The red and gold ghunghat, symbol of an incredible lost and found story of Laapataa Ladies, unmasks several sticky tropes. Among them is the fight-and-fright response to stories from rural India

Is it sheer cinematic grit, script, story, cast, direction, acting and meaning that explain the nominations of films to the Oscars from India over the decades? Or is there a complex attention and attraction for the triumph of the underdog who fights back from a position of helplessness and then takes over? As a moral lesson for all who didn’t believe or didn’t pay attention. Not just as karmic or poetic justice as must prevail in the best stories ever told. But how it takes a village (or a grotty ghetto, slum, gully, or gutter) to make a story of victory so peculiarly Indian, so representatively “correct” in cultural diversity, ordinariness, feminism and humanism, that it reaches the Oscars.

Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies does not deserve to be pulled down. It is a wholesome, fulsome, joy-some film in serving entertainment, some great acting, and story-telling. It assimilated praise and pride over the year for the right reasons. It discovered the Alpha Female behind a red-and-gold wedding ghunghat and applause-worthy resilience plotted behind a hastily pulled pallu and submissive demeanour. It had honour and humour, farm pesticide knowledge and love. It showed gullibility and grit, the disgusting depths of corruption in the Indian police force as well as the transcending sweetness of homemade milk cake sold at a railway station chai stall. Its “laapataa” (lost) symbolism built the idea of the “found” with utter delight.

A still from Kiran Rao’s ‘Laapataa Ladies.’

Village Idiots, Villainous Cops, Veiled Women

But now that it has been nominated for the Best International Feature Film to the 97th Oscars, over Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light which won the Cannes Grand Prix earlier this year, it is hard to avoid some questions. The first being why award nominating juries (at least for films that reach the Oscars) love India’s rural heartlands, underdogs, small fights, villainous cops, misogynist landlords, village idiots, oppression-to-aggression trajectories, slums and downright colonisation of the human mind that must be fought. That seems to be the abiding, representative story of India in the 1950s as well as the holding plot in 2024.

When it comes to characterisation of female actors, the ghunghat that covers the head (not always the face) is brought in, in fact, as the Big Unveil. The head veil of humble, duty-bound, rooted, selfless women, it flags the beginning of their journey to be “seen”. Not unseen, forgotten or ignored. Fascinating, right?

A still from ‘All We Imagine As Light’.

From the time it is worn with happy or helpless submission to when it is resiliently thrown off for fight-or-flight, the ghunghat becomes a flag almost of an evolution in experience and action.

From Nargis’s Radha in Mother India (India’s official entry to the Oscars for the same category in 1957) to Gracy Singh’s Gauri in Lagaan (2001) to Nitanshi Goel’s Phool Kumari in Laapataa Ladies (2024), we are looking at the grit of veiled women from rural India since almost 70 years now. That’s one “type”.

Slum It Out

The other winning trope emerges from slums and gutter alleys—from Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (1989), which was nominated as best foreign language feature film to the Oscars. And even Slumdog Millionaire (2008) which, despite not getting nominated, drew million-dollar attention to the Indian slum when composer AR Rahman performed the song Jai Ho live at the Oscar awards ceremony.

From being ‘Brown’, ‘rural’, ‘downtrodden’, ‘oppressed’ to discovering a blazing streak of individualism, self-respect and respectable rebellion against men in power is how these stories go. Set I of Adjectives. Aamir Khan aced it in Lagaan, with India’s most followed religion—cricket—to swing the bat back at the powers that be. His Gauri (who calls herself his Radha in one of the songs), wore her pallu well. Set II of Adjectives: Female, pallu overhead or ghunghat in view, submissive, smart and sacrificing, striving always to protect. Radha in Mother India, Phool in LL.

A still from ‘Laapataa Ladies’

In global perception, one worries, India’s karma in films that get noticed in “international” or “foreign language” category is still made of the same mettle. Is it the win of a sustainable story or are award-nominating juries unable to imagine other battles against oppression and female liberation stories set in this culture as “light”?