Bright Times News: In recent Hindi film history, screenwriter Kanika Dhillon has created some of the most recognizable and talked-about characters. The author, who received praise for his work on Anurag Kashyap’s Manmarziyaan, starring Taapsee Pannu, Abhishek Bachchan, and Vicky Kaushal, has drawn criticism for his work on Akshay Kumar and Bhumi Pednekar’s Raksha Bandhan. The plot of the movie was criticized for being misogynistic and retrograde, and it did poorly financially.
Dhillon discusses the box office success of the Aanand L Rai-directed picture and claims that the movie was created for the “cow belt” of India rather than metropolitan India. According to Kanika, the movie depicts official data on dowry fatalities in India.
“We created the movie and developed the script for the Hindi and cow belts. What is this belt in Hindi? The statistics on dowry fatalities in this country are frightening. According to statistics, there is a society that shares Lala Kedarnath’s (Akshay Kumar’s character in Rakhsha Bandhan) way of thinking.
They treat women like cattle, objectify them, and prepare them for the dowry market. They are being socialized to believe that if someone whistles at them, they should marry them. They are also being conditioned to become fair or slim. The women are dying, so why else? Regressive views and this mindset are to blame.
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Dhillon continued by emphasizing that the urban audience found the film’s depiction of the harsh realities of rural India unsettling to the point where they were unable to identify with it. “We are so removed from rural India, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” she says.
Sure, it makes us uneasy, and yes, because we are smarter than that, we don’t want to relate to it. But we deliberately intended to make this movie for the cow belt. The only error, the misfire, was that the kids didn’t want to participate in anything like that, and the urban audience thought it was a very rural sort of thing.
But as you can see from the exchange, we did obtain the Hindi belt. Due to the film’s theme and treatment, it performed incredibly well in the interiors but we were unable to win over the urban audience. We were attempting to target a different audience, but that is a topic for a very separate discussion.
We were successful in reaching our target audience and demonstrating the situation there. To move from the regressive to the progressive, we must first point out what is incorrect before demonstrating what is correct.
The lesson from Raksha Bandhan, according to Dhillon, is to write more inclusive films. “The lesson from this is to be more inclusive of the urban audience if you’re hoping for a huge box office number. I usually write on topics that are more geared toward urban adolescents, but I was trying to reach a new audience here.
The subjects in Dhillon’s literature have generated a lot of discussions. “If you look at my work, from Manmarziyaan to Judgemental Hai Kya, to Kedarnath to Guilty, and Rashmi Rocket to Haseen Dilruba 1, the concept is that there are all types of women, various types of personalities, and various tales, all of which are very fascinating.
There is so much to discuss and learn, and everything is natural. I don’t sit down and determine that because my previous character was this way, my current character should be this way. However, I do want to experiment with other things as an artist, writer, and maker.
