Daughter India

IN THE SKY, WE are all equal. In Siddharth Anand’s Fighter, Deepika Padukone playing Indian Air Force helicopter pilot Minal Rathore, is ostracised by her conservative father for becoming a pilot. It is not for women, he says. But she is not one to back down and tells him there is no discrimination in the skies. As her fellow pilot  Shamsher Pathania, played by  Hrithik Roshan, rallies behind her:  “The enemy’s bullet doesn’t differentiate between a man and a woman. Why should we?”

Captain Ramon Chibb, who wrote the film, says he wanted to highlight the role of women pilots because in his experience, they are better at flying. “They are better at multitasking. As a pilot one has to be aware of the instruments in the cockpit as well as the environment outside. We’ve always had women in the forces but they’ve been in the support arms. Things have now changed.”

Since 2016 women have been inducted into the Air Force as fighter pilots, adding to their roles as helicopter pilots, which the film industry has celebrated. Starting from Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl (played by Janhvi Kapoor) in 2020, a handful of movies have put women front and centre of the war narrative. Saxena was one of six women who joined the Air Force as a pilot in 1996, the fourth batch of women air force trainees. But the film ran into controversy because it showed her being harassed by her colleagues, causing the Indian Air Force (IAF) to write to the Central Board of Film Certification complaining about its “undue negative portrayal”.

These fighter pilots are not ordinary women. They are extraordinary women who have dedicated themselves to the state so much so that they may as well be married to the nation, immaculate virgins in the cause of patriotism, forever pure, forever deified. In the homogenised space of the IAF, there can be no discrimination on the basis of gender, class, caste or community, and portraying bias is considered nothing short of sacrilege.

Just as in sports biopics, another popular genre of movies fronted by women, the woman’s body exists only to serve the nation, bring glory to it in the form of medals, and usually to help alleviate the family’s poverty.

The female soldier’s gaze is firmly fixed on the nation-state. When her senior asks Tejas in the eponymous film what she can see from the cockpit of her plane, she says “the runway”. When he presses her for a more appropriate answer, she says; “A way to serve my country.” Kangana Ranaut, who plays Tejas, articulates the philosophy of the soldier, “A soldier has two families; one is her family and the other is the nation.” Even if the end is death, Tejas will embrace it because she is destroying the enemy, and saving her country.

If in Fighter, the parents do not want their daughter to become a soldier, in Tejas they actively help her in the pursuit of her dream. As her father, an engineer in DRDO, recounts Tejas wanted to be a pilot when she heard that the government-supported light-combat aircraft was named Tejas. For Tejas, her uniform is her identity, her soul. And terrorism for her is personal, not merely because in the film she loses her entire family in the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai,but because “terrorism should be personal for everyone”.

As of 2020, women are not allowed to serve in combat units in the Indian Army but the Indian Air Force inducts women in all roles, including combat and support roles. As of September 2020, there were 1,875 female officers serving in the IAF, including 10 pilots and 18 navigators. The Indian Navy still opposes the idea of putting women in warships as sailors or officers, even though women fly on maritime patrol aircraft.

The IAF is keen to collaborate with the film industry, says Chibb who took voluntary retirement from the Army in 1995 after serving in the infantry in 18-Kumaon. “I wanted to portray the lives of these pilots, men and women, in a fun manner. It’s like any other job, except you have to protect your country,” he adds.

That was the spirit behind Shoorveer, a Disney+Hotstar series in 2022. Its showrunner, Samar Khan, was in the NDA for three years, before he was asked to leave on grounds of indiscipline. But clearly Khan loves the uniform. “The idea was to make a series about the IAF and what makes ordinary men and women into superheroes where decisions have to be made in split seconds. And that the pride of the uniform has to be upheld at all times, not merely during war,” he says. So, the series deals with the formation of Hawks, a joint task force of Army, Air Force, and Navy to serve as the first responders in case of a serious threat, which comes from a Pakistani general who wants to defeat India.

Regina Cassandra was cast because Khan wanted someone from the south to show the diversity in the IAF. “When we met her, her body language and confidence were enough to convince us she was best suited for the role. Women in uniform give more opportunities to creators to explore, with a wider range of emotions. They are not always unidimensional like men, who are in danger of becoming just macho. Regina’s Avantika Rao is a reflection of a modern woman who is not afraid to take chances and push the boundaries and be unapologetic about it,” says Khan.

Femininity, even if de-sexualised, is a healthy alternative to the muscular and arrogant masculinity that can sometimes emerge in the IAF, something Mani Ratnam captured so effectively in the film, Kaatru Veliyidai (2017) with Karthi and Aditi Rao Hydari.

There are challenges in shooting. Not every movie about flying can be a Top Gun (1986), every moviemaker’s aerial war reference. But Khan says they shot Shoorveer in Serbia and also used Unreal Engine, a powerful 3D creation tool, to generate the aerial sequences. The director Kanishk Varma storyboarded the sequences frame by frame and they didn’t have to use the green screen to shoot any sequences. “We made a replica of the cockpit and LED screens to shoot the close-ups while the long shots were created using Unreal Engine. We shot the real planes in Serbia,” says Khan.

Khan thinks it is important that women are getting the space to explore roles in uniform on screen. He also made The Test Case (2017, now on JioCinema), about the training of a woman Army officer, and then Code M (for which they’re shooting season 3, also on JioCinema). “The time has come for women to play important roles in uniform on screen,” he says.

Till recently the police was the favourite stomping ground of women looking for substantial roles of authority and power, a trend sparked off by the Doordarshan serial Udaan (1989), starring Kavita Choudhary, who was inspired by the story of her sister, former Director General of Police Kanchan Choudhary Bhattacharya. Since then, police officers of all hierarchies have been commonly seen on screen, whether on streaming, with Delhi Crime, or in the movies, with Tabu, most recently in Kuttey (Netflix, 2023) and Bholaa  (Prime Video, 2023).

With the Air Force, there is the added attraction of the magnificent machines. As Chibb says, “In the Army, the emphasis is on commanding men. One has to be mentally, physically fit to become their father figure, where one can even order a soldier to die for you. In the Air Force, the most important relationship is with the flying machine,” which is why Fighter used real planes, real choppers, real bases, and real hangars.

There is nothing sexual about the women IAF officers portrayed on screen currently. If there are boyfriends, they are conveniently eliminated fairly early in the screenplay, and if there is a romance, as in Fighter, it is tepid compared to the bond of the man and machine. It’s a long way off from perhaps the most famous film of the 1970s based on the IAF, Chetan Anand’s Hindustan ki Kasam (1973), in which the only woman of note, who comes from a family of illustrious pilots, is planted as a spy at a TV station in Pakistan to destroy the Pakistan Air Force radar blocking Indian pilots’ communication. If the movie were to be updated today, the woman would possibly be inducted into the IAF as well, in love with the flag rather than any man, and ever ready to say Jai Hind.

If the Mother India of 1957 was a farmer and a widowed mother, the woman of 2024 may well be called Daughter India, a soldier married to the idea of nationhood.

cinemaFighterfighter planespilotsShoorveerTejaswomen