#MeToo in Bollywood: When Kanan Devi spoke up in the 1930s

Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was hauled up for sexual misconduct and his alleged intimidation of women actors leading to his expulsion from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The women who spoke out against Weinstein included top names in Hollywood, successful professional women, for whom it is now evidently easier to resist and shame their erstwhile tormentor.

Bollywood, most recently, has been stirred by the revelations of a leading lady who disappeared from the limelight some ten years ago, having left behind a promising career in films. The lady in question has accused a prominent and highly acclaimed actor of sexually harassing and intimidating her several years ago, leading her to forgo her career.

The lady in question does not hope to make a comeback in films, nor is she a top name like the Hollywood leading ladies who stood against Weinstein. What is at stake in this matter that is steadily accruing voices on either side? It will certainly not stay limited to the individuals in question, more so that some leading names in the film industry, both men and women, have voiced their concern and support for the lady in question. What does it imply in a broader canvas?


At the core of the present issue of sexual misconduct is a much wider call for gender equality. Specifically, it is confronting head on the sense of entitlement that has typically existed with regard to women in certain professions. Here we are not necessarily referring to glamour or the fashion industries or films, but as well to the larger spectrum of a service sector that includes tourism, fitness, and the leisure and entertainment industries that requires women to appear attractive or present themselves as images for consumerism and consumption. Typically women’s rise and growing presence in these professions has coexisted with a sense of ‘them being available’, something that has started to be contested in right earnest.

This sense of entitlement relating to women scarred the lives of some of the greatest performers and artists of the modern era, women who emerged as powerful professionals against the backdrop of an older service economy that was dedicated to the pleasure of the elite and princely classes. Begum Akhtar, or Akhtari Bai Faizabadi as she was famously known, was raped as a young teenager by one of her princely patrons. She gave birth to a girl whom she kept with her but was forced to pass off as her sister for the rest of her life.

Much later Kanan Devi – leading star and glamour girl of the 1930s – alleged, in her autobiography, sexual harassment and misconduct during her days as a young star. Kanan Devi was a star at par with her male counterparts like KL Saigal or Pramathes Barua, yet she struggled to earn the very same respect. She had entered a nascent film industry when women working in films were defined in terms of easy access, very much like cinema itself that was the new form of cheap entertainment. Many years thereafter, this very sense of entitlement or easy access has persisted with regard to professional women in the very same spheres: something that the present issue of sexual harassment lays bare, but also evidently promises to address.

What is being writ large by the clamour of supportive voices on the present case of alleged sexual misconduct is this: it is more than a matter of individuals pitted against one another, or a case for defining one’s allegiances, this way or that. Rather it speaks for a section of the film industry’s clamour for greater professionalism and a better self-image, a professionalism that must come with a combatting of sexual inequality, intimidation and abuse. By simply speaking out, if nothing else.


The industry which saw transparency and professionalism in the wake of its corporatisation after the 1990s, has since transited into a more equitable and democratic space. A space that has become more open to aspirants from small towns and those otherwise unconnected with films or without influence. We now have a crop of immensely talented actors, both men and women, that mainstream Bollywood may hold forth as evidence of its integral democracy and fairness, a group of individuals who have risen to prominence despite powerful lineages and a precedence of ‘insiders’.

What is at stake here, then, is the chance to bring about greater fairness and democracy in their own ranks, by making this a ground for not only speaking out against past injustices but also for setting in place certain inviolable codes. Codes that say a very firm ‘no’ to any sense of easy entitlement with respect to a woman professional.

It is a matter that deserves every seriousness and dignity. For the simple reason that it has the possibility of laying out a footprint for the future. The industry should guard itself against a degradation of the issue into a slanging war of words. Rather any spoken words of support and empathy would go towards establishing a culture of work that better secures vulnerable individuals, and make room for a work environment that does not normalise bullying.

To simply speak in solidarity against abuse is to implicitly warn off those that continue to feed on that age-old sense of entitlement, that sense of ‘yeh to chalta hai’. What lies embedded in the responses of empathy and support generated is the industry’s own progressive self, its more liberal face.