Madhuri’s return is an answer to that drama. The face is older, more tired, but alive in a different way. It has a maturity of another kind, of a woman who has made mistakes but still feels confident enough to go on, who sees her art as freedom and freedom as an art, who is aware of her sexuality and not ready to let age stereotypes annex it. There is a power to her dance, a flexibility to her body, even if it is not the suppleness of youth.

The beauty of Madhuri’s return was something M.F. Husain was ready to understand and celebrate. But not our reviewers, not wishing to yield to that sense of liberation she was evoking. They trashed the script, the narrative, the direction, but they did not see the double drama that the movie celebrates. One is of the small town in touch with its fantasies and the other of middle-age refusing to return to the middle ages. This message codes both Madhuri the actor and the real life star.

Bollywood has the courage to open these questions which our social sciences do not. Our marketing men think life begins at 20 and ends at 30. But a bit of sociology would teach them that beyond the much-touted change of youth, is the quieter, harder sociological drama of middle and old age, which has a different nuance and intensity. Aaja Nachle is an intimation to that possibility. Let us not drown it in its reviewers’ stereotypes.

... contd.