In the trailer of Shaad Ali’s upcoming OK Jaanu, Shraddha Kapoor looks appropriately forbidding as she glances at Aditya Roy Kapoor with big eyes from behind even bigger glasses, announcing with a flick of her well-coiffed hair that “it’s over”. In her bespectacled avatar, Kapoor looks serious and mature, much like the several actresses before her who have donned similar eyewear.
Spectacles on women are flexible symbols of intellect and experience and everything in between. Janice’s iconic round glasses in Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971) are a fashionable manifestation of her rebelliousness. In Ijaazat (1988), heavy black frames distinguish an older, mature Sudha from her impetuous younger self. In Life in a… Metro (2007), Neha’s elegant rimless spectacles transmit her serious commitment to her job.
But most often, glasses perched on women’s noses are an indicator of a plain, buttoned-up (and therefore unattractive) personality.
Bespectacled women are portrayed as unattractive, trapped by conventions or their own lack of confidence. True to American satirist Dorothy Parker’s famous quip, men in Hindi films don’t “make passes at girls who wear glasses”. On the rare occasion that they do, they first nudge women into makeovers. The path to true love, at least for women, is paved with neat contact lenses.
Hardly any piece of...
Read more