Sona Mohapatra says Bollywood heartbreak songs are 'reserved for men', questions erasure of women's pain

Singer and activist Sona Mohapatra has taken aim at the emotional economy of Bollywood music, arguing that songs about heartbreak and romantic longing in Hindi cinema are almost entirely written from and for a male gaze, effectively erasing women's pain from one of popular culture's most consumed formats.

Mohapatra framed her critique sharply, asking whether men in Bollywood are essentially making love to themselves — writing, composing, and performing songs about their own grief while the woman in the narrative remains a passive object of longing rather than a subject with her own emotional interiority. The comment, reported by The Times of India, is pointed: in a typical Bollywood separation arc, it is the male protagonist who mourns, yearns and expresses, while the woman either disappears or becomes the cause of suffering rather than a sufferer herself.

The observation connects to a broader, ongoing conversation about representation in Hindi film industries — who writes the scripts, who composes the music, and whose emotional vocabulary ends up defining mainstream culture. Women have historically been underrepresented among Bollywood's top lyricists and composers, a structural gap that arguably shapes what kinds of feelings get recorded and amplified.

Mohapatra has a history of public commentary on the music industry, including on issues of credit, pay and creative autonomy for women artists. Her latest remarks are likely to resonate with listeners who have long noted the asymmetry — and to push back from those who argue the industry is changing.