As the UN commissions for the first time a study on the portrayal of women in world cinema, how guilty are our movies of perpetuating an appalling culture of gender bias.
Maybe violent movies don’t cause people to pick up guns, but do films that objectify women reinforce sexual stereotypes?
UN
Women, the entity that works for gender equality and women’s
empowerment, has teamed up with former Hollywood star Geena Davis to
commission a study on how women are portrayed in cinema. Skewed gender
representation in movies has long been an issue of concern because it
strongly impacts how women see themselves, how society sees them, and
the relationships between sexes. It is interesting in the context of
this study, which will span many countries including Australia, China,
Germany, Japan, and India, to see just how well our own films handle
these sensitivities.
The recent hit Raanjhanaa,
to some, is simply the story of a besotted lover. To others, though,
the protagonist, Kundan, is a stalker who has no business demanding the
audience’s sympathy. The first category of viewers sees Kundan as a man
who’s led on by Zoya, the woman he loves, and had she not embraced him
like a friend, had she not smeared Holi colours on him, had she, in
short, stayed aloof, he wouldn’t have come on so strong. This is a bit
like saying that had a rape victim stayed at home, she would not have
been raped. This isn’t about the responsibility of cinema, its duty
towards society, but about why women always end up being blamed and
victimised for the actions of men.
You could compile
an encyclopaedia about scenes and plots from our cinema where women are
viewed through a patriarchal gaze and advised to stay safe and pure. In Purab aur Paschim,
the heroine who smokes and drinks and wears short skirts is shown the
error of her ways when the villain attempts to rape her. In the Tamil
film Gayathri, the imprisoned heroine discovers that her husband
has made blue films of their nights together. But just when she’s about
to be rescued, she dies. Her virtue having been “compromised,” the
director cannot allow her to live anymore.
For the longest time in our films, the heroine’s virtue had to remain intact. In Kati Patang,
Asha Parekh is a widow in white who falls in love with Rajesh Khanna,
but she’s also a “pure” widow, a fact that’s established through a
convoluted story that shows her marriage never being consummated. That
was in the 1970s. Four decades later, little had changed. In the
supposedly futuristic Robot/Endhiran, a nude girl rescued from a
burning building (she was in the bath) comes under a truck minutes after
she is rescued. She has been ‘exposed’ to people, and clearly cannot be
allowed to live any longer. In between, we’ve repeatedly seen victims
of rape getting married to their rapists/seducers, as in the Tamil drama
Moondru Mudichu, where Rajinikanth is “taught a lesson” when the
woman he seduces sets up camp in his house and forces his change of
heart. She has to, clearly, because, according to the filmmaker, who
else will marry her?
Raanjhanaa doesn’t
revolve around this nauseating insinuation of purity in an obvious sense
— but in its own way, there’s the tiniest implication that if Zoya had
been ’pure’, a good Muslim who stayed at home and covered her face and
didn’t go around talking to the local boys, then these events in her
life may never have come about.
It brings us to the
age-old question of whether a filmmaker has a responsibility to society.
Do action films incite an audience member to pick up a gun? Or is it
only the disturbed individual, who isn’t quite there, likely to
be affected by the violent happenings on screen? When millions of
viewers go back home and begin to lead their lives with utter normalcy,
can movies be held responsible for the actions of a handful of
individuals?
But it’s clearly different in the case
of portrayal of women, because here the movies seem not so much to be
inciting new behaviour as endorsing old ones. When the sub-text shows approval of victims marrying rapists, or of ‘impure’ women being killed, there’s a strong subliminal message going out to the masses.
In a nation whose epic Ramayana contains
an episode where the heroine’s virtue is suspected, aren’t the movies
that play with notions of the woman’s purity reinforcing caveman
philosophies? Can a film — a big mainstream film (not a multiplex movie)
— be made in India that shows that women can wear tight T-shirts and
down shots of tequila and smoke the odd cigarette and still be seen as
figures worthy of respect? Can she express affection casually, the way
Zoya does in Raanjhanaa, and not be assumed to be sending out invitations of love? Do you really need to be told the answer?
Courtesy- The Hindu
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