Re-Reading Shobhaa Dé’s Novel On Bollywood’s Sleazy Underbelly In The #MeToo Era

I am 16. And Asha Rani, 15.

I have slipped Starry Nights inside my floppy geography textbook and set myself two days to finish Shobhaa De’s second novel before I return it to the roadside library from where I borrowed it from for twenty rupees. 

In the page open before me, Asha Rani, De’s protagonist in Starry Nights, is about to have sex. 

The man is a married, middle-aged, balding Bollywood agent called Kishenbhai, who neatly folds his pants and shirt before he has sex with the teenager. Asha Rani, as Kishenbhai describes her to the reader, is his “new chidiya”, “a fifteen-year-old with a 40 inch bust”.

Unlike the breathless, sappy sex of the Mills Boons I smuggle from friends, Asha Rani’s strange, transactional sexual encounter feels almost eerie. 

I feel revulsion, a fair amount of it directed at Asha. In De’s novel, she is a willing, if apathetic participant in the sexual encounter. Her behaviour  seems to confirm the notion, bandied about by aunts, friends and family that girls who work in films are ‘kharap’ (lacking in morals). 

Yet, something feels wrong about the anger I feel towards her, I cannot put a finger on what. 

As the novel races along, Asha Rani goes from starlet, to bonafide star to ageing has-been. But all that stays with me are the  crude, loveless, sexual encounters she endures for work. 

For 16-year-old me, Asha Rani doesn’t exist in isolation. She isn’t just a protagonist of De’s novel — she is a point of reference for the sort of girls Bengali magazines describe as drunken heroines, homebreakers, participants of the casting couch. Women I am not supposed to become like or be there for. 

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Over the past year, I’ve often thought about Asha Rani and Starry Nights, a book I read almost two decades ago. As women who call out men for harassing and abusing them have faced a barrage of “Are You Sure She Said No”s, I have thought about how long it took me to recognise abuse as something more insidious than a stranger grabbing you. 

I thought about how long it took me to understand that a survivor could often seem like what I accused Asha Rani of being in Starry Nights — complicit; to recognise and condemn the people who created and guarded a structure, like the film industry, that allows abuse,  rather than blaming women who did not walk away from it or did not have the luxury to call them out. 

Last week, I picked up Starry Nights again and acquainted myself once more with Asha Rani and her world, where the women snugly fit every regressive stereotype known to my 16-year-old self.

And then I wrote to Shobhaa De and asked her what she thought about Starry Nights in light of all the conversations around #MeToo.

‘Ki shahosh’

I was 10 when I visited Asansol, then a barren, dusty, coal mining town, with my parents. The couple in the room next to ours at the hotel, who turned out to be small-time producers with stakes in Bengali films and teleserials, suggested my father send my photograph to a casting agent in Kolkata. 

My father was appalled, “Ki shahosh (the nerve),” he declared, taking a swig of his whiskey as he narrated the conversation to a room full of his colleagues and their families, with more than a fair bit of indignation. 

The room broke out in laughter and incoherent chatter, till I asked why it was a bad idea to be in a film. One woman, I suspect, slightly giddy by then, started to narrate “what all the producers demand to see”. My horrified parents and a few others, shouted and loudly shushed her, but she had said enough for me and the other children to feel that being in films for a woman must involve horrible, shameful deeds. The popular narrative—propagated and used by film magazines and newspapers—spoke to that bias. Abuse remained sanitised by the usage of expressions like ‘favours’, and the ‘casting couch’ which implied that the woman was an eager participant in this exchange. 

Starry Nights, as I recall, reinforced this bias that, years later, I began to consciously unlearn.