A Study of the Films of Aparna Sen and Deepa Mehta

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Women Representations and Space: A Study of the films of Aparna Sen and Deepa Mehta

Dr. Rohith L S Assistant Professor Department of English Jain University Bangalore.

Abstract : The proposed paper examines the importance of study of women directors’ cinema as a counter cinema, which has been developing as a major form of literary studies. This paper examines how Indian women directors made the representation of women in their film and how much space they have given to support their women audience. Today Cinema is no more a mere source of entertainment because it has become a field in popular culture, where dominant ideologies are circulated, stereotypes are framed, and various discourses are projected. Visual media or cinema has greater degree of impact on audience or viewers. The focus is also on how camera techniques and camera gaze influences in their cinema and how do they create female gaze. The aspect of Gaze (male or female Gaze) analyzed with reference to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s arguments and politics behind the camera, the politics which encourage in perpetuating a particular set of stereotypical nature of images to the characters. Finally it tries to see are they given authentic representation and space or they just maintain the hegemonic ideology.

The Indian Film Industry: from the first motion pictures brought to India by Luminere brothers in the form of soundless films in 1896, to India’s first silent feature film King Harishchandra in 1913, to Indian filmmakers making films in English such as Delhi Belly. Now, India has the world’s largest film industry in terms of number of films produced and the ticket size. There is a huge viewership for films.

The world of cinema has not remained as a mere source of entertainment. Since ages Cinema has become a powerful vehicle for culture, education, leisure and propaganda. Representations in the cinema of particular groups/ communities/ experiences/ ideas or topics are always represented from a particular ideological or valued perspectives. So, the representations in the cinema cannot be simply regarded as reflecting or mirroring reality. Cinema has become a field in popular culture where dominant ideologies are circulated,

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© 2018 JETIR December 2018, Volume 5, Issue 12 www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162) stereotypes are framed and various discourses are projected. Both male and female audiences are affected by these political messages, societal issues and gender identities that are represented in the films.

Women on the other hand belong to a group of people who have become subjects by cinematic world. It can be well said that we cannot imagine a movie without a woman character becoming an object to the male gaze in any mainstream Cinema. Women have been playing a variety of roles in the hundred years of cinema.

Nargis Dutt (Radha) in her movie Mother India1 becomes an epitome of justice and a God-like figure in her village by staying true to her cause by killing her own son so that justice would prevail. While in the movie

Arth2, we have ShabanaAzmi who walks out leaving behind a marriage, a proposal and defies the conventions of the society by being an independent mother to a child that is not her own. In addition, we have Chandani Bar3 where Tabu is projected as a prostitute and her husband as a criminal. She strives her entire life to see that her daughter does not meet with the same fate but fails to avoid the terror. Juxtaposed to this, we have another movie where a woman is shown to be very powerful is Samay where SushmitaSen is portrayed as an independent woman and also an IAS officer who is in search of a serial killer. With all her intelligence she finds a way to arrest him but is overtaken by the emotions of a mother is arresting the criminal and thus kills him. Yet another movie, throwing light on the evils of Indian society where women are shown as targets is Lajja- where Manish Koirala, runs away from her husband, MahimaChoudary

(Mythila) a bride to be, Madhuri Dixit ( Janaki), a theater artist and Rekha (Ramdulari) a village mid-wife are all victims of male oppression.

Though mainstream cinema is mainly perceived to be a male-dominated society its directors are more conscious about making women oriented films where women play the role of a protagonists as seen in the above examples. They have also been given power to make them noticed in the society. But the question the paper tries to bring forth is whether there is an accurate portrayal of a woman’s life in the reel world as in

1Khan, Mehbob, dir. Mother India.Perf.Nargis, Sunil Dutt, Rajendra Kumar and Raaj Kumar.MehboobProducations. 1957. Film. 2 Bhatt, Mahesh, dir. Arth. Perf.ShabanaAzmi, SmitaPatil, Raj Kiran and RohiniHahangadi. 1982. Film. 3Bandarkar, Madhur, dir. Chandani Bar. Perf.Tabu, AtulKulkarni, RajpalYadav and Anaya khare. 2001. Film.

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© 2018 JETIR December 2018, Volume 5, Issue 12 www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162) the real by a male director. Does women directors like Deepa Mehta and Aparna Sen tries to give voice to their women characters in the real sense?

So as the movies are being made more and more addressing the women issues, more varied are the roles of women in Indian cinema. Also these representations are debatable because of the ideas, principles and values that are assigned to them in the films that they are portrayed in. Women rather being depicted as normal human beings are elevated to a higher position of being ideal who commit no flaw, their grievances, desires, ambitions, feelings and their perspectives are completely absent. Through such a portrayal, they are being projected as ‘other’ and hence not belonging to the real world.

Another question that rises by seeing the varied projections of women characters is whether there is elimination of the stereotyped ones? Though there are films being made on several social themes including dowry, widowhood, rape etc., the films never become a part of the blockbuster and are not popularly viewed. According to Urvashi Butalia, in her article ‘Women in Indian Cinema’4 in Feminist Review, opines that such films only take a superficial interest in women and their issues. In other words, these films do not focus on the women’s point of view. Finally it can be noticed in these representations of women that they are often represented as primarily concerned about relationships, family, personal matters, home, and talk, while males are more concerned with business, institutions, self, and competition outside of the home and thus make the female audiences engaged as part of being “in the home” focusing on domestic or interpersonal conflicts.

The question that emerges is why are women’s roles in films stereotyped; where these stereotypes come from and what they mean to Indian society and film?

It is a known fact that patriarchy is a system which is predominant in Indian society. Historically, patriarchy has manifested itself in the social, legal political and economic organization of a range of different cultures.

Bell Hooks in her essay Understanding Patriarchy defines patriarchy as a political- social system that

4For further reading on UrvashiButaliafollw the link. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/journal/v17/n1/abs/fr198437a.html

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© 2018 JETIR December 2018, Volume 5, Issue 12 www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162) insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence5. Patriarchy has a strong influence on modern civilization, although many cultures have moved towards a more egalitarian social system over the past century. India is not an exception. One can still notice patriarchal hegemonic domination which subjugates women to the domestic sphere. Cinematic production too is no exception. It is very recently that women have finally broken through the male dominated industry. In the beginnings of the film industry, women were generally excluded from the film making process and were encouraged to work in non- technical areas such as make-up or production assistant or as actress. It was only in the 1970s that a few women directors made their presence felt in the huge male dominated film industry. Some of them were:

ArunaRaje, Sai Paranjype, Vijaya Mehta, Mira Nair, AparnaSen, Deepa Mehta and more.

The paper makes an attempt to analyze the films of Aparna Sen’s and the films of Deepa Mehta’s Fire

(1996), Earth (1998) and Water (2005) and see how gender issues have been addressed in these films.

Feminists generally believed that film is a contributory factor in perpetuating a narrow range of stereotyped images of woman. They argue that the way notions of gender represented by the film perpetuates and reinforces the values of the patriarchal society; for instance men tend to take exceptions to such narrow stereotyping- a strong woman portrayed can be seen as positive or rather more cynically they could be seen as the mere as ‘role reversal’ (Jill Nelmes, 1999, 274) films and thus as having purely novelty value. In turn, these representations encourage expectations of woman which are very limiting, representing a narrow range of images of woman, for instance, woman as care givers, as passive objects and as an object of desire, basing them at home, inferior to men etc.

There Women Directors like Deepa Mehta and Aparna Sen projects women characters in the most real sense- as neutral human beings with flaws, with desires etc., within the patriarchal society they are living in and thus raising their voice. Aparna Sen is known for making thought-provoking cinemas. In one of the

5 for more information on bell’s essay Understanding Patriarchy follow the link, http://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf

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© 2018 JETIR December 2018, Volume 5, Issue 12 www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162) interviews Aparna Sen says: “Women’s issues are to me a part and parcel of humanism itself- something that I believe in and try my best to live by.”(Women in Indian Film, 2012, pp.7)

Her protagonists are strong and active and they are woman who make their tough decisions and choices in life. To see a few characters and the outline of the movies selected for research; we have an ordinary housewife in the film Paroma who returns to her family after an adulterous affair, determined to live for herself and continue in search of her own identity. The movie Paroma was made in 1985 when the Women’s

Movement in India was in heights- when there was greater awareness on women’s independence in the workspace, in education, in the family and in society as a whole. The protagonist in this movie is content in a bland and empty marriage and hence gets into an affair with a gashing photographer who very soon leaves the country as well as things in Paroma’s life changes. It is here that the protagonist decides to take a big leap and discover herself. Another powerful character is Meenakshi in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer who embarks on a life changing journey. It is a film exploring the relationship between a devout Tamil Brahmin woman and a

Muslim photographer who travelling by chance together on a bus when communal violence breaks out. In the journey Meenakshi is seen to transform from a stereotypical dependent Indian Housewife to a woman who finds moral strength to save the life of a man she is totally removed from, both socially and in her religious beliefs.

In her another movie 36 Chowringlane which was released in 1981, Sen talks about loneliness, love, desire told through the story of an ordinary life of a school teacher. The protagonist, Violet Stoneham leaves alone in a dingy flat of 36 Chowringlane in Calcutta and is an Anglo-Indian Shakespeare teacher who leads a lonely dull life. Her only companion is a black cat which she calls as Sir Toby. Her life takes a new and exciting turn when a former student asks her to allow him meet his lover in her flat. Violet’s relationship with the lively young couple become the brightest feature in her bleak existence. But very soon the couple move away after getting married living her with a feeling of rejection. The research her tries to look at the gender aspects by placing her in her already existing marginalized community of the Anglo-Indians, who were abandoned by the British and made outsiders by Indians after independence. The research also examines hoe the aspect of gender is connected to age, class, caste and other social factors.

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Yet another movie which a milestone in the Indian cinema was 15 Park Avenue. It is a film about shadows of failed relationships, shadows of psychosis that borders between sanity and insanity. The movie talks about a schizophrenic woman Meethi (Konkana Sen), who is taken care by her dominant elder sister Anjali

(ShabanaAzmi), a divorcee and is trying to manage a relationship with an University colleague.

Schizophrenic symptoms are manifested after she is raped by three political gangsters in Bihar where she had gone to collect news for her journal. The movie on the other hand, deals with various kinds of relationships - between Meethi and her former fiancée Joydeep Roy (Rahul Bose),betweenAnu and her mother (WaheedaRehman), between Joydeep and his wife Lakshmi (Shefali Shah), between Anu and her colleague Sanjeev (Kanwaljit Singh) and between Shabana and Meethi's psychiatrist Kunal

(DhritimanChaterjee).

Another movie which explores human relationships without borders is The Japanese Wife. The story is built around a shy schoolteacher who struggles to reconcile his marriage to the Japanese wife he never met with his relationship to a widow who helps him realize his fleeting dreams of fatherhood and domestic bliss.

Snehamoy Chatterjee (the school teacher) was a student at Serampore College when he saw an ad for a pen- pal in a magazine. Unable to relate to his extroverted classmates, he sent a letter and soon got a response from Miyage, a friendly Japanese girl hungering for human contact. Unable to communicate in their native tongues, the two exchange letters in English, forging an intimate bond on the written page. Eventually,

Snehamoy and Miyage agree to marry each other by exchanging gifts through the mail as symbols of their union since they cannot afford to meet for an actual ceremony. Years later, Snehamoy is teaching arithmetic in West Bengal when a young widow named Sandhya and her eight year old son Poltu. They come to stay with him while Sandhya attempts to find a new husband. Meanwhile, Snehamoy discovers the joys of parenthood while acting as a surrogate father to Poltu, and finds out what it is to share a home with a spouse as Sandhya starts helping out around with the housework. But when Miyage falls ill, Snehamoy takes a leave from work in a desperate attempt to find a doctor who can save her. Later, Snehamoy falls ill with pneumonia, drifting into a delirious fever dream about his far-away wife as Sandhya dutifully cares for her ailing host.

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Another director who seemingly talks about human relationships and addresses women issues is Deep

Mehta, a Canadian Based Indian Women Director. She is known for her trilogy- Fire, Earth and Water which tries to focus on gender-related issues in India and her attempt to relate these issues to wider concerns of international and global significance. Deepa Mehta’s tries to portray women against different backdrops – in violence torn historical moments, in the humdrum of domestic arena and also in the specific socio-temporal framework of a rigid society. One of her controversial films is Fire which was banned in

India in the late 1998 for its explicit portrayal of lesbianism. Fire is centered around two married women ignored and neglected by their husband, who fall in love with each other. The movie Fire can be seen to give choices other than those sanctioned by the patriarchal code.

Earth is a movie that is based on Bapsi Sidwa’s novel Cracking India. It talks about the Partition of the

Indian subcontinent into two countries: India and Pakistan at the time of independence. It is narrated through the eyes of Lenny, an eight year old Parsi girl. Its portrays the lives of women during the years of violence in Partition. The woman character, Shanta has a lot of admirers and is seen as an object of desire by everyone. Later as the violence bursts out in the country, the Ice-Candy man (one of Shanta’s admirers and friends) is taken over by possessiveness, desire and revenge of not having got her and destroys her life during the communal riot.

Water on the other hand is based on Chuyia, an eight year old widow. She is send to a decrepit ashram where widows of all ages live together. She happens to meet Kalyani, a beautiful young widow who have been forced into prostitution by the head of the ashram. It then narrates the story of Narayan, a law student from a wealthy Indian family who falls in love with Kalyani. The movie Water depicts the terrible damage that can be done to human spirit when religious rules and texts are treated as sacred and above humanistic values. She addressed the issue of inhumane treatment of widows in India and the subjugation of these women. Therefore the researcher through the in depth analysis of these movies tries to see the aspect of gender in the politics of sexuality in Fire, in the politics of nationalism in Earth and in the politics of religion in Water.

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Thus we can see whether the women directors challenge the traditional roles that are set for women and try to provide alternatives to the standards that are set for women in the patriarchal society or doo they reject the traditional roles for women and encourage them to go beyond such roles and create opportunities for themselves? Do they use stereotypes in order to present the society’s expectations of women? For example,

Deepa Mehta’s Fire seemingly rejects the discourse of heterosexuality which always supports the patriarchal hegemonic domination and goes beyond to deal with the issue of homosexual relationship to come out of the patriarchal domination. The thesis is an attempt in this direction and seeks to answer the question whether: Women characters in the films made by two women directors namely Deepa Mehta and

AparnaSen seek personhood in their own individualistic way, full steam ahead, despite society’s disapproval or they tend to walk on a line between societal and familial expectations and pursue their own ambitions?

By the end of the 70’s, there had been a shift in the attitude when it was acknowledged that representation was a complex area and there need not necessarily be a direct link between film representations of women and their changing roles in the society. If films do not represent a window to the world, it would therefore be naïve to assume that changes in the representation of media would automatically result changes in the society. Mulvey comments on the dangers of over-emphasis on representations and suggests that to bring about change by working within the conventions of patriarchal production could be counter –productive.

This encourages women directors to produce films staying within the male dominant film industry.

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