Age-old Formula

Many ageing Bollywood actors get to play romantic leads and action heroes, but actresses still grapple with ageism and gender bias

- Tanul Thakur

TOWARDS the end of The Lunchbox (2013), Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan), a widower, gets ready for a date. It's an unlikely romance, an old-school romance: He and Ila (Nimrat Kaur) have never met; she sends him food to his office every day; they confide in each other through long letters. On the morning of his date though, when Saajan goes to the bathroom, he finds "it smelled the same, exactly the same after my grandfather had been in the shower," he tells her later. It was the "smell of an old man". "I don't know when I became old-maybe it was that morning, maybe it was many mornings ago." He reaches the restaurant and sees Ila: fidgety, pretty, young. Saajan wants to meet her, talk to her, but he turns around and leaves. "No one buys yesterday's lottery ticket, Ila. You're young; you can dream. And for some time, you let me in your dreams. I wanted to thank you for that."

Shaped by his society and time, Saajan describes old age in the way it's portrayed in popular culture and internalised in life: a period that signals regress not progress, underpins deprivation not desire, prizes sacrifice not self. Cinema, too, has favoured and fetishised the young: their bodies, their minds, their pursuits--it's a universal truth, an ageless monopoly. The actors must be young even if their characters are not, especially if they're women. Consider Mother India (1957), where Nargis plays a moral and sacrificial mother, a trailblazing role that'd define motherhood-and, by extension, feminine old age-in Hindi cinema. Nargis hadn't even turned 30 when the movie hit the theatres. Less than five months later, she married Sunil Dutt, an actor who played her son in the film.