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Screenwriter Kanika Dhillon, who started her career with Anurag Kashyap’s critically acclaimed film Manmarziyan has written some other big projects including Judgemental Hai Kya, Rashmi Rocket, Haseen Dilruba has also worked in the film Raksha Bandhan starring Akshay Kumar and Bhumi Pednekar. However, the film didn’t do well at the box office and has been labelled as s*xist and regressive. Now, in a recent media interaction, Kanika opened up about the storyline and addressed the reasons why it might not have worked.
Raksha Bandhan is a story of a brother’s struggle and how he takes responsibility for his four sisters. It features Akshay Kumar as the lead male and Bhumi Pednekar as his love interest.
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In a conversation with Indian Express, Kanika Dhillon, the screenwriter of Raksha Bandhan talked about how the storyline of the movie was focused on the ‘cow belt’ of India and not the urban side. Talking about it, she said, “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 is staggering, suffer dowry deaths.”
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“The statistics is telling us that there is a society that exists who 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 mind set and regressive ideas are responsible,” she added.
Raksha Bandhan has been labelled as s*xist and regressive. Justifying it, Kanika Dhillon shared, “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. They have not seen any better, they’re not told that they can be independent, they’ve seen their fathers are family members struggling to collect a dowry, so they decide that killing themselves is a better decision. This is what the statistics of this country is telling you. 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, but it reached a place it was supposed to.”
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Further going into the conversation, Kanika Dhillon mentioned that if one wants to have a big box office number then one must focus on the urban audience. She said, “The learning from here is that if you’re aiming for big box office number, be more inclusive of the urban audience. I mostly write about subjects which are more urban and youth oriented but this was a different audience which I was tapping to.”
Well, the writer Kanika Dhillon likes to work with unexplored, uncomfortable and different topics to reach a larger part of the audience. What do you think of Raksha Bandhan? Let us know in the comments!
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