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The representation of woman in Indian cinema is inexorably linked to the role of woman in traditional Indian society. The tradition and lifestyle practices handed down through generations stemming from ancient texts such as the Manusmriti that govern the conduct of women, are articulated in Indian popular cinema. The traditions that governed women’s roles in society gave rise to an archetypal set of female characters on the screen. However the patriarchal system that is at the heart of this tradition has been called to question by the work of women filmmakers such as Kalpana Lajmi and Aparna Sen. In their films Rudaali (Lajmi 1993,) Parama (Sen 1984,) and 36 Chowringhee Lane (Sen 1981,) they challenge the accepted norms of female characters on screen as well the woman’s role in society.
To understand the significance of the work of Lajmi and Sen we must first look at the woman’s role within Indian society and the representation of this on screen. In the words of authors K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, “according to the Manusmriti, which had a profound effect on shaping the morals of Indian society, a female should be subject in childhood to her father, in her youth to her husband and upon the death of her husband to her sons.” This text is absolutely adamant about the importance of women in these prescribed roles. A woman’s life was hence defined by her role as either a daughter (Beti), wife (Patni) of mother (Ma.)
The placing of women into strict roles defined by societies traditions translated itself onto the screen with the emergence of character archetypes for female roles. As Gokulsing and Dissanayake describe it there seems to be four identifiable archetypes of female character in Indian cinema. Two of these may be seen as positive representations and the other two negative.
First of all there is the ideal wife who is defined by her sexual purity and unwavering fidelity. She honours Indian tradition by being devoted to her husband. She leads a domestic life working on behalf of her family. She sacrifices her own needs for the greater good of the family. The second character type is that of the ideal mother. The definitive version of this role is shown in Mother India (Mehboob Kahn 1957). The Indian concept of mother is mother is steeped in religious significance. The mother goddess Shakti represents strength and vitality. The mother therefore is a strong dependable woman and a woman of integrity. The strength of the mother is the same as the strength of the family and the overall strength of the country.
The goddess Sita is emphasised as the epitome of feminine virtue. A ‘good’ woman must strive to emulate her. She is loyal to her husband and obeys him without demur. Her life is of less consequence than her husband’s happiness. Her life is one of duty without question, this means sacrificing any personal desire and ambition. She is also pure and chaste; she does not give her love easily and will win her man over from the ladies of lesser virtue.
If the mother and the wife are figures to look up to and emulate then the courtesan and the vamp are representations of behaviour to avoid. The courtesan exists outside the accepted moral realm of Indian womanhood. She is a hired hand to provide emotional and physical comfort for a man who has suffered from particular miseries. She will inevitably fall in love with him; once he is recovered he leaves the courtesan to pine for him. A good example of this motif is Devdas (P.C. Burua 1935) The final character is the vamp. The vamp is a representation of everything that is morally wrong with modern society. She goes to nightclubs in order to smoke, drink, dance and meet men. She is associated with western culture through her clothes and behaviour in particular everything that is considered decadent or immoral about the west. The vamp inevitably suffers repercussions from her behaviour and is not allowed happiness.
It is clear from these examples that there is a moral code inherent in the storytelling. The woman who stay on the right side of the code find happiness and fulfillment, those who fall short of the code are punished. These moral themes are welcome and common in countries with cultures that resist western influence and that which is, consider immoral behaviour.
Traditional family values are emphasized through stories steeped in mythological tradition. This can give a sense of timeless grandeur to the films themes and concerns, as if they were timeless fables handed down from ancestor to descendant over eons of time. However for those who wish to dispute or explore these themes in more detail and in a modern context the allusions to timeless struggle and nobility are not quite enough to excuse the only favorable depiction of women being that of the unwavering and dutiful spouse/mother.
The movie away from these conventional character types is of great concern to female directors working within the Indian cinema industry. Early trailblazers such as Fatma Begum paved the way for modern female directors and although the output of female directors is sparse their voices are beginning to be heard. These directors are interested in showing the pressure and hardships that these forced roles put upon women, and they express there views from a woman’s perspective. It is their concern to move away from stereotypical archetypes and successfully convey the oppression and complexities of the emotion that modern women feel.
One film that challenges these perceptions of women is Kalpana Lajmi’s Rudaali. A Rudaali was a professional female mourner. They were employed by rich families to add some theatrical flair to the funerals of the affluent. The richer the deceased the more theatrical and expensive the Rudaali became. Rudaali is the story of a subaltern woman in a small village who goes through much inhuman suffering but is never actually able to cry and is personally tormented by her inability to do so in her misery she forms a bond with an old professional Rudaali called Bhigni (Rahkee.)
Sanichari (Dimple Kapadia) is described as being cursed from birth. It is noted that she was born on a Saturday, which is traditionally an unlucky day to be born on. It is publicly commented that it is because of this her father died shortly afterwards. Shortly after that her mother abandons her. Although she suffers much throughout the course of her life she fulfils her role as wife and mother dutifully. However she is not rewarded for her toil, it is the cause of her unhappiness.
Sanichari’s dutiful role as mother and wife is not put into question by her own actions but by the family members who define her in that role. Her husband is an alcoholic a failure in his role. The mother-in-law takes out her frustrations with her son’s behaviour on Sanichari. Even on her deathbed she is able to find the energy to insult her daughter-in-law. Even though she adores her son his behaviour too is cause of much misery for her. Sanichari’s own daughter in law is a prostitute and she to finds time to be disrespectful to her own mother-in-law. She also aborts Sanichari’s unborn grandchild, which in tern leads to her own son leaving her. For a culture that supposedly reveres the mother and the wife Sanichari is shown nothing but contempt by her own family.
She cannot rely on men for love or support and is left to face her problems alone. The closest thing that she has to a meaningful relationship is that with her employer Thakur Lakshman Singh (Raj Babbar.) He shows her kindness and compassion. Her teaches her about equality and to question some social convention. He convinces her that it is not a sin to look into his eyes when they are talking. A bond of friendship forms between the pair.
However her job is to attend on this mans wife and she herself is married, also there is the important fact that he is from a much higher caste then him. The development of this friendship is handled in a very delicate way. It is never clear if it is merely a friendship or a physical relationship. What can’t be hidden is the fact that Sanichari will be unable to find the love she is after within the patriarchal class based system she inhabits.
The discovery that Bhigni is was her mother is the trigger that finally allows Sanichari to let go and cry. Sumita S. Chakaravarty describes it in the essay ‘Can the Subaltern Weep? Mourning as metaphor in Rudaali’ “It signifies her release from a lifetime of social and psychic repression, her accession from a dehumanised state to humanization and a new existence as a professional mourner.” She is finally able to feel the emotion she knows she ought to. Although Bhigni was estranged from her daughter she was able to come back to her and be her friend. Sanichari know feels genuine loss for a loved one as opposed to longing for someone who truly appreciates her. To borrow Chakaravarty’s words one more time ‘the last scene provides the audience with reassurance of her humanity, despite the inhuman suffering she is subjected to throughout the narrative.’
In her essay 'Class, Caste and Performance in "Subaltern" Feminist Film Theory and Praxis: An analysis of Rudaali' Radha Subramanyam tries to come to terms with her own opinion on Lajmi’s redefined female roles, it is worth quoting here in full.
``Despite my intellectual and emotional involvement in the text, prompted by its psycho-biographic verisimilitude, its sophistication and complexity, I am led to question its political implications. With the shortage of female-centred, let alone feminist, films in the Indian cinematic context, with the dearth of positive role models in media representations, and with the brute reality of hundreds of millions of women internalising the roots of their own destruction, would not a film that plays down the contradictions within female consciousness be more useful? A sympathetic representation such as this can lead us to empathize with rather than question such contradictions. Or would a more simplistic portrayal fail because of its reductive nature, because female audiences could not identify with superwomen free of conflict? In Anglo-American feminist film theory of the past two decades there have been different positions on the issue of what is the most appropriate form of feminist (self) representation. Rudaali opens up similar questions in the context of Third World feminist film production; it does not, however, give us any easy answers.''
The easy answers that Subramanyam is looking for are not what the film is concerned with. When dealing with the oppression of women or indeed any group of people within the confines of a clearly defined and traditional environment such as Indian society it is impossible to clearly define and rectify any problems without the piece becoming polemic. The empathy for the protagonist that is invited does not prohibit the spectator from questioning contradictions but stimulates it. If Rudalli seems more concerned in raising questions than providing answers that is because the only way to affect change is to make people question their own belief structures. By leaving questions open individual thought is provoked within the audience
Another major female voice in Indian cinema is Aparna Sen. Already a successful actress winning acclaim in many of Satyajit Ray’s films, she made her directorial debut in 1981 with 36 Chowringhee Lane. This tells the story of Violet Stoneham (Jennifer Kendal) an Anglo-Indian schoolteacher who teaches Shakespeare to a group of unenthusiastic girls in Calcutta.
The first thing to notice here is that of course the protagonist is not actually Indian. As such her problems may not be considered culturally specific to Indian society. However what we do have is a lonely and isolated old woman. She lives in a post colonial country where she can still identify things from her past but the way she lived and her friends and love ones have died or left her, except for her senile older brother who lives in a nursing home. Her flat is dark and dingy, the only thing she has to fill it is her memories, which both comfort and entomb her. She exists on the periphery of society and the themes of loneliness and isolation explored are absolutely universal. Themes that are illuminated by the intense detail that goes into framing violet within her flat to illustrate the monotony of her life and her extreme loneliness.
Violet briefly becomes invigorated by a friendship with a young couple. She agrees to let Samaresh (Dhiritiman Chatterjee) the boyfriend of her former student Nandita (Debashree Roy) use her apartment to write his novel. She feels as if she is bonding with the couple, and finally has the human contact and company that she has so desperately longed for. However she does not realise that the couple are deceiving her and using the apartment for some privacy. The important thing to recognise is that it is Samaresh who takes the lead in the deception; Nandita takes on the role of vulnerable young lady.
Once Nandita and Samaresh are married with their own apartment they have very little use for Violet. They stop coming to see her. Even when she makes the effort to go to them they cannot make the time to see her. The couple are selfish and uncaring; they have no time for a little old lady. We return again to the words of authors K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake who surmise the closing shot of the film and the concern of the film. “the final image of her is on a dark wet night, all by herself reciting her favourite Shakespeare lines to a desolate street. Director Aparna Sen has poignantly captured the loneliness of a middle aged woman, and does so from within the consciousness of the lonely woman.”
Violet is a woman who is under appreciated at home and at work. She takes upon the role of the good mother to Nandita And Samaresh but they are ungrateful of her affection. Those who have the power to use her because of her loneliness and isolation use her. The story here although, not dealing with specifically Indian concerns rather universal themes of isolation, does speak out about the women in Indian society who feel as if they are under appreciated, used and unfulfilled.
Sen’s follow up to 36 Chowringhee Lane was 1984’s Parama. Parama explores the life of its eponymous heroine; she is a good wife in the traditional sense that is that she performs her duties as wife and mother. However she is imprisoned by her role within the family to the point where “It appears that she has totally managed to submerge her true self into the various roles assigned to her.”
Parama (Raakhee) meets and slowly falls in love with a much younger man by the name of Rahul (Mukul Sharma.) A photographer by trade, Rahul manages to convince Parama to let him photograph her and a relationship that invigorates and also scares Parama slowly builds. Through her time spent with Rahul, Parama becomes aware of her own needs, ambitions and desires that are just not fulfilled by her roles as wife, mother and daughter-in law. The camera frequently closes in on her after she meets Rahul. The closer shots become an effective way of illustrating her introverted reevaluation of social standards, as she slowly comes to accept a private and individual life for herself. When news of her infidelity reaches her family they reject her causing Parama to attempt to take her own life. After this only her daughter finds it in her heart to forgive Parama.
It is not love that is forbidden in Indian cinema it is, impure love that is punished. The vamps and the courtesans that are punished for their transgressions have crossed a moral line that forbids pre-marital sex and infidelity. Parama cannot find the happiness and fulfillment that traditional heroines get from a pure eternal love and the dutiful servitude of her husband. Although she resists initially she yields and as such is shunned by her family. Her happiness is denied her by the role that society says that she must abide by. The films discourse is therefore the ethnical emancipation on the individual that is inherent in such a patriarchal environment. Through the empathy that the audience is led to have for Parama, the film questions the orthodox practices of such a society.
The portrayal of women in these films has much in common with the fifties Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk such as All that Heaven Allows (1955) and Written on the Wind (1957.) Both the cannon of Sirk and the films in question here deal with the oppressive patriarchal society that the female protagonists exist within, and the inequalities that lead to female suffering. They are films about hypocritical injustice and the inability for women to find true fulfillment within the system.
The audience for Sirk’s film was mainly women who faced the same forms of oppression as the films protagonists. Although the films often dealt with the affairs of the affluent the narratives were driven by universal basic human desires for love and happiness. In the same way Sen and Lajmi are finding audiences who can relate to their protagonists struggles and giving those women a cinematic voice that previously was mute.
There is an argument that although Indian cinema is progressing and changing to reflect gender identity in modern society, the old ethical codes are still very much in place with those who transgress being punished. Even the heroines in the films discussed within this essay are punished or tormented in some way.
Here it is important to remember that Indian cinema has a code of conduct that rivals even the infamous Hays code, with sex being a definitely out of the mainstream and for a long time even kissing was prohibited. These films push the boundaries as far as they can without taking their position to far and alienating a wider audience. Also it is the punishment of these women who strive so hard to fulfill their duties despite oppression that really highlights the inequalities in the system.
Biblography
Gledhill C (ed) 1987, Home is Where the heart is: studies in melodrama and the women film, British film institute, London.
Gokulsing, K. Moti and Dissanayake W, 1998. Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of cultural change, Trentham books, Stoke On Trent.
Hood, JW, 2000, The Essential Mystery: Major filmmakers of Indian Art Cinema,
Sangam Books Ltd, London.
Robin, Diana(ed), 1999, Redirecting the gaze: gender, theory and cinema in the
third world, State University of New York Press, New York.
Spinelli, Italo(ed), 2002, Indian Summer: Films, Filmmakers and Stars Between
Ray and Bollywood, Edizioni Olivares, Milano.
Subramanyan, R (1996) 'Class, Caste and Performance in "Subaltern" Feminist Film
Theory and Praxis: An analysis of Rudaali', Cinema Journal, Vol 35, No3, spring,
pp 34-57.
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