The Apotheosis of the Tiger Man

Courtesy of UTV A poster for Sajid Khan’s film “Himmatwala,” releasing on March 29.

In the trailer for “Himmatwala” (The Brave), a remake of a 1983 revenge drama that releases next Friday, Ajay Devgn’s title character stands outside a temple and swings, by long golden chains, massive temple bells in each hand as a crowd of 50 men armed with sickles and scythes charges toward him.

“Maan Sherawali ka haath hai mujhpe, chahe saikaron dushman aa jayen zameen par, ek ek ko zinda gaad dega yeh himmatwala yehin par” (“I have the blessing of goddess Sherawali [of the tiger]; let hundreds of enemies descend on this ground, this man will bury each of them alive right here”), he roars in a suitably towering closeup that follows.

The trailer hit television around the same time that the Censor Board of Film Certification barred the telecast of an item song, a racy musical performance meant for movie promotion, called “Babli Badmaash,”from the film “Shootout at Wadala.” The board gave it a for-adults-only rating for “distasteful” content. In the song, Priyanka Chopra, performing on stage in a leather catsuit studded with electric bulbs, urges her imaginary man not to feign any decency since, as she declares again and again, she is naughty herself.

The censor board, a statutory body under the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, announced in late February its decision to scrutinize item songs at a meeting of central government officials regarding updates on steps taken to teach the public gender sensitivity, a periodic exercise the government had started after the Delhi gang rape in December.

Ms. Chopra’s item song was, however, later cleared by the board’s revising committee in the face of immediate and sustained opposition from the film fraternity.

In the rush to appropriate blame after the fatal Delhi gang rape, Bollywood got its fair share. Many said that the coarse objectification of women in Hindi films contributed to a violent and misogynist atmosphere in north India. But, paralleling the blame assigned when real-life sexual attacks happen, few have complained about the portrayals of men in Bollywood.

Censorship isn’t the answer to arguable content. But if we are going to hold cinema accountable for its message, then surely the deification of machismo through films like “Himmatwala” must be as threatening as supposed degradation of women through item numbers

“To give women their due place, it is their sexuality that we need to celebrate, rather than scrutinize and censor all representations of it,” Brinda Bose, editor of “Gender and Censorship,” an anthology of essays by Indian feminists, said in an email response. “The day women can be accepted as being ‘indecent’ in ways equal to, but different from, men, will be the day that women will be ‘safe’ from unacceptable violence.”

Triggered by Aamir Khan’s role in “Ghajini” in 2008, the reincarnation of the meathead in Bollywood has been phenomenal. In the five years since, Mumbai’s cinema has been taken over by macho movies: Salman Khan in the “Dabangg” series, “Wanted” and “Bodyguard;” Akshay Kumar in “Rowdy Rathore” and “Khiladi 786;” Hrithik Roshan in “Agneepath;” and Ajay Devgn in “Singham,” “Bol Bachchan” and “Son of Sardar.â

Acting like catnip for Bollywood’s top male stars, the extremely successful genre â€" one that set off the “100-crore (1 billion) rupee” gold rush â€" is, at its core, a glorification of unmitigated manliness, in which everything else is either an excuse for or a breather between elaborate sequences of idealized men showing off their primal power.

If sexual violence is, as widely agreed, an expression of male aggression and the assertion of power over the opposite sex, then shouldn’t we also worry about the ongoing celebration of cinema that propagates the idea of violent masculinity

“Item numbers are terrible, but they are not the crux of sexual violence,” said Bijayalaxmi Nanda, political science professor and convener of women’s development cell at Miranda House, a prominent women’s college in Delhi. “We also need to look at the aggression propagated by Bollywood’s popular heroes through their machismo-driven films,” she said.

A 2005 report titled “Film and TV: viewing patterns and influence on behaviors of college students” found that young men were far more likely than young women to hold stereotypical and unequal gender role attitudes. It also reported, in a different context, that among young men with greater mobility and access to films, the media happened to be the biggest influence on their interactions with the opposite sex.

“In India, where politicians have very little public appeal, no one has more influence over people than popular actors,” Ms. Nanda said.

“So many of us have been working on sex-selective abortions â€" but look at the impact Aamir Khan had with his ‘Satyamev Jayate,’ ” she said, referring to Mr. Khan’s much-appreciated talk show about social issues.

In a sign of their hollowness, most of these dude films borrow the premise of Bollywood’s original wave of action cinema in the 1970s and 1980s â€" a tireless man’s revolt against the total dominance of a people by a powerful antagonist, which used to symbolize the common man’s struggle against an almighty Indian state.

In the three biggest beefcake films of the past couple of years, bravado begins from the titles themselves: “Dabangg 2” (“Audacious”), “Rowdy Rathore” and “Singham” (“Lion”). In all of them, the hero is a police officer with a rippling body who, responding to stock situations involving a helpless heroine/family/village threatened by a ruthless gangster, unleashes his brute strength on stream after stream of loaded men, often flattening these unfortunates with his bare hands â€" or paw, in the case of lion-emulating Bajirao Singham.

A single hero taking down armies of villains apparently effortlessly isn’t an unusual thing for Indian films. What is unusual is the way the machismo is polished to perfection. From showing his every blow in slow motion to zooming in on every throb of his bulging muscles, the new killing machine is presented as nothing short of godly.

In “Singham,” Mr. Devgn’s Bajirao Singham manifests from a temple pond, water droplets sliding off his slick six-pack, in response to a wronged woman’s cry for revenge against her offender. Over in “Dabangg 2,” Mr. Khan’s Chulbul Pandey vanquishes the main villain and his gang amid ruins of a temple on the bank of the Ganges. And in “Rowdy Rathore,” Mr. Kumar’s Vikram Rathore slays a pack of goons with a disk-like instrument with serrated edges that resembles Lord Krishna’s sudarshan chakra on a staff, before twirling his Rajput mustache in habitual satisfaction.

True, the other element running through the torrent of macho movies is item songs, with the most risqué of them, like “Chikni Chameli” (“Ageepath”) and “Fevicol Se” (“Dabangg 2”), associated with projects highest on testosterone. It is surprising, then, that while these two songs have led to the maximum number of complaints about Bollywood’s commodification of women because of lyrics in which the performers refer to themselves as, respectively, “halwa” (confection) and “tandoori murgi,” no one has pointed a finger at the glorification of male aggression in the same films.

How difficult can it be, after all, to figure out the more dangerous message for Indian society at this point between objectified women and gleefully violent men

Snigdha Poonam is Arts Editor at The Caravan. She is on Twitter at@snigdhapoonam