‘Women Talk Most In Shah Rukh Khan Movies’... Interesting?

The study finds that conversation is an important part of Shah Rukh Khan’s films.

Apparently, women speak the most in Shah Rukh Khan movies. That’s an interesting finding that has come up in Shrayana Bhattacharya’s upcoming book titled Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh. The author recently on International Women’s Day tweeted that she had measured how much women get to speak in Hindi films for her book and had got some eye-grabbing results.

In her book, Bhattacharya analyses the biggest hits from 1995 to 2020 and all films starring Shah Rukh, Salman and Aamir Khan in the same period.

I triangulated a count of dialogue share and talk-time from manual data collection and a program. I restricted my analysis to (a) the biggest box office hit for each year between 1995 and 2020 (b) all Salman, SRK and Aamir movies in the same time period. Four broad results:

— Shrayana B (@BShrayana) March 7, 2021

From all the data collected and an analysis of the dialogue share and screen time given for each actor to talk, Bhattacharya arrived at four conclusions. The first being - Women speak most in Shah Rukh’s movies because conversation is an important part of the narrative in SRK’s films and there are more women in his movies.

Second, Bhattacharya found that in four of the biggest money-spinners in the last five years, the women speak for an average of just 25 minutes in a film that has a duration of at least 2.5 hours. ‘Women occupy half of the screen time but a quarter of the dialogue,’ she tweeted.

To illustrate her point, Bhattacharya gives the example of the 2014 release PK directed by Rajkumar Hirani. Though Anushka Sharma features in a prominent role in the film along with Aamir Khan, she speaks for approximately 35 minutes in the film.

The study also found that mainstream films with equal female dialogue no longer dominate the box-office. This wasn’t the case earlier with a film like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, which released in 1995, that had a lot of female dialogue.

Bhattacharya also notes that in the huge box-office hit War, starring Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff and Vaani Kapoor, women spoke less than a quarter of the film’s dialogue.

Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh is scheduled to release in October 2021. According to the publishers Harper Collins, the book is about “how generations of women have taken Shah Rukh to heart. The stories illustrate how Shah Rukh’s films, songs, interviews and characters – the stalkers and the lovers alike – are invoked to frame a feminine conversation on inequality within families, workplaces and modern romances.”