Fanaa: A Feminist Love Letter, a Decade and a Half Later

(warning: there will be spoilers)

There is no shortage of discourse on the gender politics of Bollywood. It’s well established by now that the Madonna-Whore dichotomy is a thing and it permeates Hollywood and Bollywood. People don’t seem to want to fathom women as sexual beings who aren’t primarily objects of desire for the male gaze. The standard formula for a heterosexual romance in Bollywood amounts to boy meeting girl, boy stalking girl and the girl really does not like it, boy forcing himself on girl, boy rescuing girl from another man who would force himself on girl, girl yielding to boy. (Looking at you, Sholay!) A girl who takes pleasure in male attention is considered one of easy virtue.

Well Fanaa came along in 2006 and subverted that mindset HARD. And I’m here to outline how it did that.

We open with the incomparable Kajol, playing a sweet and sheltered blind Kashmiri girl named Zooni who hasn’t seen much of the world. She is about to take a holiday to Delhi with some of her girlfriends. While there, they meet a handsome and roguish tour guide named Rehan, ably played by Aamir Khan, who is playing an age-appropriate character. He flirts shamelessly with Zooni, whose girlfriends are justifiably wary of him and protective of her. But whereas in other movies, we see how virtuous the heroine is because she actively resists the attention of the hero, in this film, the camera shows us that Zooni takes pleasure in Rehan’s attention to her. She may be a virgin, but she is not a nun. And the camera shows this without subjecting the audience to an item number.

Zooni wrestles with the ramifications of sleeping with Rehan, expecting not to see him again after leaving Delhi, and ultimately decides that the heartbreak she will feel the morning after is a small price to pay for the pleasure of Rehan’s bed for the night. Zooni and Rehan sleep together after a really pretty musical number with obligatory rain. The camera continues to give her the treatment of Madonna rather than whore for the remainder of the film, even after we find out that she got knocked up with Rehan Junior that night. There is no discourse on Zooni’s virtue or honor. And this when Zooni’s family is supposed to be Muslim. People in India are not usually up for showing Muslims to have forward-thinking values, so this is a big deal.

I’m not about to spoil the movie any more than I have to in this piece, so I will just close with, “Watch Fanaa. It is ahead of its time in its gender and sexual politics. It subverts the Madonna-whore dichotomy HARD. Plus the soundtrack is on point.”