Spoiler: The Best Part of TBMAUJ is Kriti Sanon As the Bad Robot

The setting is an opulent farmhouse outside Delhi, bedecked with decorations for a wedding. Everyone is in a good mood as they gear up for the big event. The bride to-be is Sifra (Kriti Sanon), the new-age domestic goddess who can whip up elaborate meals, match her fiancé Aryan (Shahid Kapoor) step for step in complicated choreography, and whose smile doesn’t falter when she’s force-fed laddoos by Aryan’s family. Sifra seems to be the perfect woman  — she’s beautiful, she doesn’t complain, she barely eats, she doesn’t sleep; she simply smiles, serves and says “Theek hai (ok)”.  

Incidentally, Sifra is the Aramaic word for “book” and fittingly, Sanon’s Sifra is nothing if not literal in her thinking. When she goes to her room to “recharge”, she plugs a charging wire into her person. You see, the heroine of Tere Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya (TBMAUJ, 2024) is a robot (whose charging cable looks remarkably like the one that comes with iPhones). One fateful night at the palatial farmhouse — a site associated with traditional domesticity since it has hosted many weddings before this one (Aryan’s mother’s great regret is that the farmhouse is a wedding venue that others have used before she could do the same for her son) — the electricity fluctuates when Sifra sits down to recharge. The farmhouse is briefly plunged into darkness before the lights turn back on. The humans barely register the blip. For the humanoid, the effect is dramatic. The glowing bindi, which usually gleams steadily during charging, is shown as flickering and we know there’s trouble ahead.

The Scandalous Woman

Accompanied by ominous music and cinematography that deliberately leans into visual tropes from horror, Sifra transforms from cheerfully docile to a bad robot. Tics make her statuesque figure twitch unexpectedly. Her gait slips every now and then, turning her catwalk-worthy strides into awkward lurches. She slaps an annoying aunty, refuses to follow orders, and breaks into a rendition of Madhuri Dixit’s infamous “Dhak Dhak” dance that scandalises all those present. It’s a testimony to the genius of choreographer Saroj Khan that the bust-thrust move she gave Dixit more than 30 years ago can still make people break out in nervous, hormonal sweat. While Sifra mouthing the lyrics of “Dhak Dhak” to Aryan’s uncle makes jaws drop, the  real shocker is when Sifra doesn’t hesitate to shove aside Aryan’s grandfather (played by Dharmendra). The old man is no match for the strength unleashed by Sifra’s corrupted motherboard — ah the rich symbolism of gendered terms — and he falls to the side. Everyone gasps in concern and horror. Sifra moves on, intent upon destruction and determined to set fire to everything in her way.

It is at this point that Aryan makes his hero’s entry, walking through a frenzy of dancing flames in slow-mo and carrying a sword (you decide whether this is an ode to Padmaavat (2018) or a hat-tip to Sigmund Freud’s take on phallic symbols). Aryan tries to restrain Sifra, but she shakes off his hand and refuses to follow his command. Instead she hits him and draws blood. With tears in his eyes, Aryan strikes Sifra (with the hilt of his sword). She staggers, but recovers to lock eyes with Aryan again. One bit of skin peels off her face to show glinting metal. Aryan hits her again. What else is a man to do when his woman, sorry robot, is out of control?

Rather than the love story between Aryan and Sifra, which is rather anodyne despite songs, kisses and a sex scene, it’s when Sifra of the malfunctioning motherboard takes the spotlight that TBMAUJ feels exciting. It shouldn’t be a spoiler that Sifra acts out because ever since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), we’ve known that if there’s a robot in a movie, it will go bonkers and unleash chaos. However, the unexpected detail is that it’s only when Sifra starts misbehaving that TBMAUJ finally gains a wrinkle of complexity.

The Good Robot 

For most of TBMAUJ, Sifra is a flat and bland model of subservience who has no perceptible personality trait beyond unquestioningly obeying orders from anyone and everyone. No matter how casual or throwaway the comment, if it’s directed to Sifra, she sees it as a command that she must execute. Self-preservation isn’t in her programming, which is why she doesn’t rebuff the leery neighbour when he tries to fondle her and neither does she resist Aryan when he demands she stay in bed with him instead of charging her almost-drained battery. Wittingly or unwittingly, the first bit of nuance enters TBMAUJ when Sifra’s circuits are rewired because of the power fluctuation. Is it a coincidence that the catalyst incident that corrupts Sifra takes place just before she’s about to get married to Aryan? Is it telling that the straw that breaks her motherboard is a banal occurrence that Aryan and his family barely notice? Is Sifra’s relationship with the Agnihotri family supposed to reflect the microaggression and everyday sexism that riddles so much of traditional domesticity?

Even though Sifra has ostensibly been lavished with affection and acceptance by the Agnihotris, their love language is also exhausting. To be embraced by them is also to become their possession and be consumed by them. While Aryan regularly squirrels some alone time for himself by retreating with a cigarette to a terrace, Sifra gets little opportunity to decompress. Her active hours require her to be at the beck and call of either the in-laws or Aryan, her smile in place and her energy at a steady high. There isn’t even one scene that suggests Sifra has had an experience that encourages a hint of sentience or enjoyment. Instead, we see others doing things to her and her doing things for others. Sifra is the doll that doesn’t tire of being played with — one relative even describes her as a Barbie — allowing the family to treat her however they desire. Her only respite comes when she retreats to charge her battery. Does Sifra have a meltdown because even a computer’s circuits can’t handle the pressure of serving the great Indian joint family’s needs, even when the patriarchal family is on its best behaviour?

Hallucinating a To-Do List

Another curious detail is that even when she’s malfunctioning, Sifra doesn’t act of her own accord. It’s tempting to imagine Sifra’s determination to burn Delhi down as an act of feminist revenge against a city that is notorious for being unsafe for women, but the narrative framework of TBMAUJ doesn’t allow for that interpretation. The sharp turn that Sifra takes towards violence is not a result of independent reasoning or an act of vengeance. Sifra betrays little awareness of her own femininity and the script doesn’t allow her to experience any sisterhood or womanly solidarity. The women (and men) that Sifra meets all share an unequal power dynamic with her. She exists to obey their orders. What seems like rebellion is actually an extreme example of blinkered obedience. The only reason Sifra wants to set the city on fire is because in a previous scene, a relative had jokingly told her, “Aaj toh lag rahi hai ke saari Dilli mein aag laga degi tu (you look hot enough to set Delhi ablaze).” At the time, Sifra — with Kriti Sanon arranging her beautiful features to create a wonderfully dull, earnest and deadpan expression — had responded with, “Kya aap chahti hain ki main saari Dilli mein aag laga du? (Do you want me to set fire to all of Delhi?)” Once her circuits are fried, Sifra doesn’t remember either the context of the statement or the clarifications that followed. All she knows is that she was supposed to set Delhi on fire, but she didn’t complete that task.      

Although she looks like a woman on a mission, Sifra’s actions are not really rooted in dissent. It seems as though Sifra is challenging established authorities when, for instance, she slaps an aunty, but actually she’s following an instruction that had been given to her earlier (by another aunty) which Sifra hadn’t carried out. In effect, Sifra has been driven round the bend by the stress of being overworked and after the power fluctuation, she starts hallucinating unfinished chores. Yet even when she’s lost her supercomputer mind, Sifra is still intent upon completing her tasks. When her creator (Aryan’s aunt Urmila, played by Dimple Kapadia) orders Sifra to shut down, Sifra acknowledges the command and promises to comply — but only after she’s cleared the preceding tasks in her long list of to-dos. How’s that for a work ethic?

Man Up, Woman Down?

There are only two instances in TBMAUJ when Sifra seems to act on the basis of her own reasoning, rather than an existing instruction. The first is an unprovoked act of violence: She viciously shoves Dharmendra for no reason when setting fire to the farmhouse. The second is when she strikes Aryan. Both men are shown as heroes who love her and stand as obstacles in Sifra’s path only because she’s gone astray. However, nothing in previous scenes suggested Sifra could be violent as she is with the patriarch and his successor. 

While the original Sifra could be persuaded with words to understand where she’s gone wrong, the malfunctioning Sifra does not see reason. Instead she gravitates towards violence, but in a departure from the otherwise simplistic writing of TBMAUJ, the bad robot hints at more complexity than Sifra did with her original programming. Even in their final confrontation, the men aren’t enemies as much as obstacles in Sifra’s path. It’s worth noting that even though she’s much stronger than Aryan, Sifra doesn’t lash out at him with all her power. She hits him with the intention of putting him out of her way, rather than killing or disabling him (this is despite Aryan having taught Sifra ‘tricks’ like dangling a man from a rooftop or crushing someone’s hand during a handshake). 

Sifra’s resistance to Aryan is to simply refuse to bend or crumble. When he hits her, her body seems to collapse, but then she pulls herself straight again and locks her unwavering gaze upon him and us, thanks to a direct look into the camera. TBMAUJ focuses its own narrative gaze on a teary-eyed, sword-uselessly-in-his-fist Shahid Kapoor as Aryan mans up and bludgeons his wife to-be — so much for his promise that he’ll be Sifra’s “best admin ever” — for the greater good of his family and presumably, Delhi.   

The Conundrum of Femininity

Directors Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah, who have also written the film, hint that Sifra has developed both a personality and an ego when at the end of TBMAUJ, Sifra 2.0 seems to identify Janhvi Kapoor as a competitor. Neither the idea of a sequel nor the prospect of a love triangle sound particularly exciting, but for the detail that if Janhvi Kapoor is pitted against Kriti Sanon, then the follow-up to TBMAUJ has the potential of exploring different models of contemporary femininity and modern gender dynamics. 

Considering how deliberately TBMAUJ turns away from any kind of complexity, it is perhaps unrealistic to expect depth in its sequel. Maybe the delicious possibilities of the bad robot scenes are a blip in the film’s programming. However, if Indian storytellers are so inclined, there’s a lot to potentially explore with what has been set up with TBMAUJ. Research has shown that there is a proliferation of feminine robots — a literal objectification of women — because women are generally perceived as more humane compared to men. As Kate Manne wrote in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, “Often, it’s not a sense of women’s humanity that is lacking. Her humanity is precisely the problem.” 

But what are the attributes that make up a woman’s humanity, as opposed to that of a man? Does it necessarily have to be framed as an opposition? What does it mean to be womanly and are there new models of idealised women that can revamp the tired tropes of the goodie-two-shoes and the bold, ‘bad’ girl? How is the traditional male hero informed by modern women? Does society need feminine robots to infuse the idea of masculinity with humaneness?

Is the power cut that happened earlier responsible for me overthinking a film that is, at its best, underwritten?