Females take the lead in Bollywood

Box office success fails to translate into same financial rewards as men

For Bollywood, 2014 is the year of the woman. Some of the biggest hits in India's prolific movie industry have female leads in female-oriented stories.

In this summer's surprise hits, Queen, Kangana Ranaut is the feisty heroine who embarks on her honeymoon alone after she is jilted the day before her wedding. In Mary Kom, Priyanka Chopra plays a female Olympic bronze-medal-winning boxer.

Previously, women were relegated to playing the male lead's girlfriend, sister or mother in subservient roles reflecting the traditional dominance of men in Indian society.

But for all their box-office success and newfound prominence, Bollywood actresses are asking: Where is the money?

Top male stars, such as the three Khans - Salman, Shah Rukh and Aamir - and action star Akshay Kumar earn about 400 million rupees ($6.5 million) per film on average, as well as a share of the profits, according to industry experts.

A-list actresses such as Deepika Padukone and Katrina Kaif get paid a tenth of that per film. When Padukone recently signed a movie deal for 70 million rupees, it generated a buzz since it was one of the highest amounts paid to a female lead.

But actresses are speaking out about the enormous disparity.

"I don't really understand why we are paid less than the male actors because we put in equal effort and the recent past has shown that actresses can deliver a hit film. We deserve better pay, equal to what actors get," up-and-coming star Aditi Rao Hydari told Press Trust of India.

The momentum started last year, when women featured prominently in several successful movies, causing directors and producers to rethink roles for actresses. Given the success of this emerging genre, studios appear to be more confident about producing female-oriented movies in which the main character is played by a woman.

In the past couple of years, several such films starring actresses Kaif, Padukone and Ranaut as well as Priyanka Chopra and Vidya Balan have crossed the 1 billion rupee earnings mark that is generally considered a hit in Bollywood, which gets its name from Bombay, the old name for Mumbai, where most studios are based.

Part of the change reflects the greater spending power of Indian women, who are joining the workforce, earning more money and want to see movies starring women in stories they can relate to - not typical action or fantasy fare, where women are merely eye candy for male moviegoers.

And while female-oriented movies have been doing extremely well at the box office, conventional films with top male stars in the lead role are still the biggest earners.

But the changing audience has also helped grow India's film industry, one of the world's biggest, cranking out around 1,000 movies annually. Revenues have risen more than 10 percent in the past decade to more than $3.5 billion in 2012. Hollywood's revenue for the same year was about $10.8 billion.

"It's only going to get better from here as audiences are changing. We are moving toward a society where we have more educated and working-class women," said Ranaut. "They'd like to see stronger women on screen."

In the low-budget Queen, Ranaut plays Rani, a young woman who goes on her honeymoon solo after her fiance ditches her.

With her supportive family cheering her on over Skype, the film focuses on her adventures in Europe.

(China Daily 11/26/2014 page10)