The Unobtrusive Trailblazer

With three successful films in her bag, Bhumi Pednekar is an unlikely star, exuding a refreshing mix of healthy sensuousness and sensible level-headedness, without being in your face.

- Maithili Rao

The 2010s have been rather adventurous when it comes to the Bollywood heroine. It is not just Vidya Balan and Kangana Ranaut. They are the rule breakers who can power woman-centric films, even though Balan’s recent films have ranged from interesting to iffy. Ranaut, the uncrowned Queen, has challenged Bollywood’s entrenched establishment by dictating her own terms with a chutzpah bordering on arrogant disdain. These two are a class apart. There were other, more muted challengers who really acquiesced in following the rules of the game. Anushka Sharma set the trend under the failsafe Yash Raj banner, of the middle class urban girl with big dreams, and has subsequently leaped into the top tier.

There is a whole sub-culture here waiting to be explored: in which direction will Konkona Sensharma, Kalki Koechlin, Richa Chadda and Swara Bhaskar take their talent? They are closer to art house than mainstream. There is yet another middle ground where fresh themes are tackled with refreshing honesty, and not too many compromises made, to appease the box-office deity. This trend of exploring the Hindi heartland had started more than a decade ago and found resonance with metropolitan audiences, who were tired of recycled clichés flaunting reinvented coolth. It became trendy – and lucrative – to leave the big city and find authentic locations to tell real stories about real people: the unwritten proviso being that real did not mean a gritty, documentary style of narration. Characters became more important than stories, so that they could engage us emotionally. Here, the woman was as important as the man, for these films centered round marriage, adjustment and contentment. Ecstatic romance of the filmi kind was thrown out of the small, barred windows of cramped houses lining narrow streets.