Women In White

IN THE 2018 film Stree, men from the town of Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh start to vanish. The culprit is a female ghost they call Stree. We are told she visits the town every year during a major pooja celebration. Stree abducts men at night, leaving their clothes behind, so that they can be identified. During this time, the men of Chanderi live in fear. They walk around in saris and don bangles hoping Stree mistakes them for women. They can’t go out alone at night because it’s unsafe. The women must lock them at home and go out to work.

It’s 2024, and the makers of Stree take us back to the town of Chanderi with Stree 2: Sarkate ka Aatank. Once again, Chanderi is in danger. This time it’s the women who go missing and the culprit is not Stree but a headless monster called Sarkata. Sarkata hates women, specifi­cally those who are ‘adhunik’ or modern. His targets include a female Taekwondo champion, a girl who marries a man from another caste and another who smokes.

In a clever scene played for laughs in Stree2, hapless Chanderi residents debate who they would rather be haunted by—a flying female ghost in a bridal lehenga or a misogynist with a detachable head? Stree wins the contest. They appreciate that Stree is a ghost with a work ethic. She doesn’t enter homes that have the sentence ‘O Stree Kal Aana’ (‘Stree, please come tomorrow’) painted at the entrance, which means she’s a ‘padhi likhi chudail’ (an educated witch) with etiquette. She also seeks consent by politely calling out to her targets before running off with them. Sarkata, on the other hand, is the ghost of an obnoxious ruler who ill-treat­ed women when he was alive, and is punishing them in death. “He will take us 20 years back in time,” says one character.

In 2018, Stree was an unexpected runaway hit. Stree 2, currently in theatres, is an even bigger success. It has collected over `500 crore at the global box office, and is still counting. It has an ensemble cast featuring Rajkummar Rao, Abhishek Banerjee, Aparshakti Khurana, Pankaj Tripathi and Shraddha Kapoor.

While the feminist themes of the franchise (Stree 3 is already in the works) are deliberate, it’s not in your face. Films like Stree are labelled horror-comedies, though they are mainly comedies interspersed with the occasional jump scare. If you enter any theatre playing Stree 2, you are likely to find the audience in raptures. The film’s biggest victory is its quick-witted one-liners. You are barely done laughing at one, and the next one is flung at you. But amidst all the chuckles, do the feminist themes land?

Niren Bhatt, who has written the screenplay and dialogues of Stree 2, says maybe not, and he’s okay with that. “Cin­ema is a medium of escapist entertain­ment. We want people to enjoy them­selves and have a good time. A youngster will love the buddy jokes, a kid will get some laughs and scares, and older people will understand the messaging. We are putting out a thali of entertainment. We don’t want to give sermons about things we personally believe in. We want to smartly put it across,” he says. There is a moment in Stree 2 where we are shown what happens to the women that Sarkata has held hostage. They are all made to shave their heads, remove their makeup and wear white saris. They look like lifeless statues. This is meant to be a scathing commentary on how a patriarchal ruler views women. The messaging is clear but the focus is on a male character crying about his girlfriend becoming bald.

Horror comedies are a popular genre in Hindi cinema with a good strike rate at the box office. Producer Dinesh Vijan’s Maddock Films, which has produced both the Stree films, is crafting an entire universe of monsters, ghosts and vam­pires to keep the genre rolling. They also produced the successful horror-comedy Munjya that was released this June. The film earned over `100 crore at the Indian box office, and is based on a popular Maharashtrian legend about demons in the Konkan region.

The stories of horror comedies are usually derived from desi folklore and urban legends. These films are not going for finesse or genuine fear-inducing scares. Instead you will get stories of babas, tantriks, chudails and daayans. The female ghosts have chalk covered faces, funny teeth, and long black hair. It’s fun to see characters being chased by spirits and the situations they are placed in are intentionally ridiculous. “All our demons are representing some sort of a social fallacy. We are just making entertaining films using this trope,” explains Bhatt, who along with film­maker Amar Kaushik, is a chief architect of Maddock’s horror-comedy universe.

Divay Agarwal, a YouTube creator who runs the popular channel Khooni Monday, is not surprised that audiences land up in droves for these movies. At 4.88 million subscribers, his channel discusses horror movies, ghost stories, and conspiracy theories around haunted mansions. According to Agarwal, every pocket of the country has similar legends of ghosts and demons which explains why they have such mass appeal. Post the release of Stree 2, he made a video on how West Bengal too has its own version of Sarkata, called Skondokata, which clocked 1.9 million views.

The character of Stree too has its ori­gins in Nale Ba, a popular urban legend in the villages of Karnataka, which features a female ghost who would knock on doors at night and whisk away the men. To protect themselves, the villagers would write ‘Nale Ba’ on their doors, which translates to ‘Come tomorrow’. Directors Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK (Raj and DK), who wrote the first Stree and set the feminist tone of the franchise, grew up hearing the same story in the Tirupati village they were raised in. In the villages of Andhra Pradesh they remember seeing the line ‘O Stree, repu raa’ scribbled on the walls. In a recent Instagram post, the duo wrote, “It hit us that this can’t just be a silly comedy or a silly horror film. It can be so much more. Thus came the idea of gender reversal—what if men were the ones afraid to go out at night? What if men had to go through what innumerable women have to deal with every day?”

FEMALE GHOSTS COME with a tortured past. They’ve either been brutally murdered by their husbands, separated from their lovers, or were sex workers ostracised by society. Their grim backstories present a real opportunity to smartly slip in themes of patriarchy, oppression and violence against women, even in these mass entertainers. “As a creator who is not into content that caters to women like fashion and beauty, I have a healthy male-female viewership ratio. My audience is 42 per cent women and 58 per cent male, which is rare. I think this is because of all the stories about female ghosts. They track really well and do much better than others. Female ghosts make for great stories and they also come with a lesson that if you ill-treat women, there are consequences. They will come back to haunt you,” adds Agarwal.

Let’s take the ghost of Manjulika, from the 2007 film Bhool Bhulaiyaa (a remake of the Malayalam film Manichi­trathazhu), who has become somewhat of a pop culture icon. Manjulika, played by Vidya Balan, is a Bengali speaking ghost who spooks the living daylights out of a royal family by breaking into a classical dance when everyone is asleep. Her spirit possesses a member of the family and the sound of her ghungroos causes much distress as well as fodder for comedy and confusion. Images of Balan looking unhinged as Manjulika have made for several memes.

In one of the more sombre scenes of the film we learn that Manjulika was a celebrated Kathak dancer of her time. Her dancing partner and the man she loved was publicly beheaded by an evil king who secretly loved her. Manjulika killed herself after losing her partner but continued to haunt the halls of the king’s palace. After her death, all the patriarchs of the family mysteriously died. It is assumed that they were murdered by an angry and wronged Manjulika.

In 2022, Manjulika made a comeback in Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2. This time Tabu reprised the role as Anjulika, her twin sister, with a cracked white face and smudged red lipstick. The explanation for this twist made little sense, but Tabu embraced the stupidity by going full ham as the tortured ghost. Bhool Bhulai­yaa 2 was not only a massive box office hit, but also credited with bringing audiences back to the theatres post the pandemic. The third part of the film releases later this year with Balan back as Manjulika.

THE BHOOL BHULAIYAA franchise is by no means about women em­powerment. But the trope of avenging ghosts makes room for it and the first film intelligently leverages it. The sequel squanders it. “There have been many films in this genre, but they went for lower-hanging fruit,” says Bhatt, adding, “It’s a maker’s choice. The tropes are there for everyone to use. How you use it is your personal worldview.” This is true. In 2020, Akshay Kumar played a Muslim man possessed by the ghost of a transwom­an in the horror comedy Laxmii. The film was meant to bat for inclusivity and trans rights, but it ended up doing more harm than good.

When Bhatt began to write Stree 2, his main challenge was to deftly take forward the progressive messaging that Raj and DK had established. At the end of Stree, we realise that the female ghost who had wreaked havoc on the town didn’t have any sinister intentions. She was the ghost of a courtesan who was killed on her wedding night and all she wanted was love and respect from the town that scorned her. “Stree was the symbol of matriarchy and a feminine force. When we chanced upon the idea of Sarkata we knew he had to be the exact opposite of her. This guy was the literal embodiment of patriarchy. He wants to influence people. He wants society to function as per his point of view. That’s what patriarchy does,” says Bhatt.

There isn’t a major scene in the movie that explicitly spells out this intent. Instead, Bhatt relies on “visual meta­phors” to make his point, like Sarkata hypnotising the men of Chanderi. “We show a powerful head influencing the minds of people who were liberals and then turning them into radicals. There are visuals of men painting over posters with female models. There is a scene where the men of the family snatch books from a baby girl who is studying. Then their music systems and mobiles are being taken away. These visuals provided a great opportunity to show this satire,” he adds.

One could argue that in a film called Stree, the cast is entirely male dominated and they get to have all the fun. Shraddha Kapoor has much less to do and doesn’t get any of the film’s great lines. Both films have item numbers that are perhaps avoidable in a movie about women empowerment. That’s probably because the film’s main com­mitment is to entertain. That said, Bhatt promises that the quiet feminism of Stree will remain a running thread in all future instalments of the franchise.

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