he minute you’re vulnerable… when you’re not trying to sit on a high horse, there’s an immediate connection of the hearts that transcends all class, privilege and the sundry trifles…”

There is an ongoing debate around the longstanding, if unpopular, idea that the cinema, like the rest of the world has been dominated by the male-gaze. A great majority of the portrayals and genres are designed in such a way that consolidates masculine approach. How women think, how they act, how they react, how they love or hate, are often seen through male lenses. Due to this lack of diversity, cinema takes it upon itself to lead a binary approach: hero or villain. Most characters are shown in an absolutist view, deprived of organic layers, capacities for highs and lows, good or bad, twists and turns, strengths and weaknesses and are pigeonholed into dehumanised roles to produce pieces that reek of propaganda or populism. This holds true for the chronically colonised South Asia as well.

Despite sharing a historic bond across cultural, racial and literary realms, the countries born out of the erstwhile Indian subcontinent now rarely see eye to eye with one another. Or that’s what we are made to believe, thanks to the nonstop rhetoric spewed from the top echelons to mainstream talk shows wrought by the same male gaze. In 1947, the region parted ways with its heritage. However, it couldn’t quite decolonise its collective thinking. Thus, listening to a celebrated woman filmmaker from India, speaking in a Pakistani arts college, quoting substantially from Bengali cinema while explaining the cardinal importance of female gaze – a subaltern narrative despite women making up half the population – becomes a welcome Valentine’s Day opportunity.

Moments before the annual Faiz Festival, Nandita Das, a self-identified accidental actor and director of the Nawazuddin starrer Manto, spoke at an exclusive gathering at the National College of Arts auditorium.

The exclusive session was titled Female Gaze.

On diverse perspectives

“Look is always a complex thing… I can only look my way… and the only way I can inform my way of looking better would be if I had multiple perspectives; if I was exposed to different things.” Perhaps thereby, Das established that making films from a female gaze and for men to watch those is just as important as it is to do justice to women’s stories. In its absence, both remain at a loss one way or the other.

“As I grew up, the movies I watched about women-centric issues, with female gaze, came from Bengali male directors,” she said, adding that those were stories with strong and layered women characters, which were then novel concepts.

“Even today, the films of Satyajit Ray don’t feel dated. Compared to that, the mainstream films seem archaic.” She added that the Bengali cinema has a huge role to play in the Indian independent cinema ethos.

“It’s true that only women bring about the lived experience in the female gaze. However, we have had men create strong female characters, too.” Dispelling the binary, she added that men that allowed themselves to be sensitive and developed their instincts had shown this in their timeless work.

“We say we have an instinct about a thing, but that instinct is not some divine gift; it’s what we expose our minds to and feed it that trains our instincts.”

On nuance

“We greatly lack nuances in our stories… through our art, we need to move towards a greater sense of nuance.”

Das noted that many sub-stories were now coming out, not just in art but also in science and literature.

We’re learning about certain cases in which, for instance, a male Nobel laureate in physics was significantly helped by his wife.

So the women who did things from backstage are slowly but incrementally being brought to the fore. That’s how we’re adding nuance to our stories. What they used to do thanklessly and anonymously, they’re now doing it with ownership.

Sharing her views on decolonising, she said there was a need to break away from the constraints of binaries in that department, too. To better train one’s gaze, she said one needed self-reflection. “So when I feel that this is how it is, is that my truth… Can I expand my truth? Can I actually look at it in a nuanced way?”

On discourses and disagreements

Initially, Das was a little cautious, saying she did not want to “ruffle many feathers and come off as explosive.” Talking about subjects like her 1996 debut film Fire, which dealt with homosexuality, intimacy and challenging patriarchal dominance, she said she thought it might hurt some sensibilities here just as it did in India. The film’s release was delayed by two years and there were several attacks by some right-wingers. Just as she had found support in India as many showed up to watch and supported the idea of a debate whether or not they agreed with the narrative, the response from the audience encouraged her to lower her guard.

“This is what the universities are supposed to do, create a conducive environment for debate even if the subject is not widely agreed upon or is liked by everyone,” she said.

To do what feels right

Talking about breaking into the industry, Das said her first remarkable exposure to performing arts was through a street theatre she attended as a 12th-grade student. A classmate introduced her to a street theatre group Jana Natya Manch [birth] run by Safdar Hashmi, who, she said, truly inspired her. He would also influence the future trajectory of a post-graduate social scientist who always had the knack for actually doing something after learning the theories in her academic work. Das joined the group and started doing theatre with Hashmi. “I don’t know if you know him. He was killed brutally while performing a play I had done 50 shows of…”

She said she got roped into academics and professional commitments but her sense of urgency for doing what she felt to be the thing to do persisted. Since then, Das has done about 50 movies as an actor in Bollywood cinema and directed about half a dozen.

Mainstreams and populism

“If you’re too popular, you should think about what you’re doing wrong,” she says.

On the popular cinema vs good cinema dilemma, Das said that to understand mainstream cinema in a nutshell, one had to understand that it wanted to please many people at the same time. “The minute you have to please a lot of people, you have to lower your standards.”

“We say we have an instinct about a thing, but that instinct is not some divine gift; it’s what we expose our minds to and feed it that trains our instincts.”

She said everything would not appeal to everyone, nor would everyone understand everything, so one had to go for the “lowest common denominator” to become popular.

“He is a good man, he is a bad man; the good man must execute the bad man. That’s popular cinema. There’s not much to understand here, there’s no controversy, it’s the easiest to do.”

She said that when one added layers to a story, it became complex and, therefore, hard to dissect for everyone. “It becomes hard for the masses to understand and to relate to stories if we add layers as to why indeed a ‘bad man’ become so bad; what events led to him becoming a certain character; was there any guilt on his part, any conflicting thoughts; did he revisit, confide or betray… Similarly with the good character: is he absolutely good or selectively good…”

On building blocks

“I always thought that I would have a girl child whom I’d teach to become feisty and a confident go-getter. But then my son was born, and I didn’t know how I would raise him to be sensitive and caring,” she said. “It seemed like a far bigger challenge.”

Expanding on the thought, she noted that for women, it’s natural to be nurturing. It’s because all children have both feminine and masculine energies. “As a society, we sow the seeds of patriarchy in the developmental years of a male child when we reproach them for ‘crying like girls’.”

“For men,” she said, “we decide the range where they must win, defeat ‘evil’, and use violence to defeat evil. We endorse violence for them, and our storytelling and cinema reflect that.

“So all kinds of stereotyping we do for men and women is pushed into our heads from such an early age that it becomes the responsibility of both the parents and other people involved to play their parts.”

“My son is caring, and he can easily cry,” she said.

O love for Lahore

“Jinhay Lahore nhin wekhya o jameya e nhin... Lahore is a wonderful place. It’s sad that not enough people from India can come and see it.”

For Das, Lahore is a city she’s been visiting since 1996. “It is a beautiful city and for me the definition of beautiful is something that’s really soulful.” Das said she first came with Kuldeep Nayar to attend the South Asians for Human Rights event where she met Asma Jahangir among other wonderful people of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

It’s kept its soul over these years, Das said, adding that she loved Lahori food, culture, songs and the many festivals that she had attended here. Most importantly, she said, the city had kept its soul through the incredible people with strong convictions for human rights and democracy.

In India, the filmmaker said, democracy was often taken for granted. ”But here you had to fight so many battles and for such a long time.

“In some ways, I think your conviction, and I keep going back to conviction because to me, it’s a fundamental thing, and it is stronger [than the Indians].”

In India, Pakistani culture, poetry, conversations, art, and drama are highly regarded. Thanks to the absence of an overpowering film industry like Bollywood, in Pakistan individuality and nuances thrive.

The writer is a journalist mostly covering business, policy and social issues. He posts on X at @mhunainameen