Kabir Singh is not an anomaly. He is just the ultimate culmination of the privilege that male protagonists have enjoyed in Hindi cinema for a long time.
Raj Kapoor slapped and manhandled Nargis in Awara (1956) because she playfully called him ‘Junglee.” But he had a messy, heartbreaking backstory so she had to rescue him from his demons and we, you see, had to empathise with him. Shammi Kapoor was a jovial stalker in every third film. In An Evening in Paris (1967), he dangled precariously from a helicopter in a rather revealing bathrobe to distract his love interest as she tried to focus ineffectually on a water sport. “Akele Akele kahan ja rahe ho” was the theme song of most courtships in the sixties and the ritual of wooing a girl in cinema mostly involved singing songs and appropriating her physical space in public spaces till she helplessly fell in love.
Even in family socials, the ‘bad’ daughters-in-law or the vicious mother-in-law were always tamed with a slap in the end and returned to the kitchen and traditional servility sans any protest or ambition.
A young bride who was educated, wore Western clothes, liked to party or to dance, did not want children and wanted to set up her own home was made to repent in the end by a twist in the plot or the ever dependable slap with a one liner that this disciplinary measure should have been taken a long time ago.
The worst were the passive aggressive heroes who guilt tripped women for having volition like Ashok Kumar in BR Chopra’s Gumrah where after losing his wife, he not only marries his sister-in-law to raise his kids but shadows her and torments her with sneaky reminders of her immorality whenever she reconnects with her past lover.
There was also the upright hero of Basu Chatterjee’s Swami in the seventies who repeatedly reminds his impetuous wife Saudamini that she must behave because she is a “Vaishnav ki patni” and that her place is with nobody else except with, you guessed it right, her Swami. Her master.
Even in a film as modern as Gulzar’s Ijazat, an ex wife touches the feet of her husband in the final scene even though it is the latter who failed their marriage.
In Basu Bhattacharya’s Aavishkar, the husband almost becomes a wife beater. In his Anubhav, he is self-involved and oblivious. In Griha Pravesh, he strays and in all three films, it is up to the woman to forgive and make amends so that the marriage can be revitalised.
The seventies did see some spunky heroines in mainstream and parallel cinema but the real shift happened in the eighties when Hindi film heroes stopped being even fundamentally decent towards women.
In the eighties, Amitabh Bachchan left behind the innocence of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Mili where a raging alcoholic is tamed the first time a chit of a girl tells him to behave and sinks into defeat with a , “bahut din baad daant khai re..maza aa gaya.”
He also left behind the dignified crusader of Zanjeer, a role that had first brought him success, to cat call Kimi Katkar in Hum where he also drenched her clothes with a hose and sang “Jumma Chumma De De.” He slut shamed Zeenat Aman in Dostana but had no qualms about singing songs with double meaning in films like Mard. He kidnapped Rati Agnihotri in Coolie and she actually liked it. He even cornered Zeenat Aman in Lawaaris and pretended he was going to molest her to teach her a lesson. A trick that Aamir Khan repeated with great conviction in Dil to teach Madhuri Dixit a lesson. In both films, the women fell instantly in love.
Public harassment became a bonafide entertainment device in the nineties with every teen romance having at least one song where the girl was eve teased in college corridors (Dil, Phool Aur Kaante and counting) . If Govinda’s stalking tactics in Raja Babu were a big hit, Shah Rukh Khan’s manic obsession in Darr turned him into a phenomenon.
When Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D hit the theatres in 2009 to rave reviews, it was hard for me to understand what was admirable about a man who is not just vindictive, petty and wimpy in equal measure but lives in a world rearranged for his convenience . So his happily married ex-girl friend turns up one day in his messy room to wash his clothes while there is the exotic new love interest who bathes him tenderly in a tub, thankfully without Johnson’s baby soap.
We are asked to sympathise with him even though he is involved in a drunken driving episode where people die. Because broken men must be mothered and understood no matter what or who they have destroyed. The difference between Kashyap’s Dev D and Sharat Chandra’s Devdas is that the latter knows he is a moral failure and that he has failed as a lover and a human-being while the former lives in a haze of utter impunity. I also remember sitting through Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara where every anti-woman expletive was greeted with uproarious laughter. Tere Naam of course turned the obsessed lover into an object of sympathy for his one-sided passion and a kidnapping victim into an unwitting provocateur.
Then there is Sanjay Leela Bhansali who glorifies the perpetually suffering woman in most of his films and will be hard pressed to find just how to outdo the resplendently, colour coded Jauhar sequence in Padmavat where women seem to dissolve in light when they are actually immolating themselves from bone to flesh. Hindi cinema has largely failed to see the world with a female gaze and to grant a woman physical, emotional and mental autonomy. Though, there are exceptions.
What is unique about Kabir Singh however is that he also exhibits class privilege and the victim complex of someone who has the freedom and the choice to live the way he wants but torments those weaker than him to feel empowered. See, where this narrative is going?
That the film is a hit should tell us something about the milieu we live in now. Where those who have power can humiliate and dehumanise anyone and they can do so with impunity while the onlookers cheer on.
Kabir Singh mirrors the new India. Where anyone can appropriate a saintly name and inflict violence because well, who cares about a moral compass any more. We make lynching and rape videos go viral. This is a developing story. Kabir Singh is just a sign of things to come.

Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of  Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a  translator who recently interpreted  Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an  RJ  and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.