Female ensembles and female driven narratives are Alankrita Shrivastava’s strong suit. Whether it was Lipstick Under My Burkha or Dolly, Kitty aur woh Chamakte Sitare, women, their aspirations, their repressed or unfulfilled sexual desires and their fundamental desire to be treated with dignity, are recurring themes in Alankrita’s work.
Bombay Begums, now streaming on Netflix, traverses age groups and socio-economic strata to tell the story of four women and a girl who are each going through their own journeys of love, pain, sexual exploration, and discovering a true sense of self. Rani Singh Irani (Pooja Bhatt) is the CEO of the Royal Bank of Mumbai, a position that the male dominated boardroom is trying to take away from her. Her second in command is Fatima Warsi (Shahana Goswami), a woman who is pushing her body to produce a baby that her husband Arijay (Vivek Gomber) has decided will mean early retirement for her. Ayesha Agarwal (Plabita Borthakur) is a new joinee at the bank, ambitious and starry eyed, but with very little wisdom about how the world operates.
Through a twist of fate and a car accident, Lily/Lakshmi Gondhali (Amruta Subhash), a bar dancer turned sex worker, enters Rani’s life.Rani then introduces her to Ayesha, who is assigned the task of setting up a factory for her as a part of a social service scheme.
Rani wants to turn the bank’s balance sheet around and win the hearts of stepchildren who, I personally felt, were less confused teenagers and more privileged brats. Fatima who gets a huge promotion soon after she discovers she is pregnant, wants to have a baby because that’s supposed to be an effortless thing for women to do.
Ayesha who is struggling to come to terms with her sexual orientation, wants to succeed at her job so that she can escape the suffocating control of her parents. Lily wants to give her son a better life, but the means she resorts to aren’t always above board. Offering a rather intrusive and wholly unnecessary voiceover describing the emotions these adult women are going through, is Shai (Aadhya Anand) Rani’s teenage daughter. She is going through adolescent struggles of her own, and has mental conversations with her dead mother, musing on matters of the body, head and heart that seem far too mature for a kid her age.
Bombay Begums is a compact little series of six episodes each about 50 minutes long, and Alankrita who has created the show, cowritten and co-directed it, creates a fairly vast canvas thematically to explore with about six hours of running time.
Office politics and the uneasy throne that a woman in power sits on in a traditionally male dominated industry and society, sexual harassment in the workplace, the pressures on a woman to conform to conventional expectations while also breaking glass ceilings, and the sad reality that women can be patriarchal too, are all ideas that Alankrita and her cowriters weave into the narrative.
Watch: Trailer of Bombay Begums
Unfortunately, each topic is only briefly touched upon but not explored in detail. While the show makes some very valid points and has some truly impactful moments thanks to its ensemble of fabulous actors, it didn’t have an emotional or cathartic impact on me. Instead of letting issues like sexism or patriarchy slide in unsuspectingly like it happens in most of our lives, Alankrita and her team get their characters to verbalise and pontificate far too much about their struggles as women. Even the titles of the episodes are directly lifted from feminist texts like The Colour Purple and A Room of One’s Own.
Rani, the CEO of a bank poses for a Karvachauth ad and even celebrates the festival. The irony is not lost on anyone. But the show gets Lily to comment about how it’s a problematic custom and then also throws in a voiceover to further dissect why women follow traditions for love etc, completely ruining the impact a moment like this could have had. Lily wants to live a respectable life, but she keeps repeating ‘I want to live with respect’ so many times, instead of just letting the visuals spell it out for us. The only character I could perhaps empathise with, was Ayesha. Having lived as a twenty something year old in Mumbai and being ill-treated by landlords for being a single working woman, her struggles to find stability in the city of dreams and nightmares, was quite relatable.
Also, this may be a good time to call an intervention on including voiceovers and narrators in a web series unless it is absolutely necessary. A teenage girl giving us a running commentary about the emotional turmoil a character she doesn’t know or has never met is going through, seems wholly unnecessary, especially when the actors cast for these parts know their job. I felt like I was being ‘womansplained’ to and it was just as annoying.
For a show that has three out four women working in the same office, there is very little time spent in boardrooms and much more in bedrooms. Apart from a few token scenes to let us know they have jobs and are stressed, we never really see what women in a male dominated workplace deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Pooja, Shahana, Amruta and Plabita all turn in measured and sincere performances. Plabita and Amruta are especially good and slip into the skin of their characters effortlessly. It is wonderful to see so many talented women working together and being offered leading roles that allow them to explore multiples shades of black, white and grey. For that alone, this show and Alankrita deserve a pat on the back.
Bombay Begums is an entertaining watch, but don’t expect to feel moved or empowered after watching it.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the series/film. TNM Editorial is independent of any business relationship the organisation may have with producers or any other members of its cast or crew.