ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates popular representations of girlhood and the related adolescent anxieties, discontent, and preferences that constitute the diegetic focus of recent films in contemporary Bollywood. Through an analysis of Nil Battey Sannata (released internationally as The New Classmate, 2015), Secret Superstar (2017), and Skater Girl (2021), it demonstrates how the radically different concerns of youthful female protagonists come into constant conflict with the more exacting demands of family. Caught between the numerous contingencies of impossibly difficult circumstances, the girl child is increasingly portrayed as a more resilient, assertive, and tenacious alternative to earlier configurations of gendered adolescent subjectivities in Hindi cinema. The growing visibility and prominence of girls in an industry which largely revolves around the fail-safe celebrity status of male stars owes a great deal to the political conversations and public discourses that have characterized the Indian landscape in the protracted aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case and governmental drives such as the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (Save the Girl Child, Educate the Girl Child) campaign.
