Mumbai: Actor R Madhavan, who plays an ageing man struggling to find love in his upcoming film ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’, recently opened up about toxic masculinity in Bollywood films.
Talking about the patriarchal mindset of men, during a recent interview with HT, the actor said, “If you look back at any Hindi film hero, you will find that he is completely flawed because that’s part of the way Indian culture has been represented. There is no actor in the Hindi film industry whose one film or the other is not about toxic masculinity. Don’t take only RHTDM, take any film before that. Any hero who has slapped a woman on screen or any actor who has abused a woman in films is toxic. Name one actor who hasn’t done that. So, if you look at it in retrospect, you are going to confuse yourself completely.”
Insisting audience to judge the character of heroes from the lens of the time, he further said, “What were the circumstances when a guy fell in love during the RHTDM days? We didn’t have some bars where you can go and meet a girl and tell your parents ‘aapki bahu ko main wahaan se le aaya’. In our country, at least in villages, you have social functions like weddings and festivals where you get to meet and interact with people whom you might get attracted to and fall in love. And even in cities, you didn’t have mobile phones as such to get in touch with them.”
“If I saw a beautiful girl in the train, how do I get in touch with her? Even if my intentions are completely noble and without malice, how do I tell her that I like her? If I keep a letter that she’s given me, it’s considered creepy right now. So, we have to change our understanding of what masculinity is right now,” he added.
Relating it to the contradiction in his upcoming film ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’, Madhavan said, “In which part of the world a man considers his bhabhi a mother? Which other culture do you see that happening in? But because of this conditioning, he is toxic for the relationship he is getting into. At one place, he has seen the women in his house as mothers, and on the other hand, he is taught to treat women in a certain way because of how women in his house are behaving. And he is expecting that from his partner. So, even though the intention is not there, his act comes out as offensive.”
Reflecting back to his superhit romantic film, ‘Rehna Hai Tere Dil Mein’, Madhavan said, “In that film, if I was able to open the door for the girl, or if I stood up for her and beat somebody up because he thinks they are being wrong, for that time it was correct. It was seen as he was putting his life on the line for the girl. But now it’s considered that this guy is violent. That is the journey of how men have been perceived in the society.”
While talking about his character in ‘Saathiya’, he concluded, “It was my first romantic film where I see a girl in a wedding and I don’t know how to find her. All I know is that she is a doctor from Chennai. So, my character actually does a calculation like how many girls go from that particular train station, from them how many go to the medical college. Out of them, how many are from the hometown that the girl is from. So, he narrows it down to a list of 65 girls, out of which she is the one. Aaj ke zamaane mein isko bola jayega ki ye to stalker hai. But Mani Ratnam didn’t see it that way, that time it was considered romantic. If you look at it from the lens of now, even a Mani Ratnam hero is flawed. So, we should be kind to the man as per the era it was portrayed in.”
Besides Madhavan, ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ also stars Fatima Sana Sheikh in lead role.
The film is slated to hit theatres on July 11.