Has The Depiction of Sex In Hindi Films Changed Over The Years?

Here's how sex had been depicted in Hindi films in 2023.

How does Bollywood portray sex in recent years in films & shows?

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

If there was ever the title for the “Most Dissected Movie of the Year”, it would go to Animal. Created by a director with only two previous films to his credit, the reviews of Animal could be a genre in itself. 

This writer watched a clip from the film Animal and the film Priscilla (based on the life of Priscilla Presley) on the same day. This article is not about Priscilla, but the short clip from Animal. Shot in a dappled room, the couple post coitus, in their tanned fitness evoke the image of sex as a tastemaker. This would have remained an inscrutable music video like image from one of the most successful films of the year, but for the salute the male actor throws in the direction of his woman counterpart. This is sex as politics.  

Hindi Films and Sex

Hindi films have moved on from showing sex in a coy and suggestive manner to something more aesthetically appealing. The role of flirtation and seduction no longer falls on the second lead (picture a marvellous Tanuja in the song “Raat Akeli Hai” in Jewel Thief). 

Tanuja in the song 'Raat Akeli Hai' from Jewel Thief.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

This is keeping in line with the evolution of a more city – centric filmmaking and filmgoing experience.

Hindi films are still an escapist experience. There is very little that sex / intimate scenes (or, as some commentators prefer “bold scenes”) are trying to say apart from a desire to fuel desire.

Sex onscreen is never banal – it is aspirational. Though some would argue that, at least, progress has been made in the craft of such scenes.  

Post #MeToo 

In 2022, a movie with adultery as a theme (Gehraiyaan) became one of the few Hindi movies to have an Intimacy Coordinator on its sets. Though, an Intimacy Coordinator is not security, but a mere safeguard. 

Deepika Padukone & Siddhant Chaturvedi in Gehraiyaan.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube screengrab)

Credited to the British movement director Ita O’Brien, the “Intimacy on Set Guidelines” seeks to protect actors filming sex scenes after the #MeToo movement. But desire is hard enough to telegraph onscreen; let alone the grammar of acting in sex scenes.

Post #MeToo, in Hollywood, actors such as Molly Ringwald and Sharon Stone have written about the confusion and exploitation of filming intimate scenes, and the impact of such scenes in “our cultural life”. 

This may lead some to ask do we need to show sex onscreen. Ringwald in a stunning piece of inquiry, published in the New Yorker in 2018, underscores the vulnerabilities faced by young actors, and the unofficial role of intimacy coordinator famously played by the mothers of the actors!  

OTT Much 

In the Indian discourse, sex is a woman’s issue, and pleasure is a man’s business. This has seeped into movies as well. Never more has this been evident than in 2023 with multiple releases on OTT platforms with “bold themes”. One need not look further than the Matryoshka doll of a short film titled The Mirror, directed by Konkana Sen Sharma for the anthology series Lust Stories II, available on Netflix.

Konkona perhaps knows the staging of pleasure from her work as an actor in the celebrated adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello, 'Omkara'; where, her character is a woman with one foot firmly in the family and the other in her desires. In the film, she somehow made banal seem erotic.

One of the more recent releases on OTT was the film Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, where a young couple ride up to a hotel room, in a glass elevator, to have sex. You know, usual stuff. Now contrast this with the most unimaginatively named film of the year Thank You for Coming.  The film which saw a wide release locates its pleasure centre in a morality tale, and becomes a tale of whogaveit.  

Ananya Panday, Siddhant Chaturvedi and Adarsh Gourav in a still from Kho Gaye Hum Kahan.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

Though both of these movies are able to exist in 2023, the Central Board of Film Certification in India, till the late 70s, had the demanding job of, amongst others, censoring films for depicting “excessively passionate love scenes” and “indelicate sexual situations”. 

Demand for change has led to more vague language which seeks to curtail “obscenity” and “depravity”. This approach of hiding on-screen sex has further pushed sex and pleasure to the realm of fantasy.  

Many filmmakers had found a refuge in the light handedness of OTT platforms. However, recently the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has released the draft Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill to “streamline” the regulatory framework applicable to OTT platforms. This will likely lead to greater censorship of movies and series released directly on the medium. Though one hopes that the rules will not usher a period of tussle witnessed in the era of old Hollywood when the Production Code of the Motion Picture Industry, popularly known as the Hays Code was introduced as a measure of censorship. Grappling to regulate a new yet impactful medium, the Code led to many a bizarre case of censorship of pleasure and intimacy (and, possibly changed the ending of the movie Casablanca). 

In Conclusion 

In a now immortalised line by the literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, in her Harper’s magazine essay, she said, “a book is born in a puddle of treacle.”

In a bizarre parallel, Hindi films in 2023 adhered to this sentiment when it came to intimacy, pleasure and the sex of it.

For example: in Pathan and Jawan, two of the most successful films this year, the lead actors don’t even find the time for a kiss! Or the mega successful Rocky and Rani ki Prem Kahaani, where the couple show more desire when collaborating on Project Rebellion, rather than in the snowy Kashmir. (Contrast this with Dev D, released in 2009: where the lead actor carries a mattress for a rendezvous in the fields.)  

As a viewer of Hindi films, I shall be remiss if I don’t mention hope in the form of more poetic lines uttered by, the red nail paint wearing, lyricist Majrooh in Ms Anvita Dutt’s Qala which released in 2022. Played with big – eyed tenderness by Mr Varun Grover, Majrooh says “daur badlega, daur ki yeh purani aadat hai”. Lets hope he is right.

(Sangeeta Chakravorty is a lawyer and currently a student at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)