Widowhood and Motherhood in Cinematic Imagination in the Historical Context

This article engages with the question of how Hindi cinema sought to synergize and imagine the nation, community and land in independent India as the embodiment of widowhood. I suggest that this process of embodiment was the culmination of a long historical-political process. The focus of this chapter is a 1957 Hindi film by Mehboob Khan named Mother India. The film stands out as a powerful emotional drama. On the one hand, this film marked continuity with the Indian literature, painting, theatre and cinema of the colonial period,1 on the other, Mother India influenced the culture of a new Indian nation after 1947. Within a decade after India attained independence from Britain, the Indian cinema became an undisputed site where the cultural engineering of a new nation could be enacted.2

Indian Cinema: Making Departure from the Stereotypical Presentation of Women in Nuptial

In the late 20th and 21st century various movements took place which challenged the stereotypical notions of gender in society. #MeToo movement gave a momentum to the society where people started talking about any kind of violence, sexual assault and harassment against women. Many government policies and laws were framed and implemented to provide equal opportunities to women in every field. Vishakha Guidelines and Internal Complains Committee are made mandatory at work place and education institutions to assure a safe and healthy environment for females. Now the issues brushed under the carpet for long have been brought into light. Issues which were considered taboo even to talk about are now discussed on public forums and academia, penned down in literature and projected in media and cinema. Women and their concerns and point of views found space in popular cinema and were acclaimed too by the critics as well as spectators. Bollywood has made deviations from the stereotypical portrayal of women and broke the silence on issues like sexual consent and female sexuality. It also showed the role of woman in marriage and how it’s changing with woman becoming economically independent and realizing her real worth. The present paper will deliberate on the institution of marriage and the role of woman in it in the Indian society especially in the context of Indian cinema. It will discuss recent Indian cinema which came with stories in which decision-making power has been exercised by women in a nuptial and consent of a girl in a marriage has been considered. Gender roles in a marriage will also be analysed which has been shown deviating from the stereotypical notion especially in the movies Ki & Ka and Tumahari Sulu. It will include the movies which have at the centre the idea that the courage of a woman can put a full stop to the deep-rooted patriarchy of centuries in our society. The paper will include only popular cinema made in Hindi language film industry known as Bollywood in the last decade like Dil Dhadkane Do, Badrinath Ki Dulhania, Secret Superstar, Parched and Tumhari Sulu.

Playing human

While Indian cinema has a rich tradition of ‘creature features‘, these films have traditionally drawn from Indigenous myth and folklore, rather than engaging with the environmentalist themes that are a staple in Western creature features. S. Shankar’s 2.0 (2018) marked an important moment in Indian cinema as the first true example of a mainstream Indian film that is unequivocally categorisable as ecohorror. However, the emergence of such a film text is not devoid of a historical context, nor is the near-absence of environmentalism in previous Indian ‘creature features’ devoid of reason. This essay is an attempt to trace how a film like 2.0 emerges within the Indian cultural context, how it assimilates prefigured Indigenous ideas as well as culturally translocated and subsequently Indianised ideas, and what new meaning is created in the process. My discussion primarily revolves around the theme of anthromorphism, which is commonly used in the visual and narrative portrayal of monsters in ‘creature features’. My arguments, while inter-linked, are divisible into four broad parts. Firstly, I locate the differences in Indian and Western ‘creature features’ in the differing cultural perceptions of anthropomorphism and anthropomorphised beings. For this, I draw on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of threefold mimesis, which links narratives to particular cultural repositories, and James Clifford’s notion of ‘traveling cultures’, which describes the modification of those repositories through cultural exchange. I locate the Indian economic liberalisation in the 1990s as an important historical juncture for the modification of the cultural repository. To make my case, I refer to existing criticism of Indian sf, marking the shifts from the post-colonial era through the post-1990s era. Secondly, I engage with the visual form of 2.0’s monster, focusing on the incorporation of both nature and technology in its design, and how it is significant. I draw from Western posthumanist theory, especially Donna Haraway’s concept of the ‘humanimal‘, and compare it with the Indigenous ecocentric imagination of the world where humans and nonhumans are kindred figures. Thirdly, I argue that the film, both at the narrative and visual level, constructs a vision of the Anthropocene that is not anthropocentric. It accomplishes this by consciously de-centring human characters, shifting the focus to everything that is of humans. Fourthly, I consolidate the previous argument by analysing how the film makes use of humour, especially dark humour, in order to accentuate its decentring of humans by the anthropomorphised, or human-like. Looking ahead, I propose the likelihood of 2.0 being the first of many Indian ‘creature features’ that mark a cultural shift from the mythological paradigm to the environmentalist paradigm. As such, a close analysis of the film as text and its corresponding context, focused on how it draws from and modifies its cultural repository, is significant in terms of laying the groundwork for future discussion.

Rethinking Diasporic, Cultural and Religious Identity through the Eyes of Celluloid

The word Diaspora was first used to describe the dispersion of the Jews beyond Israel. This has since changed, and today there is no set definition of the term because its modern meaning has evolved over time. But as a general term it is a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale. As found in a search in Google it is the dispersion or spread of any people from their original homeland. As per Oxford Advanced Dictionary it is defined as the movement of the Jewish people away from their own country to live and work in other countries and the movement of people from any nation or group away from their own country. So we have a clear definition of the word Diaspora. Diasporas work on a transnational premise and the term best alludes to ’complex multidirectional streams of individuals, thoughts, items - social and physical, and to types of collaboration, arrangement and trade.’ The suggestion at that point is that not all ostracizes are Diasporeans, the term being restricted to the individuals who are proactively occupied with transnational action. Since Diaspora and the baggage associated with the term is very subjective, it also takes a great toll in shaping an individual’s socio-cultural and religious identity as well. Cultural Identity refers to a person’s sense of belonging to a particular culture or group. This process involves accepting traditions, heritage, language, religion, ancestry, aesthetics, thinking patterns, and social structures of a culture. Normally, people internalize the beliefs, values, norms, and social practices of their culture and identify themselves with that culture. The culture becomes a part of their self-concept. This paper tries to explore the problems that get depicted on the celluloid, especially in Indian cinema. The paper tries to find out the difficulties that individuals undergo in order to come to terms with the spatial and mental exile through films like Swades and My Name is Khan.It also tries to uphold the liberating force of exile and migration that works on human’s psyche in order to make them free from societal bondage through films like English Vinglish. The two different approaches that the films employ to manifest the impact of migration on human life will help in proving that Diasporas have consistently been something beyond forever settled than ordinarily expected yet today they are more dynamic than they have ever been.

Tactics of Survival: Social Media, Alternative Discourses, and the Rise of Trans Narratives

In 2018, when Nandini Krishnan decided to write a book on trans men of India titled ‘Invisible Men’, perhaps she expected great accolades. After all, she was raising a topic that was relegated to the periphery of peripheries, an identity that often went astray in translation. But was the intent enough to write something impactful and honest? At the same time in Indian Cinema, Akshay Kumar geared up for a stereotyped role as a trans woman. What’s the connecting dot between these two? They ended up being nothing but highly skewed queer representations by cis-folks. Meanwhile, an alternative movement was brewing on social media as Alok Menon narrated poems of subversion, dressed as a challenge to everything heteronormative. The current paper aims to examine these voices of subversion, of trans narratives, as formed and catalyzed on social media and across various mediums of general discourses. The paper would also explore the rise of trans narratives in literature with special reference to ‘Me Hijra, Me Laxmi’ by Laxminarayan Tripathi and ‘A Life in Trans Activism’ by A. Revathi. Both exploratory and descriptive research methods are used for deriving the theoretical analysis from primary and secondary sources.

Contesting Culture: The Grammar of ‘Kaala’

Cinema as an art form vividly captures the aspirations and everyday life-worlds of the people in India. In more contemporary times, suffused with the global language of desire, popular Indian cinema has sought to project the nation as a global power, while invisibilizing the faultiness of caste, gender, race and ethnicity. The films are increasingly shot in exotic locales with the lead characters leading enchanted lives. Innovative technology is utilized to narrate stories in which the farmer/worker/maid/other laboring people are conspicuous by their absence. Very few films possess the courage to buck this trend to recount tales of struggle entwined with the language of rights and justice. My article focuses on one such film—Pa Ranjith’s Kaala (Black). The film interrogates the muscular religiosity, caste and patriarchy on which the nation state is tethered. The cinematic journey also infuses the locale of Dharavi in Mumbai, home to thousands of migrant workers, with an agency of its own.

The power of Bollywood: A study on opportunities, challenges, and audiences’ perceptions of Indian cinema in China

India has long been known for its prestigious Mumbai-based film industry, namely Bollywood, and remains by far the largest producer of films in the world. With the growing global reach of Indian cinema, this study looks at an intriguing Indian-film fever over the last decade in the newly discovered market of China. Through examining key factors that make Indian films appealing to Chinese and exploring the opportunities and challenges of Indian cinema in China, this article draws upon insights gained from the narratives of local audiences. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 32 Indian-film audiences residing across 14 different cities in mainland China. Thematic analysis identified the following five appealing factors, which explain why the Chinese enjoy Indian films: content-driven story, social values, star power, audience reviews and cultural connections. While a comprehensive list of opportunities was derived showing the potential future of Bollywood in China, results found that China’s unique institutional context and an ongoing India–China geopolitical tensions also present challenges, which in turn add to the overall complexity of films’ success in the Chinese market. This article argues the powerful role of Bollywood in bridging cultures and improving India–China ties, as Indian films have made Chinese people more aware of India in a favourable way.

Marxist Feminism: An Analysis on Class Structure and Position of Women in Malayalam movie -“Chemmeen”

The Malayalam film industry, prominently known as “Mollywood,” is one of the fast-changing faces in Indian cinema. This paper tries to examine one of the Malayalam movies, Chemeen, through the lens of Marxist Feminism. The primary text chosen for the study is the movie, Chemeen, an adaptation of Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s novel with the same name. The story revolves around the lives of Karuthamma and Pareekutt, lovers whose life cannot be led together because of the strong influence of caste and class in their society. This is one of the liberal texts in Malayalam Literature narrating the Kerala fishing community’s lives, customs, traditions, and beliefs. The research paper’s primary focus will be on society’s hierarchy through the reflection of Mollywood cinema, the stereotyping of certain characters based on their class and caste, the aftermath of marriage, and the domineering male-centric society female fellowships through deities.