At the close of 2020, the actor-director Pooja Bhatt tweeted an unusual confession: “Four years sober today!Earlier it was pink champagne, malt & packed, city bars. Now it is pink skies & deserted, country roads. What an enriching, searing journey it has been. Gratitude to life & the divine force that has watched over me, kept me true, vulnerable, strong. #sobrietyrocks”.
This is possibly the first time a woman who is a public figure in India has admitted to having a problem with alcohol, and working on sobriety. In fact, Bhatt is possibly only the second public figure in India, after actor Sanjay Dutt, to acknowledge a substance abuse issue. There have been many public personae whose drinking or drug use has been a subject of public discussion. However, most often, the disclosure has been made by their families. For example, the writer Sadat Hasan Manto; the actress and poet Meena Kumari; the politician Feroze Gandhi; and the Hindi film singer Geeta Dutt and her husband, the actor and filmmaker Guru Dutt whose death at the age of 39 was related to alcohol and sleeping pills. A personal acknowledgment is a different, far more powerful thing—a person taking charge of their story and acknowledging their difficulties has far greater potential to alter public attitudes and shape the lives of others for the better. There is an especially thick stigma about women who drink in the subcontinent. Perhaps this is a stigma that once transcended cultures—in her book The Five, the historian Hallie Rubenhold traced the lives of the five best-known victims of Jack the Ripper, and found that they were not prostitutes (as has been stated previously) but homeless women. Why were they homeless? Often because of problems with alcohol, an affliction so shameful in late 19th century London that they could no longer live with their families.
Since his admission, Sanjay Dutt has been cheered on through a career full of wretched films (despite being a fine screen presence) and a criminal case for which he was sentenced to seven years in jail for illegal possession of weapons in connection to the 1993 Bombay blasts. Eventually, he became the hero of a gloriously mounted (blockbuster) biopic about his life. What has been the response to Bhatt's disclosure? An Instagram post she wrote at the time of completing 3 years 9 months of sobriety was reported verbatim in the online editions of some newspapers. But on the whole, her acknowledgment of a serious problem has been met by indifference. There has been no conversation about it, no interviews. The stories that you find if you search for Bhatt's sobriety are the usual cut-and-paste jobs pulled from social media posts. The sort found when celebrities post pictures of their cooking or families or gym routines; as if there is nothing worth engaging with in Bhatt's admission.
Alcohol use in women has been growing across the world in recent years, and the drinking gap has closed between men and women. An analysis published in BMJ Open in 2016 noted that women born in the late 20th century were almost as likely as men to consume alcohol, whereas women born in the early 20th century were less than half as likely to drink than men. This is close to the time that Rubenhold describes in her book, the late 19th century, when the Whitechapel murders attributed to Jack the Ripper took place. This is perhaps the most vivid description of the stigma that the woman of the 19th century who had a dependence on alcohol carried. It carried so much shame that even their own families were compelled to sever ties with them.
Yet in India, alcohol use among women appears to be going down, and the gap between men and women remains enormous. A 2019 report on substance use by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences found that 1·8% of women consume alcohol as against 29·3% of men.
One of the reasons for the markedly lower use of alcohol among women in India is sociocultural attitudes against women drinking, although this could also be a reason for fewer women to report alcohol use and dependence, meaning that current figures might be an underestimate. However, more interesting than the disparity between men's and women's drinking habits is the gap between the small number of Indian women who drink alcohol, and the intense interest of popular culture in women who drink.
Cinema audiences have spent decades watching women in Hindi films being constructed as bad because they smoke, drink, and show interest in sex (the triad of signs differentiating her from the virginal, sari-clad heroine). The Westernised Nadira in Shree 420 (1955), who uses Raj Kapoor's character to earn money, was arguably the first memorable bad woman, positioned against the poor school-teacher Nargis Dutt, who wore her blouses high on her neck and virtuously up to her elbows.
The empress of bad women in Hindi film is Helen Richardson Khan, often known as simply “Helen”, the remarkable semi-French, quarter-Spanish, and quarter-Myanmarese dancer whose signature moves hold aloft the sexiest Bollywood songs of the 1960s and 1970s in particular. Aside from dancing like no one could or can, Helen poured men drinks and often blew smoke from her lips. She is often made up in a manner to accentuate her foreignness: in some of her most famous songs, her eyes sparkle blue and her hair is blonde, although the actress is actually dark-haired and non-blue-eyed. This is, perhaps, the equivalent of the prosthetic facial scars with which James Bond movies mark out their villains—it is as if to say that good Indian women do not behave like this.
Some films provided a twist on Helen's usual character; in these, she played a woman with the proverbial golden heart (for example, the cult 1978 thriller Don). However, this made no difference to her ultimate tragic ending. Even when the gaze on the bad woman was empathetic, she still came to no good. We see this first with Chhoti Bahu (younger daughter-in-law) in Sahib Biwiaur Ghulam in 1963, an unloved wife drinking to quiet her depression. The character is played by Meena Kumari, rumoured to have had alcohol problems herself. Another example is Parveen Babi's character in Deewar, where she plays a so-called prostitute who lives with Amitabh Bachchan's character and becomes pregnant with his baby—groundbreaking for a heroine in 1973. Babi is murdered in the film, meeting that brutal fate written for women who do not maintain the norms of decency, even the good ones. In Arth (1982), Smita Patil plays Kavita, an actor who likes a drink, breaks up a marriage, and finally crumbles in distress. This character is said to be based on the life of Parveen Babi, who suffered from schizophrenia, spoke of being persecuted, became a figure of ridicule, and was discovered dead in her apartment in 2005 aged 50-something years. No one came forward to claim her body. In the past decade, Bollywood has decided that the woman who enjoys a drink is actually someone cool. The young woman who consumes alcohol (daaru) and cigarettes (sutta) is also sexually assertive. Alcohol and cigarettes are code for independence, sassiness, and abandon. The writer Gillian Flynn has called this the “cool girl”—the girl who drinks like the guys, eats junk like the guys, but maintains the body of a nymph. She is one of the guys, but is also sexually available. We have seen this cool girl in the small-town, mithai-loving films like Tanu Weds Manu (2011, with a 2015 sequel), Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017), and Manmarziyan (2018). We have also seen her in a couple of urbane, chic Alia Bhatt characters in Dear Zindagi and Kapoor and Sons. Arguably, we first saw her in Cocktail, when Deepika Padukone arrived on screen drinking straight from the bottle as she rode the streets of London.
I have thought a lot about this, and I cannot help but feel that this might actually be a good development. It erodes some of the moral judgement that attends a female protagonist enjoying a drink. It gives women a taste of the liberties that men enjoy; it levels the unequal ground a little bit. If men and women are permitted to eat and drink the same things, is that not a step towards equality? However, it also highlights an ongoing deficit in the complexity allowed to female characters in Hindi film.
Alcohol and drugs are signposts for a certain kind of woman: bad, sad, or cool. We never travel inside the mind of a woman experiencing addiction. Her struggle is not narrated, only her choices are highlighted. She is not portrayed as an individual, but as a type. A new Hindi adaptation of Paula Hawkins' thriller The Girl on the Train, about a divorcee with alcohol problems who is involved in a murder investigation, has the material to explore this terrain but is too silly to be considered. Besides, the film is wholly set in London, giving the impression that loneliness, depression, and alcohol dependence are things that can happen only in cold, foreign lands. Hollywood movies show no such hesitation; we have seen women struggling with alcohol problems in movies such as Losing Isaiah (1995), When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), and my favourite, Rachel Getting Married (2008). Why is the Hindi film hesitant? Perhaps it is palpably uncomfortable to see a woman experiencing the mental and physical changes that accompany addiction? The universal expectation is that women are gentle, warm, selfless—in a single word, mothers. Addiction, on the other hand, is typified by a narrowing of horizons.
Until half a decade ago, this is the point at which Hindi film stood on mental health. Women who suffered mental health concerns were ciphers for tragedy. They were less human beings than walking, talking portrayals of a problem. But this is changing, with films like Hasee Toh Phasee (2014), Dear Zindagi (2016), and Judgementall Hai Kya (2019), and now web series like Patal Lok and Criminal Justice (both 2020), mapping the contours of mental health. In fact, in this new world of mental health in Hindi media, it is men who are relatively neglected in mental-health-related plotlines. However, Bhatt's acknowledgement could be an even more potent narrative than all of the movies yet made on the subject of alcohol. In fact, Bhatt debuted in a TV movie called Daddy (1989), in which she helps her father, played by Anupam Kher, sober up. Bhatt, now a director and producer herself, has the means through her own example and her art to promote a more inclusive and understanding attitude to the issue of alcohol use by women. She can shape a more meaningful narrative around this—a woman who saves herself by owning her truth and disinfecting the shame out of it.
Sohini C was adjudged best film critic in the Indian Government's National Film Awards, 2021
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