Polyandry: A Secret form of Misogyny: A Cinematic Overview (original) (raw)
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EXPLORING THE MULTIPLE FACETS OF POLYANDROUS MARRIAGE OF DRAUPADI IN THE PALACE OF ILLUSIONS
IASET, 2020
Publishedin 2008 by Picador, The Palace of Illusions is a novel by award-winning novelist and poet, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. It is a critically acclaimed text, as it gives an intriguing insight to the feminine side of the otherwise patriarch tale. While majority of the authors try to focus on the warfare and philosophy of the epic, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni highlights the inner recesses of the mind of Draupadi. She narrates the story as seen from the eyes of Draupadi, retelling her joys, her desires, her adventures and her struggle through the voice of Panchaali. Though Draupadi is an iconoclastic mythical figure, for her fiery female voice; her marriage to five of the famously heroic Pandava brothers, plays a crucial role in her life. In times, where Polygamy was quite a common phenomenon, Polyandry was limited to folklores and stories. To marry five men, was an alien concept and was regarded with contempt in those times. The rules were different for men and women, favoring the men, while restricting a woman to sleep with a single man only. Polygamy is defined as state or practice of having more than one husband or male mate at one time. This paper analyses the Polyandry of Draupadi, her emotions towards her own marriage and her relationship with her husband's. It also highlights the reliability of the marriage, its formation and its characteristics. Thus, we will be analyzing the efficiency and nature of Polyandry in the story, through the exploration of emotions of Draupadi and her relationship with the five Pandavas.
On Screen Forbidden Relationships: The Depiction of Extramarital Affairs in New Wave Malayalam Films
Communication & Journalism Research, 2014
Movies often duplicate changes in the society and they sometimes persuade changes as well. Recently, controversy on new wave films became the disputed subject of the Malayalam film industry. The issues which were formerly treated as proscribed by the societal order are now boldly exposed before the Malayali viewers with the help of these new experimental movies. Extramarital affairs are always there in our society, but now, it's become common enough that we find examples from our neighbouring circles. A prejudiced society supports men to be a polygamist, but today's independent and bold woman also says she too is capable of all this. The pretence inbuilt in our fascination with stories of affairs in novels, Television and movies where we idolize the experiences of people having affairs, while at the same time pass judgment on people in real life who engage in the same behaviour. On one hand, we go into raptures over monogamy, but on the other, we unintentionally make a payment to a milieu that supports affairs. The present study analyzes how extramarital affairs have been portrayed in three new wave Malayalam movies-Beautiful, Cocktail and Traffic through narrative analysis.
Sexuality Studies, 2014
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This paper tries to explore same-sex love in Muslim cultures in India as represented in Hindustani cinema. My focus will be on Muslim female same-sex love which is generally not touched upon. Female same-sex love and male same-sex love is widely discussed and debated upon. The recent film Dedh Ishqiya (Bhardwaj, 2014) is taken as a case study to examine female same-sex love in a Muslim context. Other films will be dealt in periphery. The influence of language, place and peer group is to be checked. Amradparashti or male same-sex love is discussed in comparison to female same-sex love for which no particular term in North India is used that frequently.
Indian Cinema: Making Departure from the Stereotypical Presentation of Women in Nuptial
The Creative Launcher
In the late 20th and 21st century various movements took place which challenged the stereotypical notions of gender in society. #MeToo movement gave a momentum to the society where people started talking about any kind of violence, sexual assault and harassment against women. Many government policies and laws were framed and implemented to provide equal opportunities to women in every field. Vishakha Guidelines and Internal Complains Committee are made mandatory at work place and education institutions to assure a safe and healthy environment for females. Now the issues brushed under the carpet for long have been brought into light. Issues which were considered taboo even to talk about are now discussed on public forums and academia, penned down in literature and projected in media and cinema. Women and their concerns and point of views found space in popular cinema and were acclaimed too by the critics as well as spectators. Bollywood has made deviations from the stereotypical port...
Demure Heroines Expressing Sexual Desire. Hints of Traditional Motifs in Popular Hindi Cinema
Acta Orientalia Vilnensia, 2011
In some of the most successful and representative popular Hindi films released between the 1990s and the early 2000s, the depiction of amorous feelings often takes traditional forms. The reference here is essentially to those films that come more or less within the broad category of classical family dramas: love stories that come up against all sorts of opposition, characterised by the celebration of the traditional Hindu values and the sacrality of the Indian joint-family institution. A particularly interesting aspect emerging here lies in the way in which the sexual desire of the heroine—typically a chaste and virtuous maiden—finds representation. On the strength of studied re-elaboration of traditional themes and motifs, these films achieve high levels of stylistic inventiveness and poetic refinement, albeit often limited to certain individual sequences. The apparent purpose of this aesthetic sophistication is to endow amorous feelings—always leading inexorably in the direction of marriage—with an aura of purity and authenticity. Indeed, it is a matter of sentiments so noble and intense as to win over the consent and blessing of the families by the end of the film. The paper proposes to identify and analyse the conscious use of these traditional motifs in some of the most representative films in this area.
Gender, Cinema, Streaming Platforms. Chakraborty Paunksnis, R., Paunksnis, Š. (eds) , 2023
Indian Cinema has as a ‘key arbiter’ of popular culture in the subcontinent corroborated notions of identity, values and gender. The Hindi film heroine as a protagonist in Bollywood or ‘mainstream’ hindi narratology post 2010, is a distinct extrapolation of a country’s changing socio-cultural, economic and political inflections. The ‘female led’ cine-narratives while redefining gender roles and responsibilities, question and explore desire in a patriarchal society struggling with layers of power renegotiations. The success of women-led commercial Hindi films has also revealed the potency of the multiplex to host alternate narratives and the vibrancy of global Indian audiences. The twin entanglement of a ‘neoliberal governmentality’ and instrumentality in appropriating this new form of feminism as discussed by Gill & Scharff, (2013) along with ‘post feminist’ influx from the west as daily engagement with brands, products and celebrity rhetoric has endowed contemporary directors to boldly interpret desire and sexual fulfillment in cinema for an aspirational youth emboldened with the neoliberal narrative. Simultaneously, Video on Demand (VOD) platforms like Amazon Prime and Netflix are extending portrayal of desire with the advantage of an uncensored yet formidable space of the aspirational middle class with access to technology. Representation has moved beyond challenging stereotypes to recast the young techno-savvy urban female as liberated, open to satisfying desire and hugely skeptical of marriage. Located within these new feminist realities is sisterhood and the female buddy film. These narratives explore the intertextuality of patriarchal repression with the conventional coded and un-coded messages as well as bold, blatant and unseen private moments, which were if at all depicted, in independent cinema. Sisterhood within heterosexuality is being reinterpreted as a symbol of empathy within an unvoiced constituency. Specific films juxtapose the metropolitan global woman with invested agency and attempt to represent diversity of the ‘other’ as she extrapolates the meaning of freedom in a hybrid post feminist space. This paper examines the portrayal of desire and self-fulfillment in context of marriage in the mainstream Bollywood film, Veere di Wedding (2018) in context of feminist film criticism, auteurship, reversal of the gaze, and ‘competitive femininity, perfection and imperfection’ (McRobbie, 2015). It also delves into the dynamics of production ideology of Hindi mainstream cinema, distribution and spectatorship vis a vis the millennial.
Polyandry is the umbrella term for one woman maintaining sexual access to more than one man. This work is a comparison of forty-three societies as examples of the six types of polyandry practiced around the world. In some types, the sexual acts are part of a marriage contract involving three or more people. In some types, the marriage involves only two people, but the sexual access of the wife extends beyond the marriage. In one type, the extra-marital sexual activity is expected, and not entirely voluntary by all parties. This survey is the first to describe all six types with examples of each. Keywords: associated polyandry, familial polyandry, fraternal polyandry, polykoity, secondary polyandry, walking marriage
Dimensions of Female Sexuality: A Re-Reading Of The Film Thoovanathumpikal
Abstract In this paper I make an attempt to analyze the dimensions of female sexuality with reference to the Malayalam film Thoovanathumpikal directed by Pathmarajan. This paper explores how a woman sexualizes her body and how a woman’s body is being sexualized by others for their desire satisfaction. It revolves around the character of Clara, a young beautiful woman who hails from coastal fishermen community. She lives with her alcoholic father and torturing step mother. To be free from the difficulties of her present life, she decides to make use of her ‘body’ which is her ‘self’. She never thinks about her body and bodily process negatively . In the film she appears thrice and each of her appearance provokes the spectators. She celebrates her ‘womanhood’ through her body. At the same time she is being sexualized with a lustful image. Her face, her lips, her eyes, her nose are imaged as an ‘item to be sexualized’ for male gaze. Clara embodies a set of images of female desirability - a sexualized images which emphasizes physical strength and stature. She is figured as romantic interest for the hero. She herself satisfies her desire by celebrating her ‘body’. The male gaze towards female body is explored. The three appearance of Clara adds the three stages of male sexual gaze towards her. Even if she gets tired of her ‘body’, she celebrates it with the politicization of her body. In this film , the image of Clara is to be compensated for the figure of an active heroine by emphasizing her sexuality and her availability within feminine terms. Key words : Female body ,Male gaze , Sexualisation , Malayalam Cinema
Polyandry Practiced among Jaunsari of Uttarakhand: Scope for Futuristic Study
2014
Man learns his behaviour and behaviour that is learnt denotes his culture. Thus culture is a system of learned behaviour shared by and transmitted among the members of a group and every group have tried to maintain their cultural heritage / uniqueness by the effort to make their culture distant from the others. The most significant task for the students of anthropology is to observe the different cultural systems and to find out the cultural units of distinctive pattern of a culture or group that mark them unique from the rest of the world. Marriage is such a prime cultural unit and at the same time may be viewed as a reference point to locate the diversity and uniqueness of each culture at intra and inter analytical level. In this paper researchers have tried to share their observations regarding polygamous marriage especially polyandrous marriage practiced among the Jaunsari people living at the village of Lakhamandal, state of Uttrakhand.