Jaisa Desh, Waisa Vesh? Explorations on the representations of Adivasis in popular Hindi cinema (original) (raw)
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Ishal Paithrkam, 2023
Malayalam Cinema has proved its mettle in various national and international venues with its innovative treatment of offbeat themes and has demonstrated its efficacy in attracting a large pool of moviegoers worldwide. Still, when it comes to the realistic portrayal of the Adivasi communities in Kerala , mainstream Malayalam cinema lags like any other film industry in India. The selective erasure of well-delineated Adivasi women characters is perceivable in mainstream film narratives, even in Malayalam. Nevertheless, a refreshing change can be witnessed in the depiction of Adivasi women in the Malayalam parallel cinema of recent years. Here, an Adivasi woman does not play the role of a mere victim of the atrocities meted out to her, but rather, she is represented as being resilient in her mind and body. Another promising change is the surfacing of Adivasi auteur Leela Santhosh who incorporates the distinctive 'Paniya' dialect in her screenplays to provide constructive solutions to agonies faced by the women in her community. Since the portrayal of Adivasi womanhood in Malayalam parallel cinema has evolved over the years, it would be rewarding to chart this change. The present paper seeks to find the factors responsible for these shifting perceptions by placing these portrayals against the backdrop of sociological studies conducted among the tribes of Kerala.
CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF INDIANS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SELECTED HOLLYWOOD FILMS
CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF INDIANS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SELECTED HOLLYWOOD FILMS, 2022
This dissertation deals with the representation of the Indian people in Hollywood movies. As we know Indians have been stereotyped by the Hollywood movies, this dissertation tries to prove if there has been cases of stereotyping and racist portrayal and tracing it back to where it bloomed and then joining the dots to the present/contemporary situation and analyzing if the hypothesis hold any ground or not. The methodology used in this dissertation are, review of literature, descriptive analysis and interviews of experts. Since representing a particular race is a very important job and in Hollywood where every culture and race of people come together to produce works of art, racism and stereotypes against a particular group of people brings upon shame and places them at an easy target of bullying and various sort of ridiculing. The dissertation also tries to understand whether this problem of representation or rather the misrepresentation has caused problems for actors of Indian origin acting in Hollywood and draws an opinion from there whether the industry has been using this for the gags or there is a deep inherent racist outlook towards a particular group of people. This research being a product of the things available at that time may also be something quite different if put under other circumstances
Gagged Narratives from the Margin: Indian Films and the Shady Representation of Caste
Popular Hindi cinema provides a fascinating account of Indian life history and cultural politics. Hindi cinema is always a mirror of the Indian society but films also have fascinated entertained the Indian public for more than a hundred years and sometimes when we analyze the history of Indian cinema we can get an amazingly interesting but actual history of the contemporary society with all its virtues and vices in different colors. This paper deliberates on the various issues pertaining to the portrayal of specific caste, especially the Dalits in Indian films-both Hindi and regional.
“Adarsh Indian”: How Bollywood failed multiculturalism.
Kirori Mal College, 2018
‘Cinema is widely considered a microcosm of the social, political, economic, and cultural life of a nation. It is the contested site where meanings are negotiated, traditions made and remade, identities affirmed or rejected’ (Bhoopaty 2003: 505).Being the art form of greatest impact and most widespread audience films are strong agency for conceptual creation and catalyst of opinion formation. Bollywood claims to be the expression of Indian social background and mirror to the nature of entire subcontinent with it’s portrayal of Indian culture, society, classes or religion. Still Bollywood is obsessed with the idea of monoculturalism that is always biased towards Hindutva notion of Indianism, always manifested in the trajectory of Islamophobia and Dalit-Bahujan phobia. Bollywood makes this possible by creating character imagery of an ‘Adarsh Indian’- Ideal Indian - who is devoid of critical faculties, never complain about the state,preoccupied with the idea ‘India first..always’ and extreme rage against its ‘enemy’ mostly Muslims, Kashmiris, Dalits and North Easterners. This article attempts to examine how Bollywood forced monoculturalism over multiculturalism and analyse how popular culture stigmatized minorities.
Deciphering Cinematic Transition: Context to Tribal Community of India
Praxis International Journal of Social Science and Literature (PIJSSL) , 2020
In the age of globalisation, Cinema has been the most influential mass medium for creating social awareness, mass appeal and generating public opinion. This helps in bringing the diverse mass population within the same perimeter. However, the tribal and the backward society people are not taken into account as a part of mass population. Their needs, opinion as well as efforts to be a part of mainstream population is deliberately neglected by the Medias, especially Indian Cinemas. There are very limited films made on/for tribal communities. The tribal peoples are mostly used as props or side kicks in movies to highlight the positive main stream heroes. They are distinctly discriminated from the mainstream mass by virtue of their language, their culture and so on. This article explores the indecent and inferior portrayal of tribal and backward community peoples in Cinema. Comparing few cinemas from past and recent years it is seen that there had been no changes observed in the portrayal of tribal peoples in Indian Cinema. Their development is stagnant. The same picture of their distress and oppression by high society people is evident; more over any biopic of internationally recognised entity with tribal root is deliberately ignored. In a nutshell, this article intends to throw light on the need to include the tribal and backward community people as apart of mass population, and Cinema is the most appropriate medium to make this initiative a success.
Patriarchy and Prejudice: Indian Women and Their Cinematic Representation
International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, 2017
Nurtured by Indian culture and history women's role in commercial Indian films is that of a stereotypical woman, from the passive wife of Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harishchandra' (1913) to the long-suffering but heroic mother-figure of Mother India (1957) to the liberated Kangana Ranaut of Queen (2014), it has been a rather long and challenging journey for women in Hindi cinema. Although this role has been largely redefined by the Indian woman and reclaimed from the willfully suffering, angelic albeit voiceless female actor, the evolution is still incomplete. Culture and tradition mean different things for different women, but there is always the historical context of what it entails in the form of ownership. What this paper seeks to unravel is what being a woman means in Indian cinema. Indian film industry is one of the largest in the world, my effort then is to understand how an industry so vast caters to half of the world population. In today's globalized world, how are female actors treated? How do directors and female actors deal with vital issues of the three-pronged 'trishul', othering, violence, and voicelessness? What effects do films have on perceptions of beauty, sexuality, and gender? It is important to note that the sheer number of Hindi movies produced each year is huge and viewership is even greater, yet, in this globalized world, peppered with neocolonialism, caste distinctions, intolerance and aggression, the portrayal of Indian women in Hindi films creates, produces, and reinforces women's roles in a strictly heterosexual and rigid fashion. This does not allow for many variations in representation. Unarguably there has been some progression in Indian movies as in, they are more accessible but as far as improvement of the Indian woman is concerened, little progress has been made.
Brown gaze and white flesh: exploring ‘moments’ of the single white female in Hindi cinema
Contemporary South Asia , 2016
This paper posits that the contemporary (re)configuration of the generic white woman of Hindi cinema solely as a spectacle was produced by the nationalist discourse during the colonial encounter. This essay explores both the textual analyses and aesthetic strategies employed in the construction of national imagery of white female subjectivities. My approach is twofold: (i) to chart the historical specificities of the representational construct of the white woman through discontinuous changes occurring across Bombay cinema, and (ii) to explore the white female subjectivities across specific historical and cultural milieu. This paper probes the historicity of the ‘Otherness’ of the white woman in Hindi cinema reviews and re-examines how Hindi cinema constitutes female whiteness. I posit that the representation of the white woman in Hindi cinema as promiscuous and sexually available was constructed within the nationalist discourse of the colonial era and is a continuation of the white memsahib in her absence. It is my position that all that was ‘repressed’ in the Hindu woman resurfaces in the white woman – the racial, sexual ‘Other’, onto whom everything repressed within the self could be projected.
Harvard Business School Working Paper, 2021
This working paper examines the social impact of the film industry in India during the first four decades after Indian Independence in 1947. Its shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India and the counterpart in scale to Hollywood in the United States, shared Hollywood’s privileging of paler skin over darker skin, and preference for presenting women in stereotypical ways lacking agency. Bollywood reflected views on skin color and gender long prevalent in Indian society, but this working paper shows that serendipitous developments helped shape what happened on screen. The dominance of Punjabi directors and actors, organized as multi-generational families, facilitated lighter skin tones becoming a prominent characteristic of stars. By constraining access to legal finance, pursuing selective censorship, and by denying Bollywood cinema the kind of financial and infrastructural support seen in other developing countries, the Indian government also incentivized directors and producers to adopt simplified story lines that appealed to predominately rural audiences, rather than contesting widely accepted views. Employing new evidence from oral histories of producers and actors, the paper suggests that cinema not only reflected, but emboldened societal attitudes regarding gender and skin color. The impact of such content was especially high as rural and often illiterate audiences lacked alternative sources of entertainment and information. It was left to parallel, and to some extent regional, cinemas in India to contest skin color and gender stereotypes entrenched in mainstream media. The cases of parallel cinema and Tamil cinema are examined, but their audiences were either constrained or – as in the case of Tamil cinema – subject to the isomorphic influence of Bollywood, which grew after policy liberalization in 1991.