A now-familiar filmic standard that goes at least as far back as the ’80s is the so-called campus song. Choreographers have found in the college campus — with its neo-gothic congregation halls and tree-lined avenues — just as interesting a backdrop as the Alpine slope or the city street in the rain. In the foreground: singing, dancing and, alas, sexual harassment.

The classic, and in many ways representative, song is ‘Khambe jaisi khadi hai’ from the 1990 film Dil : wild kid Aamir Khan avenges a petty insult from Madhuri Dixit’s heiress with an elaborate and well-choreographed humiliation. The woman’s original infraction — splashing Aamir Khan with mud while driving a jeep past him — is forgotten now. The real offence is now her supposed arrogance, which the song happily identifies with her refusing the advances of a man who has just pretended to be blind as an excuse to grope her. It’s hard not to take her side.

The scene makes for uncomfortable viewing: Madhuri Dixit isolated, often the only woman in the frame, as a large gang of dancing men ask, again and again, ‘Khud ko samajhti hai kya’. What does she think of herself? The question, in fact, has an easy answer: she thinks of herself as a human being entitled to respect, someone whose ‘no’ means ‘no’.

That this is immediately dubbed arrogance is a sign, more than anything else, of what the men in the sequence think they are entitled to. The Irish novelist Rebecca West’s remark comes to mind: ‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.’

In this genre, there is no good, only less bad. A song from only two years later, ‘Khud ko kya samajhti hai’ — again, ‘What does she think of herself?’ — from 1992 thriller Khiladi has roughly the same scenario and asks the same question of its female pair, played by the cheeky and charismatic Ayesha Jhulka and the now-forgotten Sabeeha. This scene, however, leaves a much less bitter taste in the mouth. By the low standards of a mostly indefensible genre, it’s almost a triumph of egalitarianism.

For one thing, the joke is from the start on the boys; part of the fun is the song’s awareness of their sense of entitlement. Akshay Kumar’s career of playing wisecracking muscleheads with chest-hair bursting out of their vests more or less started with this film, but throughout this sequence, he exudes a goofy, comic, harmless style of masculinity. It’s his body that’s the site of humiliation — eggs, flour, mud — and he takes it all with endearing resignation.

More importantly, this time, the women get to say their piece, and ask the natural follow-up: ‘Khud ko kya samajhta hai?’ What does he think of himself? The battle of the sexes, so called, for once looks like an evenly matched affair, a back-and-forth where the women, now united into an all-singing-all-dancing collective, have a fighting chance. Their dance steps are more assertive, and no one plays the shrinking violet. The whole thing is not being staged only with the needs of its heterosexual male audience members in mind.

There is a more general point to be made here. For hundreds of thousands of Indians, the three or four years spent acquiring a degree constitute — as Sunil Khilnani remarks with despair and a little condescension in The Idea of India (1997) — ‘for most, an idle rite of passage rather than an education’. But Khilnani’s picture is incomplete.

These cinematic fantasies of nubile boys and girls cavorting in lecture halls embodies, implausibly enough, something like an ethical vision. These sequences have, in their way, a vision of the good life, one with room for joking, banter and flirtation, not just consciousness-raising and inorganic chemistry.

The college campus is many people’s first and only experience of being around adults of the opposite sex to whom one is not related. It is a brief window between their well-policed years at school and the (often arranged) marriages shortly to follow. The frisson of college comes from its association with a fantasy of freedom, with all its pleasures and all its risks.

Of course, the reality is rarely anything like the fantasy: the teaching staff mysteriously disappear on demand whenever the students feel the need for a little dancing in the corridors. Perhaps this is for the best, because the fantasy itself — with harassment and humiliation painted as a bit of harmless ‘eve-teasing’, in the horrible Indian euphemism — is at least ambiguous. But the appeal of these sequences is an invitation to imagine something better, a vision of freedom without the inequality but with just as much fun.

Nakul Krishna is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge

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