Dr Srabani Basu, Associate Professor, Department of Literature and Languages, SRM University AP
Nobody wakes up in the morning and announces, “Today I shall internalise patriarchy.” It sounds terribly inconvenient. One would have to locate patriarchy, obtain the appropriate manual, read several hundred pages on gender hierarchy, underline the important passages and perhaps sit for an examination afterwards. Fortunately, popular culture discovered a far more efficient delivery system. Give the proposition a melody. Add a handsome hero, a beautiful heroine, several inexplicably available backup dancers, a mustard field, a Swiss mountain, one strategically deployed chiffon sari and a chorus catchy enough to survive three generations, and an entire philosophy of gender can be delivered before the samosa gets cold.
Bollywood songs occupy an extraordinary place in Indian cultural memory. We forget passwords, telephone numbers, appointments, where we left our spectacles and occasionally why we entered a room, but play three notes of a song heard in 1989 and the neurological archaeology department immediately reports for duty. The lyrics return. The choreography returns. The hero’s shirt returns. Even the aunt who sang it badly at a cousin’s wedding returns. That mnemonic durability is precisely why Bollywood songs deserve examination as more than entertainment. They are cultural texts that travel through repetition. A song is encountered in a cinema, replayed on television, heard on the radio, performed at weddings, danced to at college festivals, blasted from neighbourhood loudspeakers, resurrected through remixes and recycled through social media. The film eventually disappears from memory while the song keeps wandering around unattended. Sometimes what wanders with it is a belief.
The argument here is emphatically not that listening to one problematic Bollywood song transforms an egalitarian citizen into a patriarch before the second chorus. Human cognition is not a pressure cooker. Media effects are probabilistic, contextual and mediated by family, education, peers, personal experience and competing cultural narratives. But psychology gives us very good reasons to take repetition, modelling and reinforcement seriously. Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, subsequently developed into Social Cognitive Theory, demonstrated that people learn not merely through direct reward and punishment but also through observing models and the consequences associated with their behaviour. We notice what people do, what happens to them afterwards and which behaviours appear to produce desirable outcomes. Recent research examining sexist Bollywood songs has explicitly applied reinforcement frameworks to gender representation, asking how repeated structures of reward and punishment can contribute to the normalisation of stereotypical gender roles.
This gives us an interesting question. What happens when problematic behaviour is followed by romantic reward? Enter Bollywood’s celebrated Courtship Department. The hero pursues. The heroine refuses. He follows. She becomes irritated. He sings. She walks faster. He recruits friends. They sing too. Apparently, harassment has an orchestra. She says no. He persists. She says no more emphatically. He persists more melodically. Eventually she smiles. Romance achieved. Behaviour rewarded. No PowerPoint slide appears announcing “LEARNING OUTCOME ACHIEVED,” but the narrative contingency has already done its work. The lesson need not be the crude proposition that men should harass women. The subtler association is that persistence after resistance signifies sincerity, that refusal may be provisional and that sufficiently determined masculine pursuit may ultimately receive feminine affection as its reward.
Few Bollywood lines expose this linguistic problem more elegantly than “Tu haankaryanaakar, tuhai meri Kiran” from Darr (1993). Whether she says yes or no, she remains “my Kiran.” To be fair to Darr, Rahul is not presented straightforwardly as a healthy romantic ideal. His obsession becomes dangerous and destructive. But songs acquire cultural afterlives independent of the narratives that produced them. The refrain escapes the film and enters parties, radio, quotation and popular memory, while the cautionary architecture surrounding Rahul does not necessarily accompany it.
From an NLP perspective, the line offers a fascinating example for examining presupposition. NLP does not possess the empirical standing of mainstream cognitive and social psychology, and it would therefore be intellectually irresponsible to present its concepts as established neuroscientific mechanisms. As a framework for examining language and subjective meaning-making, however, it gives us useful questions. What must already be accepted for a sentence to make sense? Here the woman is apparently offered two possibilities, yes and no, yet both possibilities exist inside a larger proposition that remains untouched: you are mine. Her choice changes the response but not the ownership claim. Consent has been given two buttons, but somebody appears to have disconnected both from the machine.
Khambe Jaisi Khadi Hai from Dil (1990) provides another useful specimen. The woman becomes the target of public teasing and ridicule packaged as flirtation and comedy. What interests us psychologically is not merely what the hero does but what happens to him after he does it. He remains charismatic, entertaining and narratively desirable. The surrounding cinematic world does not treat his behaviour as something that disqualifies him from romantic success. The possible limiting belief being rehearsed is therefore subtler than “men should insult women.” It is that teasing, public embarrassment and disregard for boundaries may become legitimate demonstrations of attraction when performed by a sufficiently desirable man. Bollywood occasionally appears to operate according to an extraordinary romantic equation: boundary violation plus good looks plus playback singer equals courtship. Remove the playback singer and the mathematics begins behaving very differently.
Then comes Ladki Kyon from Hum Tum (2004), which takes us from possession into gender essentialism. The song playfully catalogues supposed differences between women and men. It is intentionally comic, which makes it culturally interesting rather than automatically reprehensible. Humour is one of the most elegant vehicles through which generalisations become socially comfortable. “Women are like this.” “Men always do that.” We laugh because the stereotype is recognisable, and recognition itself can strengthen the category through which subsequent behaviour is interpreted. A woman changes her mind and the stereotype whispers, “See, women.” A man avoids discussing emotion and another stereotype replies, “Obviously, men.” Individual behaviour becomes evidence for a pre-existing cultural template.
This is where Judith Butler becomes an unexpected guest at the Bollywood dance sequence. Butler’s theory of gender performativity argues, in greatly simplified terms, that gender acquires its appearance of naturalness partly through the repetition of socially recognisable acts. Gender is not merely something one is. It is continually constituted through repeated ways of behaving, moving, speaking, dressing and occupying social space. Bollywood does not merely tell us that men and women are different. It repeatedly gives those differences bodies. He advances. She retreats. He looks. She is looked at. He declares desire. She responds to being desired. He occupies space. She beautifies it. He pursues. She eventually accepts. Performed once, this is choreography. Repeated across decades, genres, stars and thousands of songs, it becomes part of the cultural repertoire through which masculinity and femininity can be imagined.
And then we encounter one of popular romance’s most beautiful and potentially limiting propositions: the idea that another person completes us. Bollywood did not invent this belief. Poets had been manufacturing incomplete human beings centuries before cinema discovered playback singing. But Bollywood gave incompleteness excellent music. Consider Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hai from Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008). It is an extraordinarily tender song and reducing it to a specimen of patriarchy would be absurd. Yet its devotional metaphor provides a fascinating doorway into the cultural construction of romantic completion. The beloved becomes more than companion or lover. The beloved becomes the location of transcendence, meaning and almost sacred fulfilment.
The psychological question is not whether profound love is unhealthy. It is what happens when love becomes organised around the proposition that another human being supplies what the self fundamentally lacks. NLP would recognise fertile territory here for examining complex equivalence, the process by which one experience is treated as meaning another. “You are profoundly important to me” can quietly become “you give my life meaning.” “I feel deeply connected to you” can become “without you I am incomplete.” Once incompleteness becomes the presupposition, separation ceases to mean merely losing a relationship. It can begin to feel like losing part of oneself.
Psychological approaches to relationships allow us to distinguish connection from fusion and healthy interdependence from a loss of differentiated identity. Two people can matter enormously to one another without either being ontologically unfinished before the other arrives. The limiting belief is therefore not “I love you deeply.” It is “I require you in order to become whole.” Those propositions can sound remarkably similar when violins are playing. Psychologically, they are not identical.
Popular romance nevertheless adores the mathematics of two halves. One half meets another half and finally becomes one. It is an irresistible metaphor, except perhaps we need better mathematics. What if a psychologically healthier relationship is not represented by ½ + ½ = 1, but by 1 + 1 = relationship? Two whole people meeting does not diminish romance. It merely removes from romance the impossible responsibility of manufacturing another person’s identity. The beloved can enrich a life without being required to complete it.
There is a gendered dimension to this mythology of completion as well. Historically, women have often been encouraged to organise identity around relational roles such as daughter, wife, mother and caregiver, while heterosexual marriage has frequently been represented as the culmination of female adulthood. Romantic fusion therefore does not always occur on socially equal terrain. “We complete each other” sounds beautifully symmetrical, but cultural expectations have often required one of those two allegedly incomplete halves to relocate, change her surname, adapt to another household, manage emotional relationships, perform care work and then answer cheerfully when somebody asks how she is “settling down.” Apparently, completion involves considerable paperwork.
The older song Babul Ki Duayen Leti Ja from Neel Kamal (1968) gives us a related but very different gender script. It would be simplistic to condemn the song merely because it expresses the sorrow of a daughter leaving her parental home after marriage. Its significance lies in the cultural architecture surrounding that departure. The bride moves from one household towards incorporation into another. Sacrifice, adjustment and departure acquire emotional nobility. The limiting belief is not “marriage is oppression.” It is much quieter: a good woman’s journey requires leaving, adapting and belonging elsewhere. No villain announces it. No sinister music accompanies it. Everybody cries. Perhaps beliefs delivered through tears deserve as much scrutiny as beliefs delivered through commands.
Then Bollywood invented the item number and patriarchy discovered sequins. Munni Badnaam Hui from Dabangg (2010) gives us an especially fertile example because the woman appears extraordinarily powerful. She commands the screen. She dominates the choreography. Men gather around her. She controls the rhythm. Everybody watches her. Yet that apparent power generates a more complicated question: who controls the conditions under which she is being watched?
Laura Mulvey’s influential concept of the male gaze helps us interrogate precisely this arrangement. Mainstream cinema can structure spectatorship so that masculine subjectivity occupies the position of active looking while the woman becomes visual spectacle. Bollywood song sequences make this particularly visible because narrative itself can momentarily stop in order to look at the female body. The camera may isolate the waist, lips, legs or chest while choreography and surrounding male spectators reinforce the position of the woman as spectacle. The gender message is therefore not located only in lyrics. It resides simultaneously in camera movement, costume, editing, gesture, choreography, spatial arrangement and spectatorship.
This is also where Richard Schechner’s Performance Theory becomes invaluable. His notion of restored behaviour draws attention to behaviours that are repeated, rehearsed, transmitted and recombined. Cultural performances do not remain imprisoned within their original performances. Gestures migrate. Poses migrate. courtship rituals migrate. Dance movements migrate. Anyone doubting this proposition is invited to attend an Indian wedding. An eight-year-old who has never seen the film knows the hook step. An uncle who spent breakfast complaining that “today’s generation has no values” is now executing pelvic movements that would cause his morning self-considerable philosophical distress. Three aunties have formed a chorus. Grandmother has joined. Nobody remembers the plot. Performance has escaped the screen, and social learning has excellent catering.
Sheila Ki Jawani from Tees Maar Khan (2010) complicates the male-gaze argument in an important way because Sheila appears to claim herself. This is precisely why intelligent gender criticism cannot simply stamp SEXIST across every sensual performance and retire for lunch. A woman dancing sensually is not evidence of patriarchy. Female sexuality is not synonymous with female objectification. Feminist scholarship has itself debated whether item numbers may sometimes contain forms of female agency, sexual subjectivity or subversion alongside commodification. The more interesting questions are therefore: who authors the desire, who controls the performance, whose pleasure organises the camera, and whether the woman functions as a desiring subject, a desired object, or both simultaneously.
Fevicol Se from Dabangg 2 (2012) and Chikni Chameli from Agneepath (2012) allow us to examine another dimension of the same cultural architecture. Female sexuality becomes intertwined with metaphors of consumption, availability and spectacular display. This is where Objectification Theory, developed by Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts, becomes particularly useful. Their framework proposes that in cultures where women’s bodies are repeatedly treated as objects for evaluation, women may internalise an observer’s perspective upon their own bodies. This can encourage habitual self-monitoring or self-objectification. The mirror then acquires an audience. The question is no longer merely “How do I feel?” but “How do I look while feeling it?” Sadness requires eyeliner. Anger must remain photogenic. Heartbreak should preferably occur in chiffon. Even emotional collapse apparently needs to respect camera angles. Patriarchy has successfully introduced remote working.
A further contradiction appears in the distinction between the respectable heroine and the hypersexualised “item girl.” Recent research on Bollywood has examined precisely this binary, showing how the heroine can be associated with virtue and relatability while the item girl is positioned closer to hypersexuality and social deviance. The cultural manoeuvre is astonishing. The item girl must be sexually desirable enough to attract enormous attention but not respectable enough to define normative femininity. We desire her. We watch her. We replay her. We imitate her dance at weddings. Then we announce that respectable women should not behave like her. Patriarchy has ordered dessert and is now complaining about the sugar.
This is where reinforcement becomes more complex than repeating a lyric. Cinematic narratives distribute symbolic rewards. Certain forms of femininity receive marriage, legitimacy, family, narrative centrality and social approval. Other forms receive spectacular visibility without equivalent respectability. Repeated often enough, the distinction teaches not simply how women should behave but which performances of femininity are supposed to receive which consequences. The woman is not only being represented, her performance is being culturally evaluated.
Nor should we imagine that patriarchy reserves all its limiting beliefs for women. Men receive an impressive starter pack too. Bollywood masculinity has repeatedly celebrated toughness, pursuit, protection, territoriality, physical courage and emotional endurance. The culturally available propositions are familiar: a real man does not retreat, a real man protects his woman, a real man wins her, a real man fights, and a real man does not cry. Unless, of course, he has consumed alcohol and Mohammed Rafi, Kishore Kumar, Kumar Sanu, Sonu Nigam or Arijit Singh is available to cry on his behalf.
The woman receives How to Remain Desirable While Adjusting to Everybody Else. The man receives How Never to Admit You Are Terrified. Both manuals are dreadful, although they do not distribute social power equally. That qualification matters. Serious gender analysis should neither reduce patriarchy to “men are bad” nor pretend that its consequences are symmetrical. Patriarchal social arrangements have historically privileged masculine authority while simultaneously prescribing restrictive performances of masculinity. Men can therefore receive structural advantages from a system that also narrows their emotional repertoire.
Now place all these songs beside one another and an intriguing architecture begins to emerge. The refrain supplies language. Melody supplies memorability. The actor supplies identification. Choreography supplies embodiment. Narrative supplies consequences. Repetition supplies familiarity. Social circulation supplies rehearsal. The wedding supplies the aunties. Eventually nobody remembers attending the lesson.
This relationship can be represented conceptually as repeated lyric plus memorable melody plus embodied performance plus narrative reward or punishment plus social repetition contributing to increased cultural familiarity of a gender script. It must be emphasised that this is a conceptual framework, not a neurological equation. There is no evidence that a Bollywood chorus marches directly into the unconscious carrying a suitcase labelled PATRIARCHY and installs itself beside the amygdala. Psychology does, however, give us substantial evidence for observational learning, reinforcement, cognitive accessibility, social modelling and the importance of repeated cultural representations. Scholarship on Bollywood has meanwhile documented recurring patterns of gender stereotyping, objectification, sexualisation, the male gaze and restrictive gender roles.
This distinction also matters when using the language of the “unconscious.” The term should not imply that song lyrics function as subliminal hypnotic commands. Their influence is more interesting and considerably more plausible. Cultural propositions can become familiar enough that we stop noticing them as propositions. Jealousy can begin to resemble love. Possessiveness can resemble protection. Persistence can resemble devotion. Female sacrifice can resemble virtue. Emotional silence can resemble masculinity. Dependency can resemble romantic completion. A cultural assumption becomes most powerful not necessarily when everybody consciously believes it, but when nobody thinks it requires examination.
And that is where NLP’s concept of limiting beliefs becomes genuinely useful as an interpretive tool. A limiting belief narrows perceived possibilities. “I cannot be complete without another person.” “If someone is jealous, they must love me.” “A good woman adjusts.” “A real man never shows weakness.” “If she refuses me, I should try harder.” “My desirability determines my worth.” Such statements may never be consciously articulated, yet cultural narratives can repeatedly make versions of them available. The important analytical question is therefore not whether a particular song directly causes a belief. That claim would be impossible to sustain. The question is how repeated cultural performances participate in constructing the repertoire of beliefs from which individuals make meaning.
Fortunately, Bollywood is not a single ideological machine endlessly manufacturing the same woman in different chiffon. It has also challenged, disrupted and rewritten its own gender scripts. Patakha Guddi from Highway (2014) offers an interesting counter-image. Here the female body can be read less as an object arranged for masculine inspection and more as a moving subject occupying landscape, space and experience. Movement becomes experiential rather than merely decorative. Freedom acquires physical space. She is not merely the picture. She travels through it.
And this is where Butler’s performativity becomes unexpectedly hopeful. If repeated performances help naturalise gender conventions, performances can also be repeated differently. A hero can hear “no” and remain heroic. A woman can desire without becoming morally punishable. A husband can cook dinner without background violins announcing the collapse of civilisation. A heroine can occupy space without being displayed inside it. A man can cry before the interval and still defeat the villain afterwards. A woman can remain unmarried at the closing credits without the director urgently supplying either tragedy or a Labrador. Two people can love one another without arriving as psychologically amputated halves waiting to be assembled into one functioning human.
Perhaps this is the belief popular romance most urgently needs to reconsider. Love need not mean, “You complete me.” Perhaps the more radical romantic proposition is, “I was whole before I met you. You were whole before you met me. Neither of us arrived to repair the other’s incompleteness. We have simply chosen to create something between us that did not exist before.”
Admittedly, this creates a serious problem for Bollywood lyricists.
It is considerably harder to rhyme “securely attached autonomous adult” with pyaar.
The answer, therefore, is certainly not to ban old songs, disinfect playlists or storm Indian wedding halls confiscating microphones. Cultural literacy is far more interesting than cultural censorship. Dance. Sing. Remember. Laugh. Nostalgia does not require intellectual surrender. We can adore a melody while interrogating its message. We can acknowledge that a song gave us enormous joy and simultaneously recognise that some of its assumptions belong to a cultural inheritance we no longer wish to carry forward.
Long before social media discovered the algorithm, Bollywood had one of its own. Repeat the stereotype, give it a memorable melody, embody it through desirable stars, reward it with romance, circulate it socially and wait for culture to press replay.
And perhaps this is popular culture’s peculiar genius. Patriarchy does not always arrive carrying laws, prohibitions and commandments. Sometimes it arrives wearing sequins. Sometimes it comes running through mustard fields. Sometimes it arrives with forty-seven backup dancers who have apparently abandoned all employment specifically to participate in somebody else’s courtship. Sometimes it arrives as a bride leaving home while everybody weeps. Sometimes it appears as a lover announcing that life itself acquires meaning through the beloved.
And sometimes a limiting belief does not sound like a belief at all.
It sounds like nostalgia. It sounds like devotion. It sounds like romance. It sounds like the song our parents loved, the song we danced to in college, the song playing at somebody’s wedding while four generations sing along without once stopping to ask what exactly they are singing.
We think we have memorised the lyrics.
Perhaps the more interesting question is how much of the choreography the culture has memorised with them?
