Older women enjoying a second season of visibility, success and relevance has been one of the nicest trends of the past decade or so. It started with Sridevi’s English Vinglish—a film about a middle-aged woman’s quest to prove she is more than just a wife and mother. The film did phenomenally well and inspired a slew of tremendously popular serials—all about beautiful, under-appreciated homemakers on similar quests of self-discovery.
We have seen Neena Gupta return to centerstage with Badhaai Ho, Panchayat and Masaba Masaba—all meaty, multi-faced roles. We have seen Ratna Pathak Shah kick it out of the park with Lipstick Under My Burqa. We have seen Zeenat Aman, casually and classily, acquire a whole new generation of fangirls and boys simply on the basis of her Instagram posts. We have seen Sharmila Tagore’s Gulmohar, and we have seen Shalini Passi hold the whole country in thrall. It is a great time to be an older woman in India.
Even off-screen, we have never been more visible. There’s Nita Ambani doing as good a job of being a business baron as she is of being a wife and mother, there’s Priyanka Gandhi Vadra finally getting sworn into Parliament, there’s Falguni Nayar becoming a billionaire as she enters her 60s—the list is long, impressive and hugely inspiring.
Illustration: Deni Lal
Which is why Rekha’s recent appearance on The Great Indian Kapil Show struck such a discordant note.
I sat down to watch, ready to enjoy a trip down memory lane with the genius who had killed it in Khoon Bhari Maang, Khubsoorat and Umrao Jaan, a single woman, the daughter of a single woman, who started working very young and lives alone in Mumbai on her own terms.
I was interested to know Rekha’s views on cinema, politics and gender equations of today. Instead, all I got was a lot of guff about “drinking the water with which my mother’s feet have been washed”, and tonnes of totally unsolicited sharing and sighing over her crush, which would’ve been more appropriate to a class nine sleepover.
Like, c’mon Rekhaji, you were asked a question about how you managed to dance the garba so well in Suhaag, inspite of being south Indian. You could have mentioned the choreographer or the director, you could have shared your thoughts on the music composers or the singers (or the fact that Mohammad Rafi, a practising Muslim, always sang aartis so beautifully), you could have praised the vibrant Gujarati community and how they are taking over the world, you could have made the point that Indians are just Indians, north or south be damned, but instead, you chose to gush about the infectiousness of the charisma of your co-star. Why?
Thinking as an advertising professional, I appreciate that this could be an attempt at being ‘different’, of zagging while the others zig—a sort of unabashed, post-feminist, wallowing self-flagellation which sets her apart from the other ‘older’ women because she has the guts to address the elephant in the room, and isn’t dodging the ‘real’ questions by talking about her craft or her industry, but, instead, is wearing her heart on her sleeve in a manner that makes everybody else in the room uncomfortable (poor Kapil certainly didn’t know how to keep his face straight, for sure)—but I feel that at the end of the day it is reductive. Because this is 2024, and the real questions aren’t about cute boys.
Nobody cares that your heart feels stuffed to bursting with an unrequited bhandaar [storehouse] of pyaar [love] for your man-crush. All we care about is your bhandaar of talent currently going untapped because you refuse to move on. Don’t eat crumbs, Rekhaji. Eat and leave no crumbs.
editor@theweek.in