Let's take a concise look at the context of women and sexuality in the Indian society.
The view on women in India is one of extreme contradictions.
They can be famous celebrities with huge popularity, but at the same time be treated differently then men.
This because even the contemporary image of women in India is largely dedicated to the (in my opinion outdated) religious sources of the Hinduism.
Some of these sources compare women to 'sudra': the lowest Hindu caste.
Other Hinduism sources show a totally other view on women and are uplifting them to 'goddesses'.
This caused a strong distinction concerning the view on women and sexuality in India, namely between the moral and the immoral woman.
The moral and 'good' woman is married, totally subservient and is giving her husband a lifetime of service without meeting any other men.
In Indian society, the participation of this 'good' woman in the sexual act is passive and exclusively to create (preferably male) posterity.
The immoral and the 'bad' women is nothing of this; she is an object of male pleasure, she is purely there to 'sell' sex.
As Shoma Chatterji points out in 'The Evolution of Representing Female Sexuality in Hindi Cinema 1991-2010' (2013) the contradiction in the perception of women in India is that on one hand the women are placed on the elevated platform of a goddess, and on the other hand treated as a reproductive 'machine' or a object of male pleasure.
The classic representation of women's sexuality and femininity in mainstream Indian cinema is strongly related to the Indian society.
First of all, the narratives in Indian cinema have been dominated by men.
The movies are truly 'male centric'; the themes are explored from the male audience's point of view.
Women are inferior and dependent towards the male characters, and their journey throughout the film is explored in relation to the male hero.
Just like the view on women in the Indian society as discussed before, there is an dichotomy visible in the classic depiction of female characters in mainstream Indian cinema.
The first kind of female character is representing the 'good' and the 'chaste' woman, most frequently by a wife or a mother.
The other kind of female character is from the other extreme: a 'bad' and 'unchaste' woman, frequently represented by prostitutes and mistresses.
Between these two, there is nothing.
The sexuality of women in terms of a pure expression of sexuality, as a desire and a pleasure have been historically ignored in Indian cinema.
The Indian mainstream cinema is male centric, and sexuality of a woman gets directly linked with being a subject of the male gaze and desire.
The same can be said of female celebrities in India, in comparison to male celebrities.
They are equally popular, but in very different ways.
Mainly because of globalization the representation of women and sexuality are undergoing a rapid change in commercial Indian cinema.
But even when the representation of the women is nowadays frequently depicted in more a subtle way, the women remain most frequently dependent on the men.
According to Shoma Chatterji Indian mainstream films are even nowadays portraying feminine sexual desire never without a punitive end or without negative implications by showing the woman as an 'evil' character.
Dev D is a modern interpretation of Devdas, the 1917 novel which got depicted plenty of times throughout the history of Indian cinema.
Despite the fact that Dev D is cinematographically very modern in comparison to other Indian films, the movie also treats women and their sexuality in a different way.
This makes Dev D one of the most interesting films to see because it testifies to changes currently taking place in Indian society.