LONDON — The math is simple for a heroine in Hindi cinema. Two assistants, same job title, same pay. Two stars, same billing, different bank balances.
Raveena Tandon spelled out the disparity during a London shoot for an upcoming OTT series. She pointed to a telling benchmark: male and female assistant directors earn equally.
The gap only appears at the top. Heroines still get paid less than heroes. That gap has numbers attached.
Tandon mentioned chartered planes as one marker of the difference. Heroes get them.
Heroines do not. The cost of a private jet from Mumbai to a film set runs into lakhs of rupees per hour. That expense is baked into a hero’s contract.
It is not for a heroine. The actress is currently filming in London and Scotland. She is proud of how far women have come in the industry.
“I’m very proud of our Hindi film industry where today, I see women making inroads into every field of expertise, even what were once male-dominated bastions,” she said in a recent interview. But the numbers underneath that progress tell a different story.
Women now work as directors, producers, cinematographers. They write scripts and run crews. The pay for those behind-the-camera roles is equal.
The pay for the woman on screen is not. Tandon’s latest film, Welcome To The Jungle, is a hero-driven mainstream comedy.
It has an ensemble cast of 32 actors. That is a big number. It is also a familiar structure — a large cast built around a male lead.
The funny lines go to the heroes, she noted. The pay follows the same pattern. She called the film a crazy ride and a refreshing change.
After a string of intense roles in recent films and web series, the comedy was a shift. She had to unlearn old habits.
The style of filmmaking has changed since her 1990s hits like Andaz Apna Apna and Bade Miyan Chote Miyan. Those were madcap comedies. The writing is more defined today, she said.
Heroines have more agency. But the really funny lines still go to the heroes.
The cast includes Suniel Shetty, Akshay Kumar, Arshad Warsi, Paresh Rawal, Johny Lever, Rajpal Yadav, Jacqueline Fernandez and Disha Patani. Tandon credited them for making the shoot easy. Director Ahmed Khan also got a nod.
None of that changes the pay gap. The trend is stubborn. The shift is subtle.
The financial ceiling for women on screen remains lower than it is for men. That is true even as women enter every field of expertise.
It is true even as the industry evolves around them. Tandon did not name specific numbers for the gap. She did not have to.
The contrast is clear enough: equal pay for equal work at the assistant director level, unequal pay for unequal work at the star level. The work on screen is not equal.
The funny lines go to the men. The planes go to the men. The money goes to the men.
The Hindi film industry has changed. Women work in every department. They direct, produce, write.
They are in the room. But the room still pays the men more.
That is the number that has not moved.
