While mass films have a history of foregrounding subaltern politics, there is perhaps a cynical opportunism associated with the kind of pageantry that invites the spectator to partake in the taming of the woman. In reducing the woman to an acquisition. In an episode of ETV’s Soundaryalahiri, K Raghavendra Rao, opined:“ What does the common man want? If you show a Rickshaw driver his life, what’s the use? You have to take the common man into a dream world. That a crorepati’s daughter has fallen in love with him, because it doesn’t happen in real life. They will relate with that.”
In Megastar, SV Srinivas also talks about the “rowdy hero”, an “excessively masculine” subaltern protagonist characterised by his “propensity for enjoyment, which ensures that spectatorial investment in the figure is suitably rewarded by his pursuit of pleasure.” In the 80s and 90s, this figure was more embedded in actual class dynamics, as seen in films like Mutha Mestri or Khaidi. And while the 90s and early 2000s saw a move away from this, the rowdy hero made a big return in Telugu cinema in the mid-2000s with Puri Jagannath’s films, most prominently with Pokiri (2006).
However this time, the class politics was mostly in a state of recession—what remained from the old mass films was the identification with the excess masculinity and the fantasy of “taming” the woman. In Puri’s Businessman (2012), when our hero, an up-and-coming gangster in Mumbai shows up in a sports car at his love interest’s door step, she rejoices at the prospect of being gifted an expensive car and tells him she loves him. His response? “When you buy a car worth two crores, any woman will tell me she loves me, not just you”.
In Desamuduru (2007), when the heroine, who has taken a vow of celibacy and joined a monastic order, tells the hero that we’re all just dust, and to dust we shall return, he asks her if she’ll sleep with him for the night—”what does it matter, we’re dust after all!”. Then there is iSmart Shankar (2019), in which the protagonist “pretends” to rape the heroine and it’s all treated like a gag. In so many of these films, the woman’s personhood is treated as an obstacle to the hero’s libido — something which the audience is invited to identify with. Any reservations she might have about being with him are framed as misguided or frivolous. A defense of the gender politics of these films commonly offered is that these male characters weren’t meant to be idolized, that they were flawed: but watch the scenes when they interact with women and it’s difficult to deny that you’re being surreptitiously invited to partake in their treatment.