Indian Women In The Flesh: From Prose To Screen

Abstract

A frequently occuring storyline in Indian cinema revolves around a sexually adventurous or morally ambiguous female protagonist, often a prostitute or entertainer. Such films have been observed by some commentators to provide merely "the constant sexual titillation of the bourgeois sexual nerve." (Prasad, 148) Popular films are viewed as more commercially viable if they appeal to the audience's prurience, the tone generally being voyeuristic and sanctimonious by turn. Examples of infantile male sexuality and cliched sexual insecurity abound in Indian popular cinema. The sexual and emotional immaturity of popular film is perhaps most difficult to avoid or most unwillingly rejected, even by adventurous filmmakers, in the depiction of women. Nevertheless, the cliched independent woman who is reduced to a harmless virginal figure by marriage or love is disappearing in more thoughtful films as is the notion that to win the hero a woman must be untainted even by mere outward sexual display Some filmmakers attempt to break from the bind of audience expectation of favorite stereotypes by balancing the use of these traditional stereotypes with a suggestion of the way in which tradition retards and distorts social change. (Binford, 1988)