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Women portrayal in movies
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In films, heroines reveal cultural values, gender roles, and social challenges experienced by their culture. Therefore, viewers may use Bollywood heroines as a lens through which to view the experience of the Indian woman and Indian culture. Recently, with the growth in size and influence of the Indian diaspora, a new strand of Bollywood films has emerged concerning the topic of first or second generation Indians living abroad. These non-resident Indians (NRI) face a reality very different from that of Indians living in the homeland. The dissimilarities between Indian and NRI culture are exemplified by their heroine’s different portrayals in Bollywood films, particularly through the song and dance numbers.
The young Indian female experience in the modern age is characterized by a conflict between Indian tradition and contemporary global culture. Historically the archetype of the ideal Indian woman has been used to build national unity, identity, and pride. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, public imagination equated the ideal woman to ‘mother India.’ This idea was fueled by art, literature, and particularly film. Heroines were characterized as “passive, victimized, sacrificial, submissive, glorified, static, one-dimensional, and resilient” (Virdi, 60). The social expectation of women to exhibit these traits persists in the modern day. Women struggle to reconcile these qualities with contemporary values such as independence, freedom, and gender equality. Therefore young women are still subject to the desires of their fathers, and the unofficial caste system still limits their social mobility; yet simultaneously they dance at nightclubs, and wear short skirts. Conflict between tradition and modernity is exemplified by events like the beer bar girls ban, in which young women who made a living by dancing in bars were banned from their profession on the grounds
In addition to, the main actors in the film looked the part and associated with the main idea of the culture of an Indian family. For instance, Samir’s appearance showed he had drifted away from his family’s culture and developed a professional understanding and love for the cooking industry. Farida’s appearance showed she was highly involved with her
The term crossover itself is a new emerging trend in Indian cinema. It has emerged to encapsulate the new brand of cinema that crosses cultural borders at the stage of conceptualization and production and thus manifests a hybrid cinematic grammar at the textual level as well as crossing over in terms of distribution and reception. It is both situated and global. Situated in the sense that it depicts the cultural aspect of a particular society but global by the fact that it has the ability to go beyond genre, audience and cultural borders. In that sense it is not relegated to one cultural border. Moreover, the term crossover for this genre of movie comes from the fact that it appeals to a wide variety of audience, cross-cultural conceptualization, production and reception. This lends cultural hybridity to the cinematic text. As, also the fact that it is grounded in a multiple of national, cultural and generic source. In such type of films as i...
Globalization is often misrepresented as the growing influence of the western culture in the world and so we tend to state that Hollywood is influencing Bollywood to a great extent. An argument can be made to justify the validity of that statement. However, this paper aims at presenting the influence of Bollywood on Hollywood in terms of music, dance and visual representation. This paper deals with a specific part of globalization, providing evidence that it is not only related to the spreading influence of the western culture but also of eastern culture. Feature film produced in 2009 Courtesy: UNESCO Indian movies began production in the beginning of the 20th century and were, much like American films, in black and white.
...e in the end, that in matters of portraying non-Indian, white characters in Bollywood films, clichés have prevailed for long, but not without the glimmer of hope for something new, something empowering – for the texts, and for the readers.
Today, for the most part, women are seen as equal to men. Women are given the same opportunities as men and an equal chance at getting a job as men. In today’s society, women do not just have one role and that role and that being to have kids, but they can pursue any career they wish. However, it was not always this way. According to feminist theorists, western civilizations were patriarchal which means that the society is dominated by males. The society is set up so that the male is above the female in all cultural aspects including family, religion, politics, economics, art, and the social and legal realms. The patriarchal biases of gender between male and female say that a male must be active, dominating, adventurous, rational, and creative. In the novel, A Passage to India, Forster expresses this male dominance by writing, “He took no notice of them, and with this, which would have passed without comment in feminist England, did harm in a community where the male is expected to be lively and helpful” (Forster 52). They say that to be female is to be passive, agreeable, timid, emotional, and conventional. The feminist theorists’ argument of a male centered society is definitely present in the novel A Passage to India. E.M. Forster reveals cultural, economic, and educational factors within the patriarchal society of India that limit women. In E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, Forster exposes derogatory stereotypes of women and portrays women as inferior to men to uphold the view of women during the time period.
The most popular type of music of South India, Carnatic music, acquires it’s essence in public performances. Carnatic music, unlike most traditions in South India, is widely based around women performers. Women in South India have been fighting for more equality for centuries. Acts of domestic violence against women in India take various forms that include beatings, rape, burning, acid attacks, and others. These negative interpersonal experiences are set within a socio-cultural context in which are seen to hold women at a lower status within society. India is often seen to use a caste system, and this alike. Things that set women back in South India include, but are not limited to, things like sex work and lower overall worth of women. According
In India, a mother holds a high place in their culture. In society, the mother is supposed to be nurturing and self-sacrificing. During the 19th century, women are seen to be suffering and silent. The sons are expected to take care and protect their mothers. In the film, “Radha is the devoted daughter-in-law, the uncomplaining wife, and the protective mother” (Rajan, 105). Mother India serves as a symbolic representation of a mother that made sacrifices and had self-respect.
The song and dance sequences in demonstrate the most obvious example of where Hindi films defy certain rules that are commonly practiced in Western films. The songs seem to be tightly woven into the narrative and removal of them would certain hinder the development of the narrative and would prove fatal to the films. However, excessive fantasy often comes in to play within the song sequences, disregarding continuities of time and space, which can prove problematic to the rest of the narrative and the already established narrative context. It is also in these sequences in which the acting becomes particularly hyper-exaggerated with...
Rao, S. (2007). The globalization of bollywood: An ethnography of non-elite audiences in india. The communication Review, 10(1), 57-76. doi: 10.1080/10714420601168491
Shah Rukh Khan has been the star in the Bollywood, representing the post liberalization of India. He has starred many movies including movies that were played in the diaspora. He is also known as the contemporary star in Bollywood. “Through a diaspora assessment of Pardes, Dudrah foregrounds the centrality of Shak Rukh khan as a contemporary star in Bollywood.” (Thakur, 125) This is because he offers desires which intercedes in the homeland and diaspora through on and off screen performances, using his body to articulate and adapt particular kinds of social and economic desires. By viewing his performances it helps us to understand ...
Many studies conducted, have shown that the influence of other cultures and religions have made an impression on the ideas of Indian men that have resulted in alterations to certain behaviors, attire, possession and customs. In the beginning the treatment and views of Indian women was somewhat degrading and depressing, often called the “dark ages”. Even in today’s modern times, although some changes have been made the condition and atmosphere of the Indian women has not transformed much. The changes can be best described as going from bad to not so bad.
The aim of this essay is to trace the changing representations of female sexuality in popular Hindi cinema or Bollywood, through a reading of films like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai(1998), Jism(2003), Ishaqzaade(2012) and Gangs of Wasseypur, Part I(2012) that were released in and around the first decade of the twenty first century. Through these visual texts, the esssay intends to examine how in popular Hindi films the depictions of heterosexual love, desire and the act of lovemaking or sex till date continue to be portrayed more often than not, only with respect to the female body. Even as the modes of depiction have changed over the years, the heroine’s body continues to be used by the male filmmakers, as sites for the projection of the male protagonist and the audience’s fantasy and sexual desire. In the event of the female protagonist’s presence being minimalistic, and her role limited to the purpose of providing what the pioneer feminist film critic Laura Mulvey (1986,p.202-203) termed ‘scopophilic’ pleasure as ‘erotic object for characters within the screen, and… for the spectator within the auditorium’ in a male driven narrative that denies her the representation of her subjectivity, I see the woman’s body projected on screen as the source to reading her life. Using the movies I refer to as cultural texts, I should like to show how female bodies and sexuality have been used to generate and perpetuate the gendered divide of what constitutes the feminine or the unfeminine, and how this in turn works towards the creation, disruption, and the re-instatement of the patriarchal conception of the domestic ideal of ‘family’ and ‘home’. Therefore, I argue that while the first two movies I discuss (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Jism) posit femal...
India’s ancient tradition describes women to be the gender that represents the nation. It has been assumed that they uphold the culture and traditions that adorn this country, and by depicting them in flashy outfits and in sexual passionate scene is equivalent to demeaning the nation and its respected “tradition”.
Women In India are seen are “housewives” and that is how they are perceived by the people in india due to the society’s norms so they aren’t seen as something more useful than being housewives which makes it difficult for girls to put themselves out in the real world and find a way to support herself and her
The Hindi Cinema has a long distance to cover when it comes to the poignant or nuanced portrayal of sexual minorities. Sexual minorities have always been at the margins in terms of their representation in the Hindi film industry. The issue of homosexuality has always been mocked upon or treated in the most insensitive way one can imagine in Hindi films. Ruth Vanita argues that though there is history of same sex male bonding in Hindi films but issue related to homosexuality have not been treated explicitly and properly in the films. Recently, many parallel film makers have tried to portray the realist aspects of Queer sexuality but the mainstream Hindi cinema still lags behind. The mainstream cinema seems to side line queer sexuality by making fun of it or making it an object of disgust. Ruth Vanita’s queer reading of Hindi cinema shows that same-sex male bonding has evidently existed in Hindi films. Mainstream actors singing songs like, “yeh dosti hum nhi chhodenge. Todenge dum magar tera saath na chhodenge” and “yaari hai imaan mera yaar meri zindagi” are explicitly hinting at the same-sex bond that seems unbreakable. For a long time Bollywood has believed in creating a picture of relationships that exist only in black or white, the concept of grey has either been absent or misrepresented.