Paromita Vohra: The Look

Last week, two actors brought to the surface - in two very different ways - how, for all the fashionable talk of woman-power, female identity continues to be deeply constrained by stereotypical norms about feminine appearance.

Actor Tanishtha Chatterjee criticised the nature of jokes and comments to which she was subjected to in a roast on Krushna Abhishek's Comedy Nights Bachao

Tanishtha Chatterjee, star of films like Brick Lane and the recently released Parched, went on Krushna Abhishek's Comedy Nights Bachao expecting a roast - irreverent, politically incorrect, insulting humour meant to honour someone and test their ability to be a good sport.

Evidently, Ms. Chatterjee did not experience it in this way, as what transpired was unending, flat-footed comments about her skin colour, which sounded from reportage, more like taunts and less like wickedly funny insults. We know this is par for the course in most of our mainstream comedy now. Much of it seems to be based on deriding people's appearances - skin colour, weight and so on. Simply mentioning the fact that someone is dark or fat is considered funny, with almost no effort made to find the humour of a situation in a novel way.

Ms. Chatterjee's discomfort also seemed to arise from the sense that there seemed to be no other point of humour for the show hosts. The fact that the imagination of the show can think of a female actor in no other terms but her appearance bears testimony to the restricted and so, restrictive way in which people continue to think about women.

Further, when she raised her objection, they seemed unable or unwilling to see her point and attempt to be inventive. It points to the pitiful limitation of our comic writers and performers that they are unable to update themselves for a newer understanding of cultural change and still be relevant, funny while appealing to a larger public.

Times change and artists change with time to create new paradigms of humour, beauty and entertainment. It's laudable that Ms. Chatterjee, at the risk of being unpopular, called them out by refusing to submit to their framework of comedy and participate in structures that perpetuate lazy thinking under the pretext of mass appeal.

Sonam Kapoor too brought up issues of female appearance on a popular website of how negative remarks about her appearance as a young girl had led to a deeply negative relationship with her own body and unhealthy ways of being thin. In what was intended as an inspiring confessional, she told young women that a lot of labour went into her image and it was an illusion not worth aspiring to.

Perhaps it is useful to tell young women this. But are young women today, who routinely laser all the hair from their bodies, eat very little, get cosmetic surgery before the first day of college, live and die by Instagram selfies, under any illusion about illusions and how they are created? Maybe it is time to not tell young women to be different as much as the creators of the airbrushed images that perpetuate unrealistic, damaging and extremely normative images of what constitutes glamour or beauty.

Also, yes, we should believe that all kinds of women are beautiful - but how about beautiful not being the only thing that equals attractive? Any thoughts?
Because if the frame doesn't change then it's as hard to walk out of a magazine cover, as it is to get onto one.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com