*Spoilers ahead*
Let me set the context at the very beginning – I loved Bhool Bhulaiyaa when it came out. Sure, I had my problems with it, Vidya Balan’s terrible Bengali accent being the least of them. This time around too, the ghost happens to be a Bengali damsel-causing-distress.
When Tabu was cast as Vidya Balan’s successor, I sensed the direction for Manjulika’s character development already – a strong, opinionated woman – obviously a nightmare for many an Indian (male). However, I still wanted to give the movie a go; personal politics aside, one also needs to be entertained in life.
This time, Manjulika has been given an extensive back story. The story has shifted from a royal palace in Varanasi to one in Rajasthan’s noble quarters. Manjulika’s existence in real life (spoilers ahead) has been given clarity – she was a dancer who fell in love with the palace’s prince. Alas, in a twist of fate, her twin sister Anjalika was to be his bride of choice. Manjulika tries her best to ruin her sister’s life and becomes a ghost at the end of it.
Like any good old patriarchal tale setting, obviously, this house of horrors has the classic Madonna/Whore or good girl/witch syndrome behind it. The good girl’s the one who gets sacrificed (I can’t reveal how without completely spoiling the plot), and the witch (or ghost in this case) is the reason behind everyone’s misery. She, who represents the ‘bad energy’, needs to be contained (or repressed eternally) for society to go back to normal. Now we all know how bad this is already looking from a feminist perspective.
Fearing witches, and repressing or burning them, isn’t exclusive to India. Unfortunately, all over the world, women are burnt at stake trying to prove their innocence. In India, too, many innocent women are brutally murdered till today, losing out to public mania, feared as a witch or possessed by the many forms of a female ghost in different cultures – chudail, pret, petni, etc. etc.
Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 also runs down the same line as far as the irrational fear of ghosts is concerned. To make matters worse, this ghost Manjulika knew the tantric arts before her death (and obviously, she’s Bengali, the rest of India’s favourite stereotype about Bengali women).
Sure, you find her with her floating hair and her paper-white face. But, the same romantic sight becomes a feared one. This isn’t a story of vintage value. Instead, this story upholds vintage, regressive fears and myths.
The casual misogyny in a mainstream Bollywood movie isn’t, unfortunately, the movie’s only problem.
The main protagonist, or Hindi-film hero, needs the side character of a young kid to provide comic relief. He is variously called ‘haathi’, ‘bhaari’ and fat-shamed in various ways; the hero goes on to threaten his life at one point – and we’re all supposed to take this as a joke. Ha-ha, the hero just threatened to topple a kid off the balcony – but it’s funny because the kid is too fat. Get it? No?
If chudails and fat-shaming have entered the party, can caste be left behind in this regressive rave? At one point, the hero rues the fact that he’s fallen in love with a Thakur, and it would be convenient if she were an Agarwal instead. (As Thakurs are brave, Agarwals are not, get it?)
The ending by which I had had enough of this movie bizarrely tries to give the ghost a plot twist by making her good and her alive twin bad. To my actual horror, we then see the entire family stand aside while they watch the ghost pulling their beloved bhabhi by the hair, torturing her and locking her up in the room where the ghost had resided till then.
No one lifts a finger, even as their beloved daughter-in-law is suddenly declared as scheming and the root cause of evil. Worse, they turn a blind eye as she is tortured in front of their eyes. By this time, I wanted to return to the relatively kinder world of Akshay Kumar–Vidya Balan’s Bhool Bhulaiyaa and forget the movie, which made me more uncomfortable than it made me laugh.
Be warned: It will only make you laugh if you enjoy fat jokes, casteist jokes or misogyny.