© 2018 JETIR December 2018, Volume 5, Issue 12 www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162) 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, JETIR1812643 Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (JETIR) www.jetir.org 296 © 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. JETIR1812643 Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (JETIR) www.jetir.org 297 © 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 JETIR1812643 Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (JETIR) www.jetir.org 298 © 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.