‘I want flawed women’: how a single brief reshaped a Bollywood screenplay

Writer of the upcoming Madhuri Dixit vehicle ‘Maa Behen’ says director Suresh Triveni asked for a female lead who was not a saint — a brief that, in Bollywood’s glossier registers, is still treated as a creative risk worth flagging.

By Moemedi Michael Poncanaasia5-minute read11 Jun 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

On a humid evening in Mumbai this June, the screenwriter behind an upcoming Madhuri Dixit film offered a line that has done the rounds of trade press: the director wanted a lead who was not a saint. The remark landed because, in the most commercial reaches of Hindi cinema, a brief that openly courts female imperfection remains the exception rather than the rule. The film, Maa Behen, is positioned as the next substantial screen outing for Dixit — a star whose career has long been read as a barometer of how Indian popular cinema chooses to frame the women at its centre.

The writer’s account, surfaced through a 2026-06-11 piece in The Indian Express, is more than a pull-quote. It is a small window onto a quieter, more structural argument about who gets to be imperfect on an Indian screen, and at what cost.

A brief, and a counter-brief

According to the Indian Express interview, the director’s note to the writer was disarmingly short: he wanted the central character to be a woman with flaws on the page, not a saintly outline later to be sanded into a marketing-friendly arc. In a tradition that has long rewarded the suhaagan — the auspicious, married, self-sacrificing woman — and, more recently, the dutiful daughter or the long-suffering mother, the request amounts to a small act of creative dissent.

The screen trade has not always rewarded such asks. Indian film criticism, from the pages of Film Companion to the back columns of The Hindu, has spent the better part of a decade documenting the slow recalibration of the female lead — from object of devotion to architect of her own consequences. What makes the Maa Behen remark worth dwelling on is its specificity: the brief is not, in the writer’s telling, a call for moral transgression or for an anti-hero in the American sense. It is a call for messiness, contradiction, and earned consequences — the ordinary incoherence of a real human being.

The counter-current here is also worth naming. A significant slice of mainstream Hindi cinema, particularly the family drama and the devotional biopic, continues to depend on the saintly centre. The economic logic is plain: those films travel to the diaspora, they fill single-screen turnstiles in tier-two cities, and they offer a moral frame audiences already know. The writer’s account implicitly challenges that logic — by suggesting that even a star vehicle, even a Dixit film with the marketing apparatus that implies, can survive — perhaps even profit from — a woman who is allowed to be wrong on screen.

Whose woman is the woman on screen?

The question the brief raises is the one that has run beneath the so-called new wave of Hindi cinema: who is the female character for? Is she a vessel for the audience’s projection, a stand-in for the nation-mother, a marketing object whose virtue is the guarantor of the film’s moral hygiene? Or is she a person, with the same editorial latitude granted to a male protagonist in a heist film or a corruption drama?

The interesting tension in the Maa Behen remark is that the request for a flawed character comes from the director, not the writer. In the usual credit hierarchy of Hindi cinema, the director is the keeper of the film’s commercial logic — the person who knows which scenes the audience will accept and which they will not. A director voluntarily loosening the virtue-screws on his own lead is, in that sense, a more meaningful signal than a writer pushing in the same direction. It implies that the calculation about what a film can carry has shifted, at least at the level of the project.

This does not mean the industry has turned a corner. The Indian box office of 2024 and 2025 was, by multiple accounts, dominated by films whose female leads sat somewhere between the dutiful and the divine. The structural incentives — funding from family-run studios, distribution skewed toward single-screen and small-town markets, and a press ecosystem that has historically been less interested in character interiority than in box-office arithmetic — have not changed. What the Maa Behen brief points to is the persistence of an alternative: a parallel track of films, often mid-budget, often helmed by directors with a track record of off-centre work, that are quietly demonstrating that flawed women travel commercially too.

Stakes, and what to watch

The stakes for the film are modest but legible. If Maa Behen performs at the level its casting suggests, the brief becomes a precedent that other writers and directors can cite. If it underperforms, the same brief will be cited in the opposite direction, as a piece of evidence that Indian audiences are not yet ready for women who are allowed to be wrong. The film’s box-office fate, in that sense, will be read as a verdict on a question that should not be settled by a single release — but in the industry’s memory, it often is.

There is also a cultural-stakes dimension. Indian women in the country’s tier-one cities have, for the better part of a decade, been the primary audience for films that place their interior life at the centre — from the independent productions of the late 2010s to the OTT-led wave of 2020–2024. The audience is not the problem. The question is whether the studio system is prepared to underwrite the project at a scale that allows it to compete for screens with the more conservative family drama. The Maa Behen brief reads, in that context, as a quiet bet that the answer is now yes.

What remains uncertain

A pull-quote is not a finished film. The Indian Express piece gives readers the brief, the rationale, and the framing — it does not, and could not, give a verdict on whether the resulting character will be perceived as flawed in a way that matters at the box office. The trade press will, of course, deliver that verdict soon enough. Until then, the brief stands as a small piece of evidence that even the most commercial corners of Hindi cinema are starting to treat a female lead’s right to be wrong as a creative asset rather than a commercial liability.

— Desk note: Monexus treats the brief as a window onto a wider industry argument, not as a stand-alone film review. The wire read, by contrast, framed the remark largely as a piece of star-vehicle publicity — the Indian Express note sits in a longer lineage of trade-press interviews that treat any non-conforming character brief as a marketing event in itself.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhuri_Dixit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suresh_Triveni
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood