Gulzar had spent years as a lyricist and poet before he ever sat behind a camera. He could capture what a woman wanted in just four lines of a song — her longing, her body, spoken of with a tenderness Hindi film music rarely achieved. Growing up on his songs, one absorbed that tenderness.Directing asked more of that tenderness. A song could stay beautiful about a woman’s longing and leave it there, but a film couldn’t. It had to follow her through getting older, getting it wrong, wanting the wrong person, making choices the people around her would judge. That’s a harder thing to do well.A woman who chose ambition, not a man who allowed itAandhi is where this shows up loudest. Aarti Devi doesn’t discover politics because a husband hands it to her — she chooses it, mid-campaign, years after leaving the man she still hasn’t stopped loving. Gulzar built the film with almost no other woman in the frame, deliberately, so there was nowhere left for the story to look except at her. Gulzar has spoken about wanting to ask a simple question with that choice: why couldn’t a woman be the one who’s outdoors, ambitious, not confined to a house. The film never resolves that by mending the marriage. Aarti doesn’t quit the campaign to win him back. He doesn’t ask her to. Two people who loved each other discover, without either one becoming the villain, that love was never going to be enough to make their two lives fit together. Suchitra Sen and Sanjeev Kumar in a still from Aandhi.Wanting something, without the film making a speech about itKhushboo’s Kusum wants something too, and Gulzar trusts her enough to never turn that want into a monologue about independence. Married off as a child, abandoned when her husband marries someone else, she doesn’t remarry — it’s not heartbreak, it’s pride. Years later, free now, he comes back and asks for her again, but she says no. The refusal isn’t rebellion dressed up for the camera. It’s just a woman being allowed, for once, to decide something about her own life without anyone’s permission attached to it. Hema Malini and Jeetendra in a still from Khushboo.ALSO READ: What happened to Musharraf after Operation Safed Sagar? Military coup, failed India visitTwo women, opposite in everything except how they loveIjaazat had every excuse to split its two women into the usual categories — the wife, and the other woman — and hand the audience someone to root against. It declines both. Maya doesn’t believe in marriage; she refuses Mahendra when he wants to make things official, which is exactly why he eventually marries Sudha. Maya is free-spirited, unwilling to be tied down, chasing love on her own terms. Sudha is the opposite — patient, dutiful, trying to understand her husband’s past instead of resenting the woman who lived in it. Opposite temperaments, and yet neither one is written as the wrong one. The film’s real argument isn’t spoken at all — it’s sung, in an inventory of a former lover’s things, still kept, because a relationship ending was never going to inform the memory that it’s over. Sudha’s eventual decision to walk away isn’t revenge either. It’s self-preservation, and Gulzar lets it play like that. Rekha and Naseeruddin Shah in a still from Ijaazat.A woman the plot refuses to reduce to her professionMausam might be the sharpest test of how far Gulzar was willing to take this. Amarnath returns to the hill town decades later and finds Kajli, who works at a brothel — and he recognises her instantly as the daughter of the woman he once loved and left behind. Guilt, not romance, is what makes him take her in. Kajli, though, doesn’t know any of this. She doesn’t know he’s the man responsible for her mother’s ruin, and slowly, unknowingly, she starts to fall for the one man treating her with respect and tenderness. Gulzar handles the reveal with real delicacy — Amarnath is horrified when he realises what she’s begun to feel, and the truth, when it finally comes out, reframes everything that came before it without ever turning Kajli into a fool for having felt what she felt. She gets desire, anger, dignity — a life the plot never lets collapse into her profession. The film asks you to look at her, not judge her.Story continues below this adA house full of women, and no hero coming to save itNamkeen builds a world of women. Three sisters and their mother, in a remote Himalayan village. Nimki is pragmatic, having given up her own life to hold the rest of the family’s together. Mithu is more romantic, expressing herself only in verse. Chinki, the youngest, has watched her sister’s sacrifice up close and wants none of it for herself. Their mother Jugni carries her own history into the house — a former nautanki dancer, worn down by an abusive husband who eventually abandoned all of them, now sharp-tongued and half-forgetful, holding onto whatever dignity is left to her. When a man does eventually arrive, the film resists the urge to make him their rescuer — Nimki, in particular, refuses his help outright, because she already knows exactly what depending on a man costs a woman. Their survival never needs a speech. It’s just there, evidenced, in how all four of them get through each day. Shabana Azmi and Sanjeev Kumar in a still from Namkeen.A saint who wanted her own life, not a different oneMeera takes the same woman Gulzar had been writing all along and sends her back into history. Her devotion to Krishna becomes an act of open defiance — against a royal household, a marriage, an entire social order built to keep her small. The film never treats her faith and her rebellion as two separate things fighting each other. They were always the same choice, made over and over: not a different life. Her own.When the violence stops being only a man’s storyMaachis moves that same instinct into Punjab in the 1980s, and hands its radicalisation arc, grief curdling slowly into militancy, to a young woman. Veera isn’t born a revolutionary. Circumstance makes her one, the way it does for most of Gulzar’s women. He doesn’t excuse where she ends up. He doesn’t flinch from how she got there either.Power, without the film romanticising itBy Hu Tu Tu, Gulzar had moved his women straight into the machinery of power. Malti Barve is a sitting Chief Minister, not a politician’s wife standing beside one. Her own daughter Panna is the film’s moral conscience, sharply critical of her mother’s compromises — critical enough that the film opens with Panna’s own kidnapping, engineered by a young man convinced her mother’s politics have gone rotten. Gulzar doesn’t let either woman off easy. Malti is compromised, not virtuous. Panna’s anger is real, not decorative. The film simply refuses to treat either of them as scenery for a political drama unfolding around them.Story continues below this adA ghost who only wants what was owed to herAnd then there’s Lekin, where a woman wanders a haveli searching for a home she was denied — dead for over a century without knowing it. Most hauntings in Hindi cinema exist to frighten someone; this one is to finish something. Like nearly every woman Gulzar wrote, what she wants, even from the other side of death, is simply the right to decide what happens to her own life.None of these women look like each other, and that was never an accident. Some chose work over family, or God over both. Some made choices, an affair, a refusal, a militant turn, that the world outside the film was quick to judge. Gulzar rarely was.He didn’t write women to be liked. He wrote them the way people actually are — flawed, contradictory, occasionally wrong. He never wrote a woman to be admired. He wrote her to be understood.