Writer Kanika Dhillon addresses poor performance of Akshay Kumar’s Raksha Bandhan, explains why the film chose to be ‘regressive’

In this interview with indianexpress.com, Dhillon addresses the Aanand L Rai directorial’s box office performance, and said that the film was made for the “cow belt” of India and not the urban India. Kanika said that the film is a reflection of official statistics on dowry deaths in India. “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. 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.”

Dhillon then emphasised that the film that showed the realities of rural India made the urban audience uncomfortable to an extend that they didn’t relate to it. She shares, “We are so far away from the rural India, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Yes, it make 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 the treatment of it. We were trying to aim for a different kind of an audience but that’s a different debate all together. 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.”

Justifying the sexist themes used in the film as a means to show the ground reality of women in rural India, Dhillon added, “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.”

Dhillon, however, says the learning from Raksha Bandhan is to write films which are more inclusive. “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.”

Dhillon’s writing is much discussed because of their themes. “If you look at my work, starting from Manmarziyaan to Judgemental Hai Kya, to Kedarnath to Guilty and Rashmi Rocket to Haseen Dilruba 1, the idea is that there are varied kind of women, varied kind of characters who have varied stories, which are so interesting. There is so much to say and explore, and it is all organic. I don’t sit and decide that because my last character was like this, my next should be like that. But yes, as an artiste, a writer, a maker I want to try different aspects.”

She calls her writing an extension of herself and her conflicts. “The unexplored, uncomfortable and different themes excite me. I believe that if as an artiste you’re not shaking things up, or not making people think, you are not doing your job. I think as a writer, my work has to be disruptive. My art is very personal, and my conflicts with the world are reflected in it.”

Talking about her body of work, she says, “Awards, fame, discussion, it is all secondary things. It is important that it should be your own voice. Do you remember the writers of people-pleasing, Rs 100 crore films? Not taking away anything from that, everybody loves numbers. But the point is that you cannot manufacture it. I can’t start writing in a particular way just because I want to become a people-pleaser. Today, the audience has changed, I’m known to be a writer whose work talks to the youth because of the themes I bring in. The self expression is my connect with the audience.”