Between Lipstick and Widow’s White: Female desire and gendered ageism in contemporary Bollywood

Aging women in Bollywood have long been confined within a narrow repertoire of archetypes, among them the suffering widow, the stern matriarch, and the self-effacing grandmother, figures defined not by individuality or desire but by moral authority, self-sacrifice, and patriarchal function. Shaped by what Susan Sontag termed the ‘double standard of aging’ and intensified by the social economy of Brahminical patriarchy, these representational conventions have historically rendered older women’s sexuality, reproductive agency, and social presence cinematically inconceivable. When older women assert agency, express desire, or transgress the boundaries of respectability, they risk social ridicule, pity, or pathologisation, their erotic subjectivity systematically erased through what feminist gerontologists theorise as sexageism, the compounded oppression of ageism and sexism. This article examines three recent films, Lipstick Under My Burkha (dir. Alankrita Shrivastava, Citation2017), Badhaai Ho (dir. Amit Ravindernath Sharma, Citation2018), and The Last Color (dir. Vikas Khanna, Citation2019), as exemplary interventions in this evolving discourse. Each film confronts a distinct dimension of gendered ageism: the suppression of erotic subjectivity and later-life desire, the pathologisation of late-life reproductive agency, and the institutionalised erasure of widows from public and social life. Through close textual analysis, the article traces how each film negotiates the representational conventions it contests. It argues that these films constitute an emergent and still fragile reimagining of aging femininity in South Asian popular culture, one that moves beyond deficit-oriented frameworks to offer new vocabularies of desire, agency, and visibility for older women on screen.