Yeh Kaisa Insaf (1980)

A Hindi film Yeh Kaisa Insaf featuring Shabana Azmi and Vinod Mehra directed by Dasari Narayan Rao was released. It dealt with a married couple (Vinod Mehra and Shabana Azmi). The couple belongs to the middle class and both husband and wife are employed and their respective families depend on their incomes. The husband agrees when the wife places this condition before marriage. But over time, with increasing financial burdens on the husband which includes the expenses incurred on his sister’s marriage and his wife’s pregnancy, as the children begin to grow, the conflict between the husband and wife escalate. The husband commands her to stop helping her mother with her earnings. He underscores this demand by adding that if she does not agree, she should go back to her parental home and leave their son behind. Does she agree? It seems she does. The film was a commercial flop as the audience in 1980 was unprepared to accept a working wife who refuses to bend to her husband’s demands.

English Vinglish (2012)

Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish, a great box office success marked the comeback of Sridevi and her first under a woman director. English Vinglish subverts the mother figure we have seen in umpteen films with Mother India as the icon of all celluloid mothers. Shashi Godbole, the wife of Satish Godbole (Adil Hussain), does not really represent either the iconic mother we met in many Hindi films or the modern mother in contemporary Bollywood films. She redefines the concept of wifehood and motherhood differently though apparently, she comes across as the ideal image of motherhood.

The most amazing is that though Shashi is a successful entrepreneur who runs her own business in preparing, making and distributing laddus to a growing clientele, her corporate husband Satish Godbole and snobbish daughter Sapna neither recognise her professional identity nor invest her with any status for her efficiency in both business and household responsibilities. The script leaves no stone unturned to belittle Shashi Godbole’s thriving business into a non-business. The constant nit-picking is simple – Shashi cannot speak English fluently.

Shashi herself is not aware of her true worth as a successful wife, mother and working woman. She realizes this only when her English teacher in her Manhattan class says that she is an “entrepreneur” and explains........

© Mathrubhumi English