Gender Relations and Cultural Ideology in Indian Cinema: A Study of Select Adaptations of Literary Texts

This book looks at Indian films based on fiction through gender lens and takes into account cultural context for the studying of the films as a work of art composed on converging systems of signs, verbal as well as non-verbal. Every film adapted from the text to the screen reflects the socio-political cultural environment which India’s cultural diversity and pluralism provides. In post-colonial India the question of gender has been the focus of struggle though perhaps not in the same terms of feminist movements in the industrial west. The tensions around gender in India can be understood in political, social, cultural and religious action to oppose a variety of interconnected oppressions. In India, especially now at the start of the third millennium we find ourselves experiencing the development of a new collective, ideology of socialist propaganda which draws attention to emerging individualization. What is visible in India now is rearticulating of gender relations as a result. Gender relations means going beyond feminism, in the sense that one may understand what are cultural norms which denigrate women and do not give women an identity, a voice of her own and the rightful status of even being a human being with dignity. Ideology unwittingly operates through various practices that produce popular culture. Though Indian cinema reproduces the gendered practices that are specific to Indian tradition as ideology. Undoubtedly the films’ media is more powerful in transcending the written words of the text and goes beyond it in establishing gender relations in man-woman relations and demonstrates the phase of cultural transition. In fact, cinema still is one of the vital medium through which one can directly deal with society and bring about a change. Besides looking at the issue of gender relations this book views the manner in which the writers’, referential sophistry gets transformed on the celluloid meaningfully by the film-makers. Also how through their art and craft of film-making they make a more powerful intervention converting the theme of literary texts into a more palpable and expansive discourse. Along with it the book brings forth a discussion on feminism and film theory and cultural context in the Indian set up.