The Indian male is exposed to a set of beliefs and values in which male supremacy is unchallenged and female subjugation is taken for granted. Shyam ignores her and even her genuine complaints are brushed aside. He controls all her choices and activities including the type of dress she should wear. He does not like her wearing stiff khadi kurtas. They remind him of “those activist women burning with vitriol and a cause” (M 117). Man’s intolerance to questioning, especially by women, is clear from his attitude. He would like her to fit in within the traditional feminine role and this is brought out through his statement, “Women should wear silk, jewellery and flowers in their hair” (M 117). He gradually finds that his hold over Radha …show more content…
He complains, “You strut about the place with strange men, you come home at midnight and expect me to say nothing. No husband would tolerate this. What do you think I am? A fucking eunuch?” (M 163). The bitter exchange of words including the assertion of each one’s rights drives Shyam to assert his superiority and rights over her body. “Then I fucked her. The resentment I felt for being tolerated rather than loved, the yearning I had suffered, the loneliness of these eight years, all fused to become a consuming desire to possess her. To make her mine. To reach within and tear down that film of indifference that coated her eyes each time I took her in my arms” (M 163). He wanted to reinforce the idea that she is his possession. “You are my wife. You are mine” (M 163). He wanted to prove his control over her body by an act of rape which leaves a deep scar on her …show more content…
The ideals that men have to emulate are powerful and sometimes even violent, whereas women have submissive, self-sacrificing and passive characters to idealise. Indian masculinity arose out of this deep-rooted sense of superiority in relation to women who were subjugated and oppressed. Shyam is filled with arrogance and triumph, a smile characteristic of a conqueror. He is compared to Ravana in Bali Vadham who is the ultimate symbol of haughtiness. “Every fibre of his body pulsed with the measure of conquest” (M 174) and he resembled
In Chapter 10, The Women who Died Laughing, Ramachandran opens with a story about Willy. While Willy was attending his mother's funeral he broke into a fit of laughter that wouldn't stop. His family checked him into the local hospital for evaluation. The doctors could find nothing wrong, save for his uncontrollable laughter. Two days later, a nurse found Willy unconscious in his bed, having suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and he died without regaining consciousness. The postmortem showed a large ruptured aneurysm in an artery at the base of his brain that had compressed part of his hypothalamus, mammillary bodies, and other structures on the floor of his brain. According to Ramachandran, "the abnormal activity or
In My Forbidden Face, Latifa explains how the Taliban are waging a cultural war against Western values. The Taliban’s goal in Kabul is to secure the environment where purity of people, especially of women, may be sacred again. However, in the book, Latifa discusses many issues that the people from Kabul experience at the hands of the Taliban such as the plight of women and men’s struggles, their views on news, media, and art, people’s education, and their religion. Throughout the book, the methods that the Taliban reinforce are very unreasonable, which leads to violence.
Throughout the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, Mariam and Laila are constantly having their inner strength challenged from birth to death. They both had different lives growing up, but they both lived in the same society, meaning that they both dealt with the disrespect from the Afghani culture.
The movie Lunchbox has demonstrated Indian Culture in a unique way, focusing on the life of a woman living in a patriarchal society. The variables chosen to measure were Gender Stereotypes, Gender Oppression, and Patriarchy. To measure Gender Stereotypes, socially constructed views of men and woman and Gender Roles were used as sub-categories. As for Gender ...
From what we have learned about Classical India, it has indeed become civilized. Many traits of a civilization include social inequalities, development of some sort of government, and many developed a mainly accepted religion as well as the arts and sciences. Documents from the Classical period of India show evidence of these traits in civilization.
What happens in the life of a circus freak doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a middle class woman from the south would ever dream of concerning herself with, and yet Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden was produced by exactly one such a woman. In the short story, Welty exposes a technique of naming and disguise that has always been effective in the blatant dehumanization bigots use to degrade specific members of our social hierarchy. Welty's title character in the story never manages to escape from the diminutive appellation, Little Lee Roy, which is more or less his actual name. Because of his appearance and the persistence of this deplorable nickname it is virtually impossible for him to achieve the status of being a ‘real person’ within the
As we compare the traditional women versus modern women, we perceive differences and similarities. Prachi fights for a belief system that controls her meanwhile Ruhi struggles with self-identity and depends on the beauty pageant to empower her as an Indian woman. Prachi defends Hinduism but at the same time, is Hinduism that restrains her from becoming “modern.” Ruhi on the other hand considers herself a very modern girl and she values freedom therefor the pageant is a road to liberation for her. Both girls struggle in distinct ways but their goal is similar, to shape their countries future.
Hess, Linda. Rejecting Sita: Indian Responses to the Ideal Man's Cruel Treatment of His Ideal Wife. Vol. 67. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.
Many people have considered gender to be a natural part of our lives, having its own roles and norms that are followed by the people within the categories of gender, male and female. However, these norms receive different views once put in action. In this report, I aimed to answer the question: in a male dominated society, how do female gender norms influence the way one perceives them self as well as they way others perceive them? The patterns, answering my question, which will guide my paper, resulting from the Hindi movie Kahaani, were that whenever a female was displaying feminine norms, she was given negative views by those of the male gender however those feminine roles show her positivity, allowing her to see that strength lies within those roles as well. Kahaani, based in a male dominated country India, is about a pregnant woman, who is actually a spy, in search of her “missing” husband but later finds out he resembles a terrorist. Due to the fact that she is pregnant, she was not viewed as harmful and thus was used and discriminated by the male police officers in order to lead them to the terrorist however she used her gender to her own benefit. In the following research report, I will outline the relations between the norms for a female and how they are perceived by others as well as the one characterizes by the gender, which is the pregnant woman. This will focus on the operationalization of the variables of gender roles, perceptions relating to actions, words and treatments the character receives. From these, I will explain the methods I used in order to obtain the patterns which answered my question after analyzing the movie.
When breaking into the field of feminist theory, I started to construct my own idea of a perfect world where there was social and political equality for people of all genders, sexualities, classes, and races. This is not an uncommon thing in feminism, as it helps anyone in the field of study understand what they want to accomplish in the field, and what ideas they should be putting firth into the world. When introducing her transnationalist feminist ideas in her novel Feminism Without Boarders, Chandra Talpade Mohanty provides her image of an ideal world which she describes as being full of freedom for both men and women alike to make the choices and lead the likes that they truly want, as well as living in a world with, “Economic stability,
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
Most of the Indian women living in an orthodox and conservative family feel inhibited to raise their voice against aggressive dominance of the male person of the society owing to their inferiority complex and rigid code of conduct imposed on them. Their ambitions, desires, sense and sensibility are faithfully expressed in Nair’s novels. Her novels show how such women in spite of being highly educated undergo psychological suffering due to inferiority complex and dead sense of inhibitions. She not only limits her writing to upper class urban people, but also picks up characters from all stratum of society. Her theme is not only restricted to domestic problems, but it is variegated in nature. Besides, her novels represent what is authentically Indian or native.
India can be considered a masculine society. This is evident visually in the display of success and power, which is best observed in the flaunting of wealth. It is common for one to advertise their success. However as previously mentioned Indian culture is heavily influe...
Feminism basically means guarding equal rights for women as enjoyed by men. Feminism does not talk only about the social rights but also about the political as well as economic rights of a woman. Feminism is a search for the identity of the most marginalized creature on earth, that is, woman. In India, women have always been considered weak or inferior by the dominating patriarchal society from ages. They are considered merely a subject of oppression and dominance. Women have not been marginalized now but it is continuing from ages, however, even the idea of feminism had been established since the inception of the universe. There is a myth that Lord Brahma first created man but then he, in his generosity, decided to give man a companion. Since he had already used all the material in creating man, he borrowed a lot of material from nature and created woman. The idea of feminism is established when Lord Brahma introduces woman to man saying that “She will serve you lifelong and if you cannot live with her, neither can you live without her”. This shows that woman has always been considered as someone who is weak, self-sacrificing, inferior and has only one purpose of life and that is just to obey and serve the traditional dogmas created by the patriarchs. This paper deals with the state of women in India from the inception of the universe till today. It focuses on the emergence of feminism in India which has been divided into three phases- first phase from 1850-1915 in which many social evils of the society were banned or abolished and reformers propagated the need to educate women; second phase from 1915-1947 in which women participated in the freedom movements...
In a world where labels determine much of a person’s identity, gender and culture have a strong influence on a person’s life. Uma tries to please her parents’ Hindu expectations of her, and fitting into American society. In the short story “Devadasi”, by Rishi Reddi, gender and culture based societal standards impact the protagonist Uma and how she sees her surroundings. These standards shape both Uma’s relationships with those around her and how she sees her place in the world. Today, too many people let every piece of their lives be dictated by gender and culture based expectations.