Warning: Spoilers ahead
No matter how much I loathed watching Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2, the fact that it is currently the most commercially successful post-Covid Bollywood release cannot be changed. The film’s real highlights are its use of misogynistic cliches, violence against women, vilification of one entire gender, and denigration of women.
Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 is a followup to Priyadarshan’s 2007 psychological thriller Bhool Bhulaiyaa, a remake of the Malayalam film Manichitrathazhu that maintains misogynistic, patriarchal, and filled with archaic viewpoints.
The first part was based on a Bengali legend about the gifted court dancer Manjulika, according to which the elderly Raja Vibhuti Narayan had beheaded Manjulika’s lover Shashidhar on Durga Ashtami and imprisoned Manjulika to marry her. Manjulika later died by suicide and doomed her spirit to haunt the castle. The second part, on the other hand, blatantly shows a Bengali kid performing black magic! How horrible could it possibly be?
Kartik Aaryan, Tabu, Kiara Advani, and Rajpal Yadav make up the core cast of Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2. The movie’s second part is filled with patriarchal and misogynistic tropes, starting with the opening scene where Kartik Aaryan says, “Aree, bag me bomb nahi hai, bomb ka bag hain!” The bigotry and objectification of women in this dialogue are rife.
In the movie’s later scenes, we learn more about the tale, which is based on the patriarchal good-bad women binary. Anjulika and Manjulika, two Bengali sisters, are portrayed as being on opposite ends of the good-bad spectrum. Manjulika, the evil sister, begins practising witchcraft at a young age out of jealousy and later murders Anjulika in order to wed her husband. Everything in this movie, I mean, is built on misogynistic ideas and thrives in a patriarchal context.
This film portrays these two women as a distraught damsel and a sorcerer. Referring to the climax, where Anjulika thanks Ruhaan (Kartik Aaryan) for not viewing her as the witch she is but rather for noticing her agony that no one else noticed, the distraught damsel, Anjulika, is portrayed as a morally ‘decent’ woman who has to be redeemed by the hero.
Manjulika, the vamp, is contrasted with this as a seductress and a killer who seeks not only her sister’s lover but also plots to kill her and pretend to be a good woman. While the men in the film are portrayed as strong and intelligent, these women are either portrayed as gorgeous and beautiful or as ugly and evil, both representations only based on surface-level and shallow qualities.
Returning to the witch’s depiction as a Bengali. The sexist media and public trial of Rhea Chakraborty after the tragic passing of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput gave rise to the notion that Bengali women engage in witchcraft. Not that this famed myth didn’t exist previously, but in order to highlight how popular it has become recently, I cited the SSR case.
It’s disheartening that a blockbuster movie that denigrates women like it’s cool and is predicated on such a falsehood. Even worse, it implies that violence against women is completely acceptable and condoned. The tale also uses the infamous misogynist stereotype of women being their own worst enemies. The movie neglects to emphasise the shared sisterhood that all women have, snatching away the agency sisterhood brings to all women. The movie pits Manjulika against her sister Anjulika and fails to recognise the shared sisterhood that all women have.
The causes of women being harsh on women are not examined. Deniz Kandiyoti stated in her study on the patriarchal bargain that the token torturer is a woman who has ingrained norms of society to quite a significant degree that she seems unable to consider the fact that the wrongs she perpetrates are the same ones she experienced. If one has a thorough understanding of how patriarchy thrives through women, one will concur with this statement.
While Bhool Bhulaiyaa 1 had its problems, the disturbing content in Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 goes much further. Bengali witch is one element that both movie stories have in common. However, how did the belief that Bengali women are chudail, witches, etc. come to be?
We will examine the history of the so-called “witches” or “wise women” who were typically healers and midwives in Europe to a lesser degree. Despite their primary focus being on healing, these folks in the Early Modern era could be implicated in engaging in witchcraft.
It is plausible to see the witch-hunt against enlightened women as another step in the exclusion of women from medicine. In early modern Europe, wise men and wise women were crucial healers, and women continued to play a crucial role in village medicine during the pre-industrial era. Amateur healers, many of whom were women, were common in rural Europe.
With plants, poultices, prayers, and ointments, they were able to treat all kinds of ailments. During the Renaissance, the first serious efforts were undertaken to remove the medicine from the sphere of popular culture and establish it as the domain of a confined profession, which put this ancient healing role in danger.
Additionally, throughout this time, medicine and science lost their spiritual underpinnings; when healers, magicians, and witches lost their ability to exert influence over the world’s spiritual energies, the foundation for the mechanisation of reality was laid.
Several measures were tried during this time to remove women and other “prominent” healers from the “profession” of medicine. The licencing of various practitioners was one of them. A second strategy involved requiring doctors to complete university training, which was unavailable to women. Another involved charging erroneous practitioners like “old wives” with witchcraft. Women were particularly vulnerable to attacks from the state, the Church, and the newly emerging medical profession due to their roles as village healers, midwives, and creators of healing spells and potions.
Similar to this, the Bengali Renaissance of the 19th century gave rise to the legend that Bengali women practised black magic. Bengal Renaissance is most often used to describe the social, cultural, psychological, and intellectual developments that occurred in Bengal during the nineteenth century as a result of interactions between sympathetic British authorities and missionaries and the Hindu elite.
The colonial capital of Calcutta served as the backdrop for the Bengal Renaissance. Bengali women, on the other hand, were educating themselves, acquiring a critical understanding of their culture, and becoming active political catalysts of social emancipation while the rest of India, especially the Northern “cow-belt,” was busy taming its women in patriarchal clutches.
Since the Bengali Renaissance, independent and incredibly progressive Bengalis have struggled against Hinduism’s backwards rituals and laws, as well as against societal ills like Sati, Child Marriage, and Widow Remarriage. The main problem is that people in the cow belt want women to behave like submissive “cows,” just as their mothers and spouses have been conditioned to do over the years by bogus patriarchy and have passed that on to subsequent generations.
We are the black magic practitioners if the Bengalis draw attention to the legitimate problems in this society. Have you ever considered the possibility that the black magic you are referring to is a result of a combination of Bengali women’s general self-assurance, strong personalities, high-quality education, and political activism? Bengali women don’t actually need to cast spells because they already have advanced social status and education. Bengali women pose a threat to the established patriarchy and undermine the structures of authority. That is what poses a threat.
In closing, I’d like to point out that Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 is a total sham that is jam-packed with Bollywood clichés and useless drama. The worst aspects of this film are its misogyny, which outweighs its poor plot, awful cinematography, pointless songs, and absolutely annoying overacting by every character. While select films, such as Lipstick under my Burkha, Pink, and certain OTT content, including Bombay Begums, have successfully and sensitively portrayed women and their characters, Bollywood as a whole has frequently failed. Bollywood, it’s time you put an end to this sexist art. Women everywhere, but particularly Bengali women, are tired of it.