaces the original Raveena Tandon to dance under the rain with Kumar, who didn't abdicate his throne and stayed to romance a younger actor. The glitter in the song is amped up several degrees, with Kaif's silver saree supplanting Tandon's plain yellow, but the sexualisation of the female body has remained stagnant. So has Bollywood's idea of "sexy."

This is not to say that the original Tip Tip was an absolute banger and Tandon in it was stunning. But the concept behind such songs seems better suited for the 90s time capsule when knowledge of ethical representation was in short supply in the mainstream. Almost every film from that decade projected a singular idea of beauty - the thin, sensuous heroine that was the object of the alpha male's attractions.

One would have thought that with better access to information and evolving sensibilities, the film industry would leave those themes behind in the time that they belonged to. But we seem to be dragging it on and on.

No doubt, the volume of problematic "item songs" in Hindi films has gone down several notches; but the odd video centred around dancers like Fatehi or Jacqueline Fernandez's bodies is always floating in. The male gaze in Bollywood still doesn't flinch generating and reiterating deeply archaic corporeal notions associated with "femininity."

It's 2021. Can our films grow up?

Views expressed are the author's own. 

Trending now: