Bollywood is taking a Turn now to Praise Sisters for saving the Brothers, on the occasion of Raksha Bandhan
Imagine a modest, unemployed man in his 20s looking for work in a Bollywood movie from the 1970s. He is on his hands and knees pleading for a job when he picks a card that many people before him and many people after him have also pulled: he needs the job to marry his sister. Imagine that the villain has the villain's sister abducted and is now using her as a form of blackmail. The villain has the hero's sister kidnapped and is now using her as a kind of blackmail, which will have the hero shaking with rage.
For many years, Bollywood movies favored using the brother-sister dynamic solely when they needed to give the hero a boost and make him seem a little more heroic. The sister was usually simply the crutch. He might be trying to exact revenge for his sister's rape (which was carelessly utilized as a plot device in many older movies), or he might be struggling to make enough money to pay for her dowry. The 'large strong brother' was supposed to be the 'bechari behna's' savior. Because the celebration of Raksha Bandhan has traditionally been about brothers promising sisters that they will be their protectors, furthering the idea that women need to be safeguarded, it's possible that our social conditioning caused us to believe these stories.
Since these films were seen to be wholly acceptable, a lot has changed in cinematic representation of the fundamental concept of a brother-sister relationship. The portrayal of a brother-sister connection has improved over the past several years, despite the fact that our films are still predominantly directed by males and that the notion that men can save the world is still widely propagated in Indian cinema.
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