Actor Gulshan Devaiah and Namita Dubey believe their film Jhansi Ka Rajkumar is a fun exploration of gender stereotypes in small town India.
In the film, Gulshan plays Rajkumar, a stay-at-home father-husband and his wife, Devayani essayed by Aspirants fame Dubey, is the breadwinner with a government job.
“It's a film about a young family, who are sort of uprooted from where they are from and they move to Jhansi from Delhi. They discover some good things as well as the consequences of relocating to a new place like the man not having a job. So, he's a house husband which is not necessarily a bad thing but that depends on how one can deal with it,” Gulshan told PTI in an interview.
Namita said the movie explores how gender roles are viewed in small town India with a dash of humour.
“Theme-wise, it shows how the gender roles are swapped. Like, when a woman is working in a small town and the man is at home, the comedy and tension drives from that. It's done in an entertaining way, with a dash of humour,” she said.
"There are a lot of characters that add a lot of drama. It's a simple story but it deals with themes like gender roles in smaller towns, working people, and having agency as a woman,” she added. Jhansi Ka Rajkumar, directed by Nicholas Kharkongor, is streaming on Waves, a digital streaming platform developed by Prasar Bharati.
Citing the example of popular Hindi films Singham and Badhaai Do, Gulshan said the two leading men in the movies, Ajay Devgn and Rajkummar Rao have portrayed varied versions of masculinity.
“In a film like Singham, he (Devgn) is a cop and there is a certain kind of masculinity. It's very entertaining, I enjoy it. But is that the only idea of masculinity? Perhaps not because there are so many other ways that masculinity is defined in many other movies,” he said.
Gulshan said films made by Zoya Akhtar portray masculinity in a more nuanced manner.
"If you look at the men in her films, like Ranveer Singh in Gully Boy, it's far more nuanced, there are more layers to the man,” he added.
The outline of Jhansi Ka Rajkumar may seem similar to that of Kareena Kapoor Khan-Arjun Kapoor's 2016 romantic-comedy Ki & Ka but they both deal with the story of a house husband in a different manner, Dubey said.
“Gender is a social construct, we've certain things in our mind that a man has to be a provider and a woman has to be a nurturer. We are kind of trying to challenge that in a film because that's what socially we've been taught and that's what we are trying to challenge,” she said.
"And in Ki & Ka they were also challenging the same thing. We've got a different sort of entertainment in this film from Ki & Ka. But the premise is kind of similar,” Namita added.