India's Most Decorated Actress Has Something to Say — and the Industry Needs to Listen

Shabana Azmi has won five National Film Awards for Best Actress — a record no other performer in Indian cinema history has matched. She has spent five decades navigating Bollywood's contradictions: participating in mainstream commercial cinema while simultaneously championing the parallel cinema movement that gave Indian women their most complex, human, and powerful screen portrayals. When she speaks about how the industry treats women, she does so with the authority of someone who has seen everything from the inside.

At the recently held We The Women event in Mumbai, Azmi turned her attention to one of Bollywood's most persistent and commercially profitable habits — the item number. What she said was not new. But the precision with which she said it, and the context she brought to it in 2026, makes it one of the most important conversations in Indian entertainment right now.

"Cinema Is Defined by the Image" — and the Director Controls the Image

Azmi's central argument is not about skin, music or dance. It is about intention — and how the camera reveals it.

Speaking at the event, she said: "Cinema is defined by the image. So when you have disconnected images" — shots of a "heaving bosom, or shaking navel" — they reveal "the intention of the director."

This is a more sophisticated critique than the usual binary of "item songs are bad vs item songs are empowerment." Azmi is pointing at the mechanism behind the image — the decision made in a director's chair about where the camera goes, how long it lingers, and what it chooses to see. That decision, she argues, is where objectification either happens or does not.

She illustrated this point with a precise example: in Zoya Akhtar's Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, when Katrina Kaif emerges from water in a bikini, the camera does not linger — it stays at mid-frame, follows her as she picks up her bathrobe, and moves on. "You immediately accept that she is an instructor who is coming and doing her job," Azmi said. "The very same shot, if the director had decided to go over, it would be objectification. So it's the intention. There's a difference between sensuality and objectification."

"A Woman Loses All Control and Surrenders to the Male Gaze"

On item numbers specifically, Azmi was unambiguous.

"I feel in an item number, a woman loses all control and surrenders to the male gaze," she said.

She has previously expanded on this in considerable depth: "Vulgar lyrics and suggestive, voyeuristic camera angles do not celebrate a woman's sexuality — they actually objectify her. So under the guise of saying that you're celebrating women's sexuality, you are actually objectifying her in item numbers."

Her position is carefully calibrated. She is not arguing that women cannot be sensual on screen, or that female sexuality has no place in cinema. "When a girl or a leading lady says 'it's alright, I want to celebrate my sensuality,' I have no problem with that. I think that's wonderful. But under the pretense of 'celebrating your sensuality' what you are actually doing is surrendering to the male gaze and objectifying yourselves because the business of cinema is of images."

The distinction she is drawing — between a woman choosing to express herself and a camera reducing her to body parts for an audience's titillation — is one that Bollywood has largely refused to have an honest conversation about.

The Children Question: What Worries Her Most

Perhaps the most pointed element of Azmi's argument at We The Women was not about actresses at all. It was about children.

"What worries me is the society's reaction to it, because then you go to these functions and there are little children singing 'Choli ke Peeche kya hain,' and everyone is laughing at them. Nobody is paying attention to the words and are just going with it," she said.

She has previously been even more direct on this point: "When you say 'main tandoori murgi hu, gatka lo mujhe alcohol ke saath' and a four-year-old girl is dancing to it, you are leading to the sexualisation of children — and the parents who are enjoying it, people who are encouraging her, are just as responsible."

This is where Azmi's argument moves from film theory into social urgency. The normalisation of objectifying language through entertainment — when children absorb it as something celebratory before they are old enough to understand what it means — creates the cultural backdrop against which attitudes towards women are formed. That, she argues, is not a film industry problem. It is a society problem that the film industry is actively creating.

Why This Matters in 2026

Azmi has been consistent on these issues across decades — at FICCI Frames, at the Mathrubhumi Festival of Letters, at countless panels and events. She was the actress who got on stage at the International Film Festival of India in 1989 and read out a protest leaflet condemning the murder of theatre artist Safdar Hashmi. The words she said then — "Artists have a voice. If they don't use that for the betterment of society, then they are losing an important access that they have" — have defined her public life ever since.

The context of 2026 gives her arguments renewed urgency. Bollywood's most recent commercially successful item numbers have not become less explicit — they have become more so. The gap between what Azmi is describing as the ideal — a cinema that sees women whole — and what actually appears on multiplex screens has, if anything, widened.

Azmi also made clear she is not singling out women. "If the males are willing to get objectified, why should you agree to get objectified?" she questioned — pointing to the double standard in which male actors are rarely subjected to the same fragmenting camera work as their female counterparts.

Who Is Shabana Azmi? The Context Behind the Critique

Shabana Azmi is the only performer in Indian cinema history to win the National Film Award for Best Actress five times — for Ankur, Arth, Khandhar, Paar, and Godmother. She pioneered parallel cinema and most recently appeared in Netflix's Dabba Cartel.

She is not speaking from the margins. She is speaking from the very centre of the industry she is critiquing — which is precisely what makes her voice so difficult to dismiss, and so important to hear.

Bottom Line

Shabana Azmi's argument is not about prudishness, censorship, or telling women what they can or cannot do with their bodies. It is about who is truly in control when a woman appears in an item number — and whether the answer is ever actually her. The director's gaze, the camera's choices, the industry's commercial calculations — these are the forces that decide how women appear on screen. And until those forces change, she argues, the language of "celebrating sensuality" will remain a fig leaf for something considerably less celebratory.

Five National Awards. Fifty years of navigating this industry. When Shabana Azmi speaks, Bollywood should listen.