Shah Rukh Khan wants to give his leading ladies top billing in his films. But this pehle aap courtesy is yet another empty gesture of symbolism. Top billing should come because the script demands it. It's not a hand-me-down from the Great Khan.

Shah Rukh Khan wants to bring about change in Bollywood by giving women first billing in films. So when his next film Chennai Express releases Deepika Padukone will be the first beneficiary of his chivalry. And he hopes he is setting a trend.

“I have always wanted to do this,” Shah Rukh tells us. “When I was working with Madhuri (Dixit), Juhi (Chawla) and all earlier, I used to feel that their names should appear first. Then I was a newcomer and couldn’t do anything about it.”

And now that he’s a superstar, and can do something about many things, this is what our Badshah comes up with – a pehle aap gesture even more meaningless than those tobacco warnings that have started littering our films. At least those have a bona fide health message. This is a ridiculous act of patronizing nonsense that will we will forget as soon as the film begins. But it’s International Women’s Day and we can never have enough of cutesy gestures of empty symbolism.

The problem, dear Shah Rukh, has never been with the credits of a film. They merely reflect the reality of the pecking order. The problem has always been about the content of a film.

If he really wants to “bring a change” as he put it let him act in a Dirty Picture and take rightful second billing to a Vidya Balan instead of dominating every frame of a Chennai Express and treating his top billing as a hand-me-down he is graciously donating to a Deepika Padukone. Whether it’s an Inglish-Vinglish, a Dirty Picture, a Kahaani or an Umrao Jaan, few marquee top name male actors will ever want to act in a film where the woman is the unquestioned real star. Even if the film’s producer could afford them in the first place.

Or how about SRK insist that women who are actually closer to him in age get to play his leading ladies now and then instead of just the Priyanka Chopras and the Deepika Padukones of the world? A Juhi Chawla or a Madhuri Dixit, for example? That gender age gap where heroes age while heroines age out is true the world over. But it can be bridged. Sally Field and Daniel Day Lewis were both nominated for Oscars for playing the Lincolns in Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed film about the American president. In real life, she’s a decade older than Daniel Day Lewis.

In fact, it would count more for change, if even in a typical Shah Rukh Khan starrer he could let the woman (or anyone else) be a genuine equal co-star. In Don 2, Priyanka Chopra is supposed to be a hot-shot smart Interpol officer. She’s no shrinking wallflower or arm candy. She learned martial arts for the film. But there’s never an encounter with SRK where he doesn’t get the last word.

To be fair, Shah Rukh is hardly the worst offender out there. In a International Women’s Day article in The Times of India about “India’s new feminist spring”, Srijana Mitra Das writes that women in Indian cinema have been trapped in the idealized “sex-less, wealth-less and selfless” mode since the Mother India days. Mitra says the first “major break” from Mother India’s iron pallu came with Basanti in Sholay. “Basanti was a peasant too but a modern working girl, driving a tanga, unafraid and free… Sholay is usually credited with altering ideas of macho rage – but its success also changed perceptions of the women. A heroine could now work, earn and challenge norms – and be admired for it.”

I enjoyed Sholay too when I finally saw it on the big screen. But if Basanti breaks the mold when it comes to feminist icons, we have a lot more breaking to do. In our cinema, the moment a heroine comes across as feisty you know the taming of the shrew is about to begin. Basanti was ebullient and fun but most of the time the audience was laughing at her, not with her. She was the stereotypical loud-mouthed chatterbox girl. At worst, she was the butt of jokes. At best, you tuned her out. But she was pretty, so you still flirted with her.

I liked Basanti. But I’ve always fantasized about another Sholay. In it that inebriated Veeru still climbs up the water tower and threatens to commit suicide if Basanti does not marry him. But in that alternate universe, she just shrugs and like a true modern working woman who doesn’t have time for all this booze emotional blackmail nonsense says, “Go ahead. See if I care, you drunken sod.” Then she disappears into the sunset with her trusty tanga because Dhanno is still a girl's best friend.

Almost 40 years after Sholay, films that are supposedly about showing the new emancipated kick-ass Indian woman still cannot resist putting them back into the same old corsets. Just because the heroine also get to play the vamp these days we think Hindi films have turned some corner of liberation. Deepika Padukone’s character in Cocktail was supposed to be another game-changer when it came to how women were showed on screen – she was independent, lived on her own, loved to party and drink, wore teeny clothes, didn’t cook and was still a loyal friend and lover. But as Rajyasree Sen writes in Firstpost:

Deepika, once she realises she’s in love with Saif starts wearing salwar kameezes and aches for Saif’s mother’s blessings and her kangans. And she also becomes religious, starts cooking and picking up the dirty clothes for the wash. Because that’s what good girls who get the boy, do.

In a industry where sexism is just part and parcel of the script, it might seem churlish to come down on poor Shah Rukh’s well-meaning gesture. The man obviously has his heart in the right place. When asked about the International Women’s Day honours for the Delhi gang-rape victim, he rightly said, “It’s good that they are honouring her, but I don’t want anyone to die to get this honour.”

Let’s give Shah Rukh Khan credit for even recognizing that there is a lopsided problem. But real change will happen not when a viewer looks at a film like Chennai Express and sees Deepika Padukone’s name flash by first because the Great Khan “allowed” it. It will happen when her name appears first because the role she plays makes her top billing a given and not dependent on the kindness of a superstar.