Figurative Expressions

Parvathy Thiruvothu says she spent years controlling her smile when people commented on how her cheeks were too full and her jawline not as sharp as they wanted. The result? Years of bulimia. Taapsee Pannu posted pic­tures of her chiselled body for the role of a sprinter in Rashmi Rocket (2021), and she was trolled for having a “mard­wali [manly] body”. And Samantha Ruth Prabhu spoke recently of wearing foundation that was two shades fairer because she was so conscious of her “wheatish” complexion in comparison with the many fair-skinned north Indian actresses in southern cinema.

Weightism, colourism, sexism. Popular cinema plays an enormous role in influencing appearance, often hurting human bodies. Certain body types create trends that are not beneficial. Take the size zero figure that Kareena Kapoor Khan achieved for Tashan (2008), which sparked a debate on the unrealistic expectations it creates for women. Or the six-pack that Shah Rukh Khan flaunted for the item song in Om Shanti Om (2007) which got people talking about the new masculinity, where the male body was as much about objectification as the female body.

Bollywood has travelled a long way from that to now where the focus is on sustainable physical fitness and psychological wellness rather than quick fixes. Movies such as Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015) have put the focus squarely on body shaming while Deepika Padukone’s statement at the height of her stardom in 2015 that she suffered from depression raised the bar on how wellness was perceived. The death by suicide of actor Sushant Singh Rajput in 2020 only heightened aware­ness about the need for a holistic view of health and fitness.

No longer is size zero considered healthy, and thanks to sporty ac­tresses such as Padukone (who played national-level badminton) and Pannu who played all sports at school, the idea of the slim body has been replaced by that of the fit body. Actresses such as Jacqueline Fernandes regularly feature their workouts on their Instagram and have become fitness icons. An actress like Katrina Kaif, who could be said to have pioneered the fab abs for women in the item song ‘Sheila Ki Jawani’ in Tees Maar Khan (2010), has singularly made fitness trainer Yasmin Karachiwala a star, pretty much like Satyajit Chourasia became much sought after when he transformed Aamir Khan’s body for Ghajini (2008). As for young Disha Patani, with her somersaults and twirls, she is almost as malleable as rumoured boyfriend Tiger Shroff.

This is a change for the Bollywood heroine who at one time embodied the finest maternal virtues and had to be curvaceous, with big hips and bosom, ideal for bearing children.The male hero’s body has changed too, from natural to sculpted. As Michiel Baas notes in Muscular India: Masculin­ity, Mobility and the New Middle Class, actors such as MG Ramachandran, Dilip Kumar or Mammootty were ideal type men but this was communicated through their body language rather than their physiques. They would never be caught shirtless. It was Dhar­mendra who broke that convention, featuring in a towel in Pyar Hi Pyar (1969). Salman Khan was then found shirtless in Veergati (1995) for his action sequences but it was only in Pyaar Kiya To Darna Kya (1998) that his bare chest made it to the movie poster.

Then, Salman Khan was following his idol Sanjay Dutt but today there are many fitness icons. There is Akshay Kumar’s warrior body, honed by years of martial arts and finessed by hours of parkour. There is John Abraham becoming the pinup for all kinds of sexualities with his swimming-trunk shot in Dostana (2008) which almost outshone Shilpa The Body Shetty’s ‘Shut Up and Bounce’ song in that movie. And there is Tiger Shroff’s phy­sique honed by years of martial arts and dancing that is able to perform both at the highest levels.

Says Baas: “Bollywood has deeply impacted the idea of a lean, muscular body. But its reach is broader than that. We should not forget that this body is not only about [sexual] attractiveness and desirability. It is also a body that radiates health. It is literally ‘sold’ as healthy. But it is important to realise that wellness is not just about being physically well. What this body speaks of is just as much about socioeconomic wellness. It has become something that ‘screams’ middle-classness. It speaks of understanding what an ideal body looks like globally. And as such it also narrates a story of upward mobility. Bollywood banks on this as it puts central its actors’ transformation. If they can do it, so can you. Wellness is all about aspiration that way.”

The rise of actors such as Nawazud­din Siddiqui, Pankaj Tripathi, Ayush­mann Khurrana and Rajkummar Rao has meant the arrival of a new kind of male hero, where the body is subservi­ent to the character, so the physique can change according to requirement. It is slowly becoming the same for women, with actresses such as Bhumi Pednekar and Kriti Sanon winning accolades for putting on weight when their roles in Dum Laga Ke Haisha and Mimi (2021), respectively, demanded it.

Yet, the dominant discourse in mainstream/commercial Hindi films even in 2021 continues to be that its leading ladies should be tall, fair, slim, young, heterosexual and ablebodied—a norm that largely draws upon a globally dominant discourse on female beauty. This discourse is bolstered by a booming nexus among fashion, health, fitness and nutrition industries which privileges and endorses the young and often athletic Caucasian body as its ide­al, the earliest prototype for which was the Barbie Doll, says Srirupa Chatterjee, an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, whose research interests include body studies. As globalisation through the 1990s ushered in Western aesthetic in­fluences more powerfully than before, India began to define beauty through a Westernised lens. Significantly, this was also the period in which Indian women were winning major inter­national beauty pageants. Female beauty ideals in India shifted from a curvaceous Hema Malini, Sridevi or Madhuri Dixit, says Chatterjee, to a tall and slim Sushmita Sen, Aishwarya Rai or Lara Dutta. The leading ladies in Hindi cinema have since then been moving closer to this ideal. And instead of Raveena Tandon and Kajol, we find since the dawn of the current millen­nium Padukone, Anushka Sharma and Kaif with their Westernised body types ruling India’s aesthetic imagination.

Notwithstanding a growing body positivity movement, Chatterjee notes that a deep fascination with the tall, thin, fair and young body type continues to predominate professions in India where female appearance is of central importance. And being inher­ently scopophilic, films have been a powerful medium for popularising this discourse, while sporadically chal­lenging it. The inclusive body discourse remains a distant dream for Indian film viewers since an ideal body image still in many ways governs our expecta­tions of female appearance.

It is not just women but also other genders including men who are subject to an ideal body image. And the fascina­tion with six-pack abs, male fairness creams and male grooming only prove the case in point.

For India to move towards a body-inclusive culture, popular media, educationists and lawmakers need to come together. Issues of body image often affect human bodies and minds violently and irreparably, says Chatterjee.

Compounding the prob­lem is the idea of the perfect mommy. Mumbai University’s Sucharita Sarkar’s research has mostly been on how Bollywood has influenced ideas about the maternal body, especially about the concept of what is popularly known as the “yummy mum­my”. Although Kareena Kapoor and many other Bollywood mothers like Malaika and Am­rita Arora and Mira Kapur are currently often photographed as examples of “yummy mum­mies”, she believes this concept started becoming popular in India with two slightly older actresses: Karisma Kapoor and Shilpa Shetty.

Karisma Kapoor even wrote a book called My Yummy Mummy Guide: From Getting Pregnant to Being a Successful Working Mother and Beyond, published by Penguin India in 2013. It was a bestseller and shared her workout and diet plans as well as how she trans­formed into a “yummy mummy” after her pregnancies. Shilpa Shetty also co-wrote a book called The Great Indian Diet: Busting the Fat Myth, published by Random House India in 2015, which gave a lot of tips on diets that helped shape female bodies into socially desired slim sizes. Shetty was also on the cover of the January 2014 issue of Hi Blitz magazine that labelled her “mom­mylicious”. The magazine had an interview where she talked about her post-pregnancy transformation into a size-zero “yummy mummy”.

Blogs by Indian mothers from 2013 onwards discuss these celebrities as role models for those who want to become “yummy mummies”. What was not part of the discussion was the increas­ing reliance on surrogacy and surgery to achieve superhuman standards of beauty. Says Sarkar: “Shifting from the ‘experience’ to ‘image’ of mother­ing, the Indian mass and social media have widely circulated the image of the ‘supermom’ as a mutated, mythic, multiple-armed, multitasking being who is effortlessly capable, with a little help from an assemblage of machine servants, of negotiating parallel uni­verses of home, self and work. How do ‘real’ mothers respond to this idealised domestic goddess: with hope, confor­mity, mimicry, anxiety or resistance?”

Anyone who doesn’t conform to the type, such as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, gets shamed on social media as she was during her Cannes visit in 2012-13 for putting on weight after childbirth. Sarkar points to her interview where she says that she wants her weight gain to be an empowering statement to mothers of all sizes. Even though she slimmed down later, she did it at her own pace.

The rise of paparazzi culture has meant the capture of stars as they are and made body shaming a national pastime. Prabhas, the Baahubali actor, was targeted on social media for gain­ing weight recently. Vidya Balan has had to counter repeatedly those who uphold culturally dominant standards of beauty. This struggle has now even become something of a launchpad for star children who have tried to jump to causes, such as Suhana Khan (skin colour), Ira Khan (mental health) and Navya Na­veli Nanda (menstruation). It’s another matter that we live in a culture where they are consid­ered brand ambassadors, which would require them to have actual jobs, rather than brand volunteers, which they should be, as young thinking women who happen to have famous last names.

Social media has allowed celebrities of all sorts to share their diet and fitness routines—and even resting habits. For example, during the early part of the lockdown in 2020, Kaif tweeted a picture of her sweep­ing the floors of her house, saying this was her way of keeping fit even when the gyms were closed. Milind Soman is famous simply for his daily runs re­sulting in an athletic body that allows him to run naked on a beach at an age when most men contemplate a lifelong romance with the couch in front of the TV. And Vidyut Jammwal has single­handedly cornered the B-movie action hero space with the power of his body and his message of organic and sustain­able fitness. In New Age Bollywood, it’s not enough to be fit, one has to do it the right way.

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