Sexuality as perceived by the Indian audience- by Amit Kang
I stumbled upon this talk show and interestingly enough there is a discussion that comes up at about 11mins,15 sec until 15 mins, which focuses primarily on the depiction of sex in Bollywood films and the audience reaction to situations of sexual nature.
Bollywood actors, or at least the famous ones such as Amitabh Bachhan and Shahrukh Khan, have earned themselves an iconic image in the public eye and hence the Indian audience usually does not like to associate them with undesirable acts and negative characters (this includes infidelity, displaying overt sexuality). This interview is with a famous Indian filmmaker named Karan Johar who was also the assistant director of DDLJ. He mentions how while examining audience reactions during the preview of one of his films released in 2005 (also starring Shahrukh Khan) he came across shocking reactions to the sexual content of the film by some of the audience. He mentions how during an infidelity situation involving Shahrukh Khan and another famous female actor, some of the audience was very taken aback and in fact decided to walk out of the movie theater. The reason according to him is the iconic image of famous Bollywood film stars that the public holds. The Indian audience almost places famous Bollywood actors on a pedestal and voluntarily decides to become oblivious towards the possibility of them playing characters and performing acts that are frowned upon in the Indian society.
The idea can be noticed in Silsila as well where performance of sexual acts is shown between Amit and Chandni when on the contrary the sexual domain that Amit and Shobha share is barely touched upon. It becomes very predictable which woman out of the two Amit would eventually end up with because the Indian audience would not very well accept his overly sexual relationship with Chandni. On the other hand, there is no sign of a sexual relationship between Amit and Shobha and one is almost led to believe that they do not engage in any sexual activity until one finds out about Shobha being pregnant. Karan Johar very well describes this concept of demonstration of sexuality in Bollywood films when he mentions at 12 mins, 30 sec “you do not have sex in Hindi cinema”.
Filed by Amit Kang at February 28th, 2013 under Uncategorized