Alankrita Shrivastava returns to Zoya Akhtar territory in ‘Bombay Begums’ armed with Rahul Bose and an overwritten voiceover. Wives are at war with husbands, teenagers at war with their mothers, and women at war with other women in the six-part Netflix drama, starring Pooja Bhatt, Shahana Goswami, Amruta Subhash, and Plabita Borthakur as four women trapped in the snake-pit of corporate India. Aadhya Anand, meanwhile, plays an emo teen named Shai, who provides the navel-gazing narration.
While the show's 'smash the patriarchy' spirit might feel progressive to some, Shrivastava's sensibilities as a storyteller, remain, as always, strictly Bollywood. There is little room for subtlety in ‘Bombay Begums’, as can immediately be gathered from the episode titles that have been lifted from feminist literature, and plot lines that involve the emancipation of a sex worker and the importance of upholding traditions such as Karwa Chauth.
While these contradictions may sound odd — can a show claim to be feminist when it has a female character dismiss the surrogate mother of her unborn child as 'just a womb'? — but they bring a certain realism to these women that is uncommon in an industry that largely prefers putting them inside clearly labeled boxes.
Bombay Begums' strength lies in its characters, each of whom embodies the clashing morals and ideologies of the show itself — in one moment they're pulling each other down, and in the next, making uplifting speeches about sticking it to the man. You're never quite sure whether or not any of them is a decent person, but expecting them to be 'polite and agreeable', as Jane Austen would say, reveals the sort of indoctrination that we've grown to accept. —Hindustan Times