Ladies... Here's Why Your Boyfriend's Favourite Feminist Is Emraan Hashmi

In a case that defies all logic and subverts every conceivable formula, a sequel to a box-office flop from 2007 has grossed over 100 crores and turned into Lord Emraan Hashmi’s best performing film till date. What’s ironic, though, is that the film’s staggering numbers expose the fundamental flaw of using box-office as the only measure for a film’s success.

Awarapan may have clocked abysmal numbers in 2007, but numbers rarely tell a full story. The film was alive in the cultural memory of a generation of wounded men—Sony Ericsson headphones plugged in—as they broodingly waited for a Mumbai local to ferry them, and their heartbreak, elsewhere.

And the outsourcing of pain to Emraan Hashmi bangers is key to understanding the enduring appeal of the actor who has always existed on the margins of despair, and rarely occupied spaces of socially sanctioned romances. It’s not just because Hashmi’s songs are addictive, or he has an understated charisma, or he simply fulfils the archetype of “oH gIrls LiKee bAd BoYz.”

It’s a heady cocktail of all those things, and then some more.

His appeal becomes more interesting when you see where he sits in relation to other romantic heroes of post-2000s Hindi cinema. While they were learning how to love, Hashmi was already tapping into something much more primal and potent—how to survive its wreckage, with Atif Aslam, KK, Mithoon supplying the soundtrack to soul-crushing emotional carnage.

It’s even more telling when you observe where the said wreckage happened.

Unlike Shah Rukh Khan’s aspirational, soft masculinity that always felt too dignified, too perfect, too Adarsh Balak Support Group for Broken Hearts; and later Ranbir Kapoor’s scenic meltdowns in Corsica, Vienna and Prague, Hashmi’s romantic despair wasn’t curated against postcard-perfect European towns, but somewhere more easily recognisable. Seedy garages, towering parapets, cheap motels, grimy streets, neon-lit dance bars, and the backseat of a taxi parked somewhere it probably shouldn’t.

And heartbreak hits harder when it doesn’t have the cushion of stunning vistas to escape the blows. KK’s voice acquires a different gravitas at Grant Road station past midnight than it does at a meadow somewhere in the Alps. It’s the social segregation of pain that Hashmi’s cinema has always been instinctively aware of: he knew early on that romantic ruin might be universal, but not everyone gets to suffer beautifully.

Footpath, Murder, Kalyug, Jannat, Murder, The Killer, Awaraapan – Hashmi’s characters are almost always morally compromised, and embody  a subaltern masculinity that a post-liberalised India regards with suspicion. They are bookies, taxi-drivers, gangsters, fixers, hustlers, and middlemen, proxies between the law and the outlaw, never fully belonging or committing to either world. Their romantic lives don’t have social approval; they are men who develop a conscience too late. And that awakening happens when they realise that the world they participated in is far uglier than they imagined it to be.

For an actor whose public mythology was built around serial kissing and sexual transgression, Hashmi has spent a surprising amount of his screen life confronting men far more sinister than himself: traffickers, pimps, sexual predators, gangsters and self-serving patriarchs who treat women as currency. His characters may themselves be compromised, but the line they repeatedly discover they cannot cross is the exploitation of someone more powerless than them, very often a woman.

And perhaps Awarapan is the best argument here: Shivam is essentially disposable labour for a criminal organisation until recognising another person’s captivity—the trafficked woman—gives him a moral purpose. He turns the violence he has spent his life administering against the very system employing him.

You could reasonably argue, of course, that women become collateral in a male redemption fantasy but Hashmi’s oeuvre is a little more nuanced than that: he doesn’t rescue the women to possess them; he rescues them from possession. The reward isn’t possession or absolution, it’s merely the possibility of being less terrible than the men around him.

His characters are driven not simply by vengeance or conquest, but by atonement. And this is why Hashmi sits in a very unique place in the pantheon of Hindi film masculinity. Behind the sleaze, the promiscuity, the bad boy coding, Hashmi’s masculinity contains something unexpectedly feminist: he understands male culpability and the violence patriarchal systems inflict on women.

He’s not the dumb-as-a-rock alpha from Animal with unbearable Daddy issues, ew, how very snowflaky. He’s not alpha at all, in fact. He’s self-aware of his complicity, is capable of feeling guilt, and even allows himself the radical privilege of experiencing pain without treating vulnerability as an assault on his manhood. Unlike SRK-Ranbir-Saif men don’t look at Emraan Hashmi and see someone they want to become; they see someone who offers them a safe language to express trauma without feeling emasculated.

Perhaps that’s his great romantic tragedy, and it’s precisely what makes his men worth rooting for: they discover their morality after having lost their right to innocence. His characters are spiritually exhausted, haunted by guilt and regret and a search for a higher power, and the only visible path to redemption is an endless walk in neon-lit streets populated by seedy pimps, pornographers, and assorted creatures of the night.

It’s an excellent grey area for a Hindi film hero to exist in: they’ve already cancelled themselves, they don’t ask for forgiveness or rehabilitation, they simply want to salvage their souls and get through the night.

And that’s perhaps why your boyfriend’s favorite feminist isn’t Lena Dunham (lol, we’ve a looong way to go), it’s Lord Hashmi. Dudes be smoking and zoning out at Malad backroad, silently raging against their IT managers, while Hashmi killing a misogynistic psychopath becomes the closest they’ll ever get to workplace justice.

Before therapy entered our vocabulary, men had Emraan Hashmi.

Of course, the fact that he was easily getting laid, seducing married women and sleeping with film stars, and still somehow came as the guy you felt bad for was an enormous part of his appeal. But in the world of super hormonal early 2000s, those characters existed in narratives that did a lot more emotional heavy-lifting than we give (Vishesh) Films Noir credit for.

In the spectrum of problematic heroes, Emraan Hashmi comes out relatively better not because he’s particularly woke. He isn’t – and that’s not even his aspiration. He’s probably a terrible boyfriend, and far from being the patron saint of feminism.

But his characters understand that, unlike the Vanga boys, their wounds don't entitle them to anyone’s affection.