Different Shades of Love on Screen- Differently-Abled Female protagonist and Hindi Cinema

“Woh mere barabar thi, main uske barabar. Agar uske saath hota, toh zindagi barabar katti. Par zindagi kaatni kise hai, hume toh jeeni thi.”

(She was right beside me and I was right beside her. I could have stayed with her forever and it would have been a perfect match. But I never wanted to merely survive, I wanted to live)

As the trailer of the movie Zero starts, you see Bauaa ( Shahrukh Khan), a hopeless romantic, losing his heart to the photograph of Aafia (Anushka Sharma) by calling her a “diamond: which was hidden within the coal mine. You are all set to experience another fascinating journey of true love until Bauaa discovered that Aafia uses a wheelchair ( as she has cerebral palsy) which was “unfortunately” not present in the photograph. The disheartened Bauaa Khan, who is a dwarf, set out for this chase as he thought that their “defects” connected the two. But then, Bauaa’s “true love “ was in search of someone much more desirable, someone who could make him a “hero” from a “zero”. And hence, Babita Kumari (Katrina Kaif) as Bauaa describes her as “poore Hindustan ka sapna” (the dream of the entire nation) enters into the scene as she is portrayed to be an embodiment of “perfection”, who has the ability to transform Bauaa into a “hero”.

The movie was certainly not received well by critics as it reinforced popular negative stereotypes around disability. It failed to capture the complexities of emotions as the worldview of Bauaa and Aafia failed to project the sentiments of differently-abled individuals. And most importantly, this movie attempted to integrate the theme of disability and romance but unfortunately falls prey to the conventional moulds and regressive ideologies. Even though Zero failed to explore the nuances of the lives of differently-abled, it brought forth some fundamental concerns. What does it mean to love and be loved when you are differently-abled? How does it impact your self-identity when you are constantly viewed with a fixed societal gaze? As a differently-abled female, how are your sexual desires perceived by others in a society which is dominated by the “able-bodied?

Meena Bhambhani talks about some of these concerns as she studies the projection of disabled women in mainstream cinema as she argues that the disabled women are represented in the most unartistic manner as they are shown in the light of parasitic dependent existence. She roughly charts out the progression of a series of discourses around the category of “disabled women” as she begins her analysis by remarking that in the movies which came around the 1950’s the disabled characters had a marginal existence that did not have any significant contribution to the plot as they were flat characters who were cast mostly as images of blind mothers. She later goes on to argue that the era of 1970’s was a transitional phase as disabled women began to occupy the center stage by taking up lead roles in Bollywood which was the beginning of a radical trend in cinematic history. But such mainstream projections were riddled with gender politics as the abilities of disabled women were rarely focused on. They were repeatedly shown as vulnerable which further alienated them from society as the propagation of negative images makes their integration into the mainstream a challenging task.

It was with movies like "Black" and "Margarita with a Straw" that a counter-narrative was written for differently-abled women on-screen which enlarge the scope of the discourse by destabilizing popular notions. While Sanjay Leela Bhansali liberated Michelle Mcnally, a deaf and blind young girl, from the cultural stereotypes which view her in the light of intense vulnerability, Shonali Bose focussed on dismantling the popular notion of an “asexual disable” by projecting a young and romantic Laila who remains undeterred by cerebral palsy and embraces her sexual desires. In one of her interviews, Shonali Bose talks about her inspiration for the movie as she remarks “The sexuality of people with disability is ignored by us. Somehow we don’t believe that they would have the same emotional and physical needs that normal people have. My film is a coming-of-age story about one such woman’s journey of finding love.”

Cinema as an art form is an effective medium as there is a greater degree of choice and perspective due to the presence of multiple agencies including dialogues, background music, expressions, body language, light and most significantly the use of the camera eye which enhances the exercise of projecting a narrative on a visual medium. Due to the presence of a wider set of choices, it can also become an effective tool to project stereotypes or subvert the status quo as quality cinema has the potential to raises questions and problematizes issues.

With powerful protagonists like Michelle and Laila, the conventional narratives around disability are disrupted as they effectively challenge the basic assumption of mainstream cinema which showcases women on screen as an erotic object for the characters within the story and an erotic object of spectacle through the mechanism of voyeurism and fetishism. The “avant-garde cinema” subverts the conventional representations which were invested in heightening the vulnerabilities Differently abled protagonists like Laila are bold and self-reliant who cannot be reduced to a mere erotic object for the characters and spectators, rather they are seen as agents of change as they break out of the social prison in order to embrace the romantic desires unapologetically.