Kangana rejected Bollywood's boys' club. So why back Anandiben's kitchen politics?

Kangana Ranaut recently decided to tell women what their "true nature" is. Backing Uttar Pradesh Governor Anandiben Patel's remarks that women should first learn to cook and become "expert mothers", Kangana wrote that nurturing is not something women need to learn. It is something God has already bestowed upon them.

She recalled her childhood with pride. While her brother played football and cricket, she built doll houses, stitched clothes and cooked for her dolls. That, she suggested, was proof that women are born nurturers.

The problem isn't that Kangana likes cooking or values motherhood. It is not even that she finds joy in nurturing. Millions of women do. The problem begins the moment one woman's personal choice is presented as every woman's natural destiny. Because that is exactly what Kangana did.

Here's what needs to be understood: Once you declare nurturing to be a woman's "true nature", you are not celebrating women but defining them.

For decades, patriarchy has survived on one simple idea: women are naturally better at caregiving, sacrifice, emotional labour and domestic work. So let's assign them the role that they are "meant" to do, and let's use the same logic by keeping them away from the outside world. A deeply unequal social order was sold to women as biology, instinct, culture, tradition and even divinity.

Kangana's latest post repeats that same idea.

Ironically, this is the very woman who built her career by refusing to accept society's definition of what a woman should be. The Kangana Ranaut we have known and celebrated over the years looks like this:

• The woman who took on Bollywood's boys' club when very few dared to.
• The woman who questioned why powerful men decided which stories would be told and which female actors deserved meaningful roles.
• The woman who called out the industry's pay gap.
• The woman who objected to women being reduced to glamorous props in films.
• The woman who started her own production house because she wanted more women-led stories.
• The woman who repeatedly asked women to stop waiting for permission.

If you are anyone who has followed the woman for her quick tongue and sharp wit, you would know what we are talking about. Which is why her latest remarks don't feel like an opinion but more like a painful contradiction.

Remember what Kangana once told women? "What you do and what you are is more important than who you marry." She told women that their identity didn't have to begin or end with marriage. There was a sense of freedom in it.

Then there was another: "No one is coming to save you." Again, powerful. Because it encouraged women to become emotionally and financially independent.

She also said, "We need to encourage our women for being who they are as opposed to trying to box them and fit them." Read that again.

Trying to box them and fit them? Isn't that exactly what happens when we tell women their true nature is to nurture? When we say they are born to cook, to mother, to sacrifice? The irony is hard to miss.

Her strongest observation was when she said: "The glorification of sisters, mothers, as the selfless Indian woman who will do 'agni pariksha' and the one who sees her own betterment only in the betterment of their husbands and fathers. That has to stop. It's very regressive."

What changed? What happened between that Kangana and this Kangana? Because these two women cannot exist in the same sentence. Either women should not be boxed into predetermined roles or they should.

Either womanhood is about choice or it is about duty. It cannot be both. Let's also be clear about Anandiben Patel's remarks.

She didn't simply say everyone should know how to cook. Cooking is a life skill. Every adult, irrespective of gender, should know how to feed themselves. That was never the issue. The issue was hierarchy. That women should first become "expert mothers", irrespective of whether they become teachers or IAS officers. That a daughter's primary preparation should be for marriage and her in-laws' home. And that her identity must first pass through domesticity before ambition.

Let's not brush this under the carpet as harmless cultural values. These are expectations. And expectations become pressure. Pressure becomes guilt. Guilt becomes unpaid labour that generations of women have silently carried.

This is why Kangana's endorsement matters. She is not just another celebrity with another opinion. She is Kangana Ranaut. She knows what it means to refuse expectations. She became one of the most powerful women in Indian cinema by refusing to behave like the industry wanted her to. She is now a Member of Parliament.

People don't merely consume her films anymore. They listen to her politics. Words from someone with that kind of influence don't remain personal opinions. They become social validation.

She is validating an age-old idea despite knowing better. It's not hard for anyone to understand why reducing women to predefined gender roles is problematic. But when Kangana doesn't seem to understand that either, it is simply disappointing.

Again, there is nothing wrong with choosing motherhood or loving your family. There's absolutely nothing wrong with cooking or nurturing. The feminist demand has never been that women should reject these things. It has only ever been this: Let women choose.

Stop telling women they need to fit into a certain role because God says so, because biology supposedly demands it or because society expects it from them. Let them accept a role because they have decided to.

Strangely, that used to be Kangana Ranaut's argument too.