 "Mothers and vengeful others")
In her 300th film, Mom, Sridevi turns into a vengeful mother, out to get justice for her stepdaughter, Arya (Sajal Ali), when the legal system fails to punish her four rapists. One of them, she gets castrated; another paralysed by feeding him crushed apple seeds, a source of cyanide (Sridevi’s character Devki is a biology teacher); the third she implicates in this; and finally, shoots the fourth. Playing a vengeful woman is nothing new for her — her character wrecked fury on her husband’s murderer in Army (1996).
Women as dispensers of justice on screen have been around since at
