Beauty Unlimited

13. Bollywood and the Feminine: Hinduism and Images of Womanhood

280 13. Bollywood and the Feminine: Hinduism and Images of Womanhood jane duran A great deal of the impetus for contemporary commentary on Bollywood, its images, and its effects on Indian culture as a whole comes from a pervasive sense that the tropes of the Indian cinema (specifically, the Hindu cinema of the north) tell us much about India’s past and future. Indeed, new work on the Hindu cinema appears all the time—much of the more recent work engages the topic from many of the postmodern and poststructuralist points of view available to us, but it is also the case that even this commentary often cites historic images from South Asian art and architecture.1 In much recent film from India, Western-clad young women make regular appearances, and the naïve viewer might be forgiven for thinking that the images derived from history, mythology, and sacred literature, such as those based on the figure of Sita, the self-sacrificing ideal heroine of the Ramayana, are now irrelevant and forgotten. But a closer look at Bollywood’s products reveals that the aspects of the traditional culture that have often proven most problematic for women—the emphasis on motherhood, purity, and dress—are alive and well. Indeed, it might be argued, Bollywood today is more invested than ever in preserving the traditional views of women’s roles and their social place. Those who hope for progressive change will have to be careful viewers of the Bollywood product. It will be the task of this paper to delineate some of these constructs, and to try to untangle them with an eye toward their relevance to India’s history. Using approaches from art history, the history of Indian drama and dance, and film studies, I argue that no one reading or take on Bollywood is possible, with the corollary that commercial film production in India will not necessarily promote progressive 281 Bollywood and the Feminine social change for women. The variegated strand that constitutes the cinema may, however, yield change in some instances and is, in any case, open to multiple interpretations. Introduction In Reading “Bollywood,” Shakuntala Banaji constructs a lengthy analysis of the various strands of the Indian cinema and investigates its effects on moviegoers in South Asia as well as diaspora sites (that is, sites of emigration from South Asia, such as London and Trinidad). Although “Bollywood” normally means the cinema produced in Bombay (now Mumbai), it has come to stand for almost all Indian commercial film. One of Banaji’s larger arguments is that there are very few solid inferences that can be made about the impact of the cinema: some see the films as valorizing tradition, while others see many of them as harbingers of new, more Western, attitudes toward gender relations. Banaji writes, For instance, as [another critic] found, many Hindi films are indeed denigrated by some viewers for their lack of realism and their melodramatic tendencies; nevertheless, as I discovered, they are also viewed as sources of knowledge which can have a fairly profound impact on the life choices of young people.2 The escapism and the overromanticized versions of the Hindu past that seem to characterize many Bollywood productions might be thought to have little to do with any real-life choices, yet one of Banaji’s main conclusions is that diasporic audiences know little about India and Indian traditions, and that viewing Bollywood films in London or Trinidad was a way of learning about South Asia. Two strands of thought, then, seem to lead contemporary analysis of the Bombay (Mumbai) productions that constitute the genre of popular Indian cinema. One emphasizes the extent to which familial and gender roles are reproduced in the films, even if their reproduction is not always obvious— the recent full-scale version of the Ramayana made for and shown on Indian television is an excellent example. The second underscores the notion that more contemporary (Western) attitudes are being introduced to Indian audiences through the cinema, undercutting tradition; nontraditional clothing, for example, has appeared in Bollywood films at least since the 1970s (Mera nam Joker, 1970), and the actress Urmila Matondkar wears it in all her recent 282 JANE DURAN films. This subversion of tradition, as Banaji says, is extremely important with respect to dress. But if it is the case that the films of Bollywood contain multiple messages and a bewildering variety of images, there is...