Is Deepika Padukone losing her edge?

Her recent roles in big-budget films have brought enormous commercial success, but the nuanced characters that made her a star are missing.

Over the years, Deepika Padukone has carved a space for herself by portraying progressive characters with agency but her latest choices mark a departure from this trend.   | Photo Credit:  Karwai Tang/WireImage

Homi Adajania’s Cocktail (2012) was a rip in Hindi cinema. In the film, the actor Deepika Padukone’s Veronica, a spoilt brat, takes in Meera (Diana Penty) who was abandoned by her husband after he married her under false pretences. Here was a woman who wore her sexual desire and her brattiness on her sleeve—a mixture not to alienate her from the viewers, but to humanise her. Padukone underscored the existence of this complicated “cool girl” with a tragicness that pronounced that independence is as much respite as it is indictment, infusing Veronica with a bewildering multitude where she seeks acceptance through traditional means such as marriage, even as she is aware of its limitations through her parents’ dynamic, and her own friend’s experience with marital fraud. Padukone’s stunning performance foregrounded a quest of acceptance that relied on external validation rather than simple fidelity towards traditional values.

The film became the neat dividing line in her two-part career. Although she made a successful debut with Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om in 2007 opposite Shah Rukh Khan, for a short while afterwards box-office numbers and critical acclaim evaded her. At this point, Vidya Balan was already boldly carving out a space for films that positioned women at the centre with work like The Dirty Picture (2011), based on the actor Silk Smitha’s life, and Kahaani (2012), a Sujoy Ghosh-directed thriller that flipped presumptions around pregnant female protagonists. Priyanka Chopra Jonas was riding high off the success of Fashion (2008), which became iconic for its portrait of the predatory model-designer-agency dynamic and queer representation. Padukone’s frequent co-star and ex-partner Ranbir Kapoor was delivering coming-of-age films that captured the zeitgeist and a range of “softboi” masculinities with Wake Up Sid (2009), Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year (2009), Rockstar (2011), and Barfi (2012). These character-driven stories, exclusively targeting multiplex audiences, also managed strong commercial success.

While Om Shanti Om’s success kept Padukone buoyed, a lack of distinctiveness and poor choices in this landscape began to affect her cachet. Bachna Ae Haseeno (2008), Break Ke Baad, Karthik Calling Karthik, Housefull (all 2010), Aarakshan, and Desi Boyz (both 2011) did not carry the reassurance of her ability to singularly carry a story or be a bankable star.

A career of two halves

This changed after 2012 and you now see a filmography where Padukone is, finally, not only stepping into roles that require her to put herself at unease but also into an easy, self-confident beauty. Despite this neat line between her two career phases, only one of which catapulted her into superstardom, she has consistently resurrected a woman (quite literally as a ghost in Om Shanti Om) whose yearning, and its active persuasion, lurk as a threat.

Padukone has never driven the plot through her beauty alone, despite its power. In Ayan Mukerji’s Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (YJHD) in 2013—the year she gave four consecutive mega-hits that cemented her as one of the most coveted stars of her time—as her character Naina gains more confidence and sheds her introversion, she is dressed in sexy Manish Malhotra saris and lehengas to indicate that she has come into her own. But we are not allowed to ignore that she is a doctor with a history of academic overachievement, who has the foresight to understand that the man she loves is not a means to realising her fantasy but a human being with sprawling dreams of travel and adventure.

While it is Bunny’s (Ranbir Kapoor) dreams that give the story its stakes, it is Naina’s clarity about their situation and its accommodation that gives the story its gentle but strong heart. A narrative that dangerously bordered on becoming less about the woman’s interiority and more about the man’s life instead becomes a symbiotic love story where the two meet each other where it is necessary to make it work (even if the resolution is fantastical).

Padukone as Veronica in Cocktail. Her performance in the film was met with widespread acclaim and marked a turning point in her career. | Photo Credit: YouTube Screengrab

With Kapoor, Padukone also did Siddharth Anand’s Bachna Ae Haseeno in 2008 and Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha in 2015. These are objectively about a man’s quest towards self-realisation, with the former having a casanova at the centre who is repenting of the callousness with which he treated women after his own heart is broken, and the latter featuring a bland, goody-two-shoes absorbed in a capitalistic job after forsaking his dream of becoming an actor, who has to philosophically find his way back to that truth. In both films, Padukone’s character propels the man on these journeys of self-investigation, but the virtue is derived less from being and more from doing—she actively seeks him out to assuage her own yearning for him.

These relationships, first with a man who has a questionable history with women (both YJHD and Bachna Ae Haseeno) and the other with one who can only channel the discomfort of self-discovery outwards (Tamasha), tread a fine line of slipping into self-destructive territory for the woman. But rosy solutions intervene to save the relationships from the thorny ideas the film introduces.

Bhansali’s trilogy

Seeking: This act of agency in itself does not need to be a virtuous or moral act. The director Sanjay Leela Bhansali has told stories where seeking romantic passion becomes a quest of self-annihilation in a space that does not relent to that desire. His three collaborations with Padukone and Ranveer Singh (her husband), all commercially successful films, touch upon the idea that the freedom to acquire what is desirable(whether it is victory in war or love) is only possible in death.

To many, it will seem bleak that in Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013), the two end up killing each other to carry their love into the afterlife. In Bajirao Mastani (2015), Bajirao and Mastani’s lives slip out at the same time, with a possibility that their souls could perhaps meet in another world that does not hold such corrosive prejudice against their Hindu-Muslim union. Then there is the jauhar scene in Padmaavat (2018)—Bhansali’s third collaboration with Padukone that had troubling Hindutva leanings but made enemies on both sides of the fence—where a deeply misogynistic practice seemed to be glorified when Rani Padmavati (Padukone) and all her female companions walk towards the burning pyre with blazing pride. We are supposed to construe this as a victory against the predatory Alauddin Khilji (Singh), whose representation in the film is rife with Islamophobic tropes.

Madhavi Menon, in her seminal work Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India, writes of how in our country, where the unhindered pursuit of love and sex especially across lines of caste and religion is so halted and monitored, death for the lovers begins to accumulate a romanticised capital around it. In all three cases, the deaths are not cruel or even a cynical summons but rather an invitation to transcend the physical realm into a more spiritual and evolved space. While the idea is understandably problematic, the acts themselves are audaciously framed as spiritual agency rather than material conformity.

It is easy to confuse these acts of agency that Padukone’s characters show as progressive postures, especially in films where the women pick up a sword or a gun, or when they act on their desires rather than be passive recipients of a man’s courting. But I am not sure if this agency is their main preoccupation, or if it even bolsters their desirability. An insidious subtext surrounds these films’ romantic pursuits. Love is realised under incredibly difficult circumstances, and when it is finally grasped, it suffocates and dies in the social space. Padukone’s complicated urban-woman genre of films bludgeon this idea across by making this subtext their text.

Padukone played the titular character in Piku (2015) directed by Shoojit Sircar. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES

Cocktail, Piku (2015), and Gehraiyaan (2022) feature financially independent women: respectively, Padukone’s Veronica is a spoilt brat living off of the fat cheques her father sends, Piku is a partner in an architectural firm, and Alisha is a yoga instructor. In Cocktail, Veronica frequently hooks up with men she meets in the bar, her London apartment allowing her to live without scrutiny. When she does fall in love with a man (played by Saif Ali Khan), she realises he has fallen in love with her virginal roommate. To reckon with this one-sided love then is also to reckon with the fact that love is often conditionally given based on sexual virtue.

Shoojit Sircar’s Piku, with its parent-child relationship entailing detailed conversations about poop, has Bhaskor Banerjee (Amitabh Bachchan) as a stubborn, insufferable man who consistently ropes his daughter (Padukone) into his hypochondria. We get glimpses of her dating life and learn that while she is seeking romance, her father and his health are her priorities. In Gehraiyaan, Padukone’s Alisha is financially supporting a partner who wants to become an author, who deflects all her attempts to get closer to him or his work. She cheats on him with her cousin’s partner Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi), and—spoiler alert—is almost murdered by him because he fears the reverberations from their affair.

Missing shades of idiosyncrasy

Padukone’s recent films do not carry these shades of idiosyncrasy. She produced and also acted in Meghna Gulzar’s Chhapaak (2020) and Kabir Khan’s 83 (2021), the former is a story of an acid attack survivor and the latter is about India’s 1983 cricket World Cup win led by Kapil Dev (played by Ranveer Singh). Both are straightforward narratives of resilience and hope, with Padukone playing the lead, Malti, in Chhapaak, and Kapil Dev’s wife, Romi, in 83, and while they got mixed critical reviews, they were commercial failures. In the case of Chhapaak, it was speculated that Padukone expressing solidarity with the students of New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, a consistent target of the right wing, at the time of her film’s release might have impacted its numbers.

Padukone has also, at this point, switched from doing films in urban settings with humanistic portrayals to large-scale action movies that have a political and religious bent. Pathaan, Jawan (both 2023), Fighter, and Kalki 2898 AD (both 2024) have done something that her filmography until that point had not: reduced her to a type. While in Siddharth Anand’s Pathaan, the better of the lot and marking her fourth collaboration with Shah Rukh Khan, Padukone plays glamorous Pakistani spy Rubai who snaps necks to save Khan’s eponymous protagonist, in Atlee’s Jawan, she is reduced to the role of a wife and a mother even as we get a sublime display of her wrestling skills. However, there is no such respite in Siddharth Anand’s Fighter and Nag Ashwin’s Kalki 2898 AD.

During a promotional event for Pathaan, which was the first of many large-scale action movies Padukone acted in. | Photo Credit: SUJIT JAISWAL/AFP

This is especially jarring since her contemporaries are making forays into fascinating territory. Alia Bhatt’s Jigra, which Bhatt partly produced, will hit theatres soon; she will also star in her own Yash Raj Films’ (YRF) “spy universe” film called Alpha. These are roles that will, apparently, put Bhatt at the centre of the narrative. Bhatt is also that rare star who is pursuing character-driven narratives such as Gangubai Kathiawadi and Darlings (both 2022) and is able to accrue both critical and commercial acclaim through them.

Katrina Kaif did Merry Christmas (2024) and Phone Bhoot (2022): box office numbers aside, the two are chunky roles that tinkle with the perception of her beauty and spin something substantive out of that. Kareena Kapoor Khan is now making a concerted effort to star in films where she is the protagonist for the bulk of its screen time, like the heist comedy Crew and The Buckingham Murders (both 2024). Although the latter is yet to be released, the former managed decent earnings even though it left much to be desired in terms of how it imagines female friendships. After winning the National Award for her role in Mimi (2021), Kriti Sanon has made waves with her performance as a robot in Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya (2024) and Crew. Despite men helming these stories, a degree of negotiation for space is visible for women.

A tactical retreat?

Padukone, in the pre-pandemic and post-2012 landscape, was chiselling a distinctive stardom even as Bhatt, Kaif, and Anushka Sharma were churning out hits like Ek Tha Tiger (2012), Highway (2014), Raazi (2018), and NH10 (2015). She had clearly cracked some sort of a magic formula where meaty roles remained compatible with box office success.

So, it is disappointing that what we get from Padukone in 2024 is a jingoistic overture (Fighter) where her character Minni is constantly sidelined and is often a weepy subordinate to Patty (Hrithik Roshan). In Nag Ashwin’s eat-the-rich futuristic dystopia—a Mahabharata saga—she is pregnant with Lord Vishnu’s latest avatar, and this physical factor stands in for her interiority. The lack of an inner life is not a genre issue as much as a gendered relegation to the margins of the story. She is pedestalised even as she cowers inside a vehicle, on a bridge, inside a cave. She is not doing, just being, and that is frustratingly enough for the film.

When asked about sexism in the industry during the promotions of Kalki…, Padukone had said: “I don’t think women can succeed without men and men can’t succeed without women. I think we need to rephrase the definition of feminism.” Rephrase it from what to what? It was a confusing platitude that dilutes the conversation around women’s rights rather than solidifying their quest for nuanced stories and better treatment on sets. It is also a doddering response from someone who had the guts to express solidarity with the students of JNU when they were attacked by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad members. She has since receded for what we can only assume is notonly self-preservation but also preservation of status.

Her commercial acclaim is incontestable. Will the surface corrode because the substance is so feeble? She is possibly the only superstar after the Shah Rukh generation who has managed to be buoyant in the purgatorial post-pandemic filmmaking landscape. She seems to have affiliated herself with male-driven franchise films, whether it is the YRF spy universe, Rohit Shetty’s “Copverse”, or Ayan Mukerji’s glacially built “Astraverse”. Three films of hers have raked in more than Rs. 1,000 crore (Pathaan, Jawan, Kalki 2898 AD) and even if these roles do not carry the multitudes of her previous characters, they ensure longevity in an industry that has brazen double standards when it comes to the shelf life of female stars.

Commercial Hindi cinema is an ugly behemoth, and this verges on a defeatist reckoning of Padukone’s career. But there is adequate solace to be found when you consider that the trajectory of both superstardom and a woman who pursues it, are not supposed to be linear.

J. Shruti is a cultural critic and editor. She has previously worked as Senior Editor at FilmCompanion and Associate Editor at Verve Magazine.