‘Film For India’s Cow Belt’: Writer Kanika Dhillon Opens Up On Failure Of Raksha Bandhan!
In the recent past, many movies have tanked at the box office. And one of them is Akshay Kumar starrer Raksha Bandhan. Audiences had high expectations from Kumar’s film when they entered the theatres but after coming out, they had nothing good to say about it. Viewers found its tone sexist and regressive.
The failure of Akshay’s much-anticipated project has impacted its makers in a lot of ways. Now, opening up about it, Raksha Bandhan’s screenwriter Kanika Dhillon has revealed that they made this film keeping in view the cow belt of India and not the urban population. Dhillon was at the receiving end after the film came out.
Elaborating on the same, Kanika stated, “We made the film, wrote the film for the cow belt, the Hindi belt. What is this Hindi belt? Here a lot of women, the statistics are staggering, suffer dowry deaths. The statistics is telling us that there is a society that exists that thinks like Lala Kedarnath (Akshay Kumar’s character in Rakhsha Bandhan). They treat women like they’re cattle, they’re being objectified and being prepared for the dowry market. They’re being conditioned to become thin or fair, to think that if someone whistles at you, you’re supposed to marry them. Why else are the women dying? This mindset and regressive ideas are responsible.”
She further quoted, “We are so far away from rural India, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Yes, it makes us uncomfortable, yes we don’t want to relate to it because we know better. However, by design, we wanted to make this film for the cow belt. The only miscalculation, the misfire that happened is that the youth didn’t want to engage with something like that, the urban audience thought it was a very cow belt kind of a thing. But we did get the Hindi belt, you can see the trade. It did extremely well in the interiors but yet we did not manage to convert the urban audience because of the theme of the film and its treatment of it. We were trying to aim for a different kind of audience but that’s a different debate altogether. We reached the audience we wanted to and we showed what is happening there. We wanted to move from the regressive to the progressive, and for that, we have to tell you what is wrong before we show you what is right.”
Anand L Rai’s film captured the ground reality of females living in rural India. Defending its misogynist theme, Kanika said, “The body-shaming, treating women like cattle, women lacking agency or choice, of marriage being the only ultimate goal in a woman’s life — this is what is killing women. How can we turn away from it, is my question? With Raksha Bandhan, I’ve tried to reach an audience that has this mindset and that particular audience was not big enough to give me big box office numbers.”
Besides Raksha Bandhan, Kanika Dhillon has written films like Manmarziyaan, Judgemental Hai Kya, Kedarnath, Rashmi Rocket, Haseen Dilruba 1, etc.
