They Wanted Curves: Sonali Bendre Opens Up About Body Shaming Culture in 90s Bollywood

Sonali Bendre, who is currently gearing up for the release of The Broken News Season 2, recently talked about how being "voluptuous" was viewed as the ideal of beauty in the 1990s. The actress revealed she was skinny-shamed multiple times during the early days of her career. As the 90s' beauty standards favoured a different body type in women, producers frequently put pressure on her to put on weight.

Sonali Bendre on body shaming

In a conversation with Hauterfly, Sonali talked about the time when being skinny wasn’t a requirement for women in the entertainment industry, instead, they were shamed for it. She said, “When I came in the industry, heroines didn’t used to be this skinny. Every producer was trying to fatten me up all the time. They would just tell me to ‘eat eat eat bahut patli hai (she is too thin).’ They wanted curves. At that time, they wanted women who were curvaceous and voluptuous and who had curls in their hair.” 

This is not the first time Sonali has addressed the issue of body shaming in Bollywood. She weighed in on the topic in her previous interview with Bollywood Bubble. Additionally, the actress criticised the idea of making people conscious about their body type. She said, “I do agree body shaming should not have any part in our society and especially little girls and the kind of ideas they are growing with and the crazy dieting people are doing. People are forgetting that it is not holistic.”

Sonali Bendre shares her thoughts on feminism

Sonali stated that she is not ‘comfortable’ with the common notion floating about feminism. She argued that they are looking for equal rights for all genders in society. The actress said, “The definition has taken on this connotation of ‘male-bashing’ which a lot of us are not comfortable with. I am not comfortable with male-bashing.”

The Hum Saath Saath Hain fame asserted that what the society needs is balance and equal rights. She shared, “We are looking for equal rights and you want equal rights not up and down. Again that is an imbalance. What you want is a balance and either way when the scale moves and there's no balance, then there is a problem.”