Why Are the Men in ‘Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo’ Such Clowns?

Early on in Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo, a family embarks on a hunt in the dry sands of a fictional Rann Pradesh. They’re looking for wild boar. The women evidently know how to hunt, as they make their way around the hunting ground, guns in hand, emitting animal sounds. Their polar opposites are their husbands, recent returns from the United States of America. Instead of exhibiting unexpected virility and hunter-ly prowess, they sscamper and squeal behind the backs of the women. The scene’s climax has one of the men letting loose a barrage of bullets towards a charging boar, only for all the bullets to miss the target. The woman next to him waits for him to get done before aiming her gun at the animal and scoring her kill with a single shot to its head. Not that the man beside her notices. He thinks he’s the one who shot the boar and she, instead of cutting him down to size, allows him to believe he made the shot. 

In the world of director Homi Adajania’s Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo, the men are clowns while the women are badass. At the centre of the series stands the matriarch Savitri (a compelling Dimple Kapadia), running Asia’s largest drug cartel behind the façade of Rani Cooperative, her jadi-booti and handicrafts business. Savitri is supported by the women in the family: Daughter Shanta (Radhika Madan) conducts experiments to enhance the drug, while daughters-in-law, Kajal (Angira Dhar) and Bijli (Isha Talwar) handle accounts and production. Rani Corporative is a community, giving (criminal) work and confidence to scores of women. They no longer need men for safety, money or pleasure, which is good because the men in Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo are pathetic duds. This is why we get cross-cut shots showing Savitri’s coddled sons Harish (Ashish Verma) and Kapil (Varun Mitra) stopping on their way home from the airport to wrestle in the mud and spit childish insults at each other. Meanwhile, the women are shown fighting off an attack on the haveli in which their opponents are burly men who are twice their size. By the time Harish and Kapil reach home, the women have cleaned up the haveli enough for the returning sons to notice nothing. 

Men as Footnotes

Much of the show’s humour is derived from Kapil and Harish’s dumbfounded amazement at the women’s assured steering of a drug cartel and their own useless masculine posturing. While many of the jokes at their expense can be seen as commentary on male entitlement, Adajania’s male characters quickly begin to resemble caricatures. Harish’s disturbing addiction issues become just as much a punchline as his promiscuity or his misconception that he is a competent heir to Savitri’s Rs. 500-crore empire. The few moments of vulnerability that he and Kapil show – both brothers are worried about their mother dealing with trauma on her own and are reluctant to leave her behind and go to America on their own – feel jarring. What we see of them otherwise doesn’t suggest they’re capable of these thoughts. In a curious (and perhaps unwitting?) reversal of how women characters are usually reduced to tropes and fringe elements in mainstream Hindi films, Adajania turns the men in Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo into footnotes to the plot. They’re the butt of silly jokes and feel so extraneous that after a point, you wonder why these characters were needed at all. 

For a majority of the show, despite life-altering events occurring around them, Harish and Kapil are either deluded or queasy about the family’s criminal truth. In the last two episodes, their personal journeys are thrust into motion, with each man moving in a distinctly opposite direction from how they had first started out (Kapil does begin his evolution early into the series but this is only revealed in flashbacks later). The gear-change feels more like a convenient narrative choice than organic character development. 

Although not as hurriedly written as the other two, Dhimad (Udit Arora), Savitri’s adopted son, is also written as disappointingly vague. He features in some of the show’s brilliant moments, like the scene in which Shanta and Dhimad – the only true (and believable) alliance in the series – attempt to deceive one another. Shanta haltingly says she was never interested in being the heir. We know that it’s a blatant lie and now, so does Dhimad. The scene leaves the audience feeling the hurt and betrayal that Adajania’s characters feel as brutal politicking seeps into the family’s interpersonal relationships. Dhimad’s illicit romance with Shanta is one of the more impactful plotlines in Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo and it’s enriched by the details that show him feeling conflicted between his duty towards Savitri and his love for Shanta. Sadly, Dhimad ends up feeling less like his own person and more like a callback to similar cinematic characters of the past, like Irrfan’s Maqbool battling his indebtedness towards his criminal boss, while being in love with his mistress in Maqbool (2004); or Shilpa Shetty’s Shikha being torn between a loveless marriage and the connection with a younger man in Life in a Metro (2007). 

Powering Up and Powering Down

This is not to suggest Adajania reserves poor characterisation for men alone. Bijli and Kajal are initially set up as important characters – what’s a story of saas-bahu camaraderie without the bahu? – but go on to have little to do. When everyone’s lunging for a piece of Savitri’s empire, the two women who seem like the best candidates, practically disappear from the power game. Bijli in particular receives the short end of the stick. She’s given an utterly lacklustre lesbian romance which serves no end other than becoming a plot twist. She is also not given a backstory, which is important because the show puts forward the idea that this is a found family brought together by the wounds of womanhood. We’re told backstories that introduce us to women who have survived horrific violence and risen from the ashes to become the fearsome forces they are today. The series’ surprise ending seems to almost count on us forgetting about Bijli and Kajal.

Even Savitri, who is the most coherent personality by far, is unravelled by the ending, bringing into question everything we know about her. Her morals and insistence on wounded women receiving care and dignity are the anchors for her character. At one point, when Kapil says that he’ll return to America with his wife, he is given an acidic reminder by Savitri: “She’s your wife, not a goat,” implying the woman can make her own decisions. Time and again, the matriarch is shown as a saviour, with Rani Cooperative being an extension of her ideals. Yet the ending shows a completely different shade of her, hinting that her charity is a farce. The effect might have had more impact if Savitri hadn’t been the only layered character in the show. Instead of cleverly subverting expectations, the twist in the tale feels like a gimmick that’s been executed to forcibly dupe the audience at the cost of consistent characterization. 

Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo releases at a time when nuanced characters – especially women characters – are more accessible than ever, thanks to the OTT revolution. In 2023, is it wrong to read women empowerment as physical strength, comfort with violence and elaborate mind games? No. Is it wrong to show male entitlement as a heady cocktail of addiction, hypocrisy and killer (literally) instinct? No. But surely, characters can be expected to rise above these bullet points and have enough complexity for us to buy into their existence. While Adajania’s series teases the idea of riveting characters created out of terrible circumstances and calculated choices, even at their best, that’s all they remain – ideas. At their worst, they’re caricatures.