Initiating an Epistemic Rupture: Exploring Contraceptive Awareness in Janhit Mein Jaari (2022) and Chhatriwali (2023)
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Priyanka Tripathi
Source Title: Journal of International Women's Studies, Quartile: Q2
View abstract ⏷
In the context of social change, cinematic representations play a pertinent role in challenging existing knowledge systems, disrupting societal norms, and provoking critical reflections among audiences. The paper’s primary objective is to highlight the gendered burden upon women in India regarding the contraception narrative and its significance in ensuring reproductive justice. By analyzing two recent Hindi films, Janhit Mein Jaari [Issued in Public Interest] (2022) and Chhatriwali [Woman with Umbrella] (2023), the paper further aims to shed light on how these movies incite an epistemic rupture by challenging deeply ingrained beliefs and norms surrounding contraception. This research delves into how these films create an epistemic rupture by highlighting the socio-cultural nuances related to proper contraceptive awareness and the importance of comprehensive sexual education in achieving reproductive justice. Additionally, it highlights the power of visual storytelling to challenge systemic norms, encourage critical reflection, and pave the way for more inclusive and progressive attitudes toward contraception and reproductive health.
Breaking’ the Silence and ‘Fighting’ Back: Changing Representations of Female Response to Gender-Based Violence in Select Malayalam Films
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Priyanka Tripathi
Source Title: Gender Studies, Quartile: Q3
View abstract ⏷
Representation, particularly mediated forms such as cinema, has always been a powerful tool to enable social change. On the one hand, cinema functions as an instrument that reinstates hegemonic patriarchy, but on the other, it also becomes “a tool for political resistance and subversion” (Lauret, 1991, p. 66). Recently, South Asian cinema and, more specifically, the corpora of Malayalam cinema1 has emerged as an empowering platform that addresses structural and institutionalised inequalities of gender. Broadly, the paper discusses the shift in the representational praxis of gender-based violence in Malayalam cinema, more specifically, the female protagonists’ responses to violence. Specifically, the paper focuses on two recent Malayalam films, Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (2022) and The Teacher (2022). The films present vigilantism as a means of female empowerment, offering an alternative narrative to traditional portrayals of victimhood, and how it can resist feelings of powerlessness in the face of gender-based violence. Therefore, anchoring on Laura Mattoon D’Amore’s theoretical framework of vigilante feminism (2017), the study examines the intersection of vigilantism, gender-based violence, and cinematic representation, in an attempt to locate both the covert and overt forms and responses surrounding violence against women.
Female Fandom and the Anxieties of Agency: A Feminist Reading of the Indian Female Fan in Guddi (1971)
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Priyanka Tripathi
Source Title: Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, Quartile: Q2
View abstract ⏷
Academic research on fandom has sometimes stereotyped female fans, potentially influenced by the gendered dichotomy in fan studies. In the context of Indian fan discourses, there has been insufficient academic engagement with gender which poses a significant gap that requires attention. This article explores the intersection of gender, specifically focusing on women, in Indian fan studies. Through a feminist lens, the article undertakes a textual analysis of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi (‘The Doll’, 1971), possibly the first Hindi film to diegetically represent a female fan. The study examines how the film portrays female fandom and yet acknowledges that it falls short in successfully dismantling the pathologising stereotypes associated with femininity. Nevertheless, the film successfully initiates a dialogue on the presence and importance of female fan practices in India. It explores how the film acts as a catalyst for a narrative that highlights the agentic potential of fandom. Additionally, the article delves into the broader implications of the film within Indian fan studies, including its capacity to challenge gender norms and inspire further research on female fan practices in the context of Indian cinema.
Narrator Matters: Consent and Date Rape in Satyaprem Ki Katha
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Priyanka Tripathi
Source Title: Economic and Political Weekly, Quartile: Q3
View abstract ⏷
Sameer Vidwans’s Satyaprem Ki Katha (2023) is a notable contribution to the evolving corpus of social dramedies (comedy dramas) in Hindi cinema. This film sheds light on the pressing issue of gender-based violence, focusing on the themes of consent and the traumatic aftermath of date rape, an often-overlooked strain of intimate partner violence in the Indian context. The film addresses these topics in a romantic drama, highlighting the disturbing reality faced by many women. And, in doing so, contributes to the discourse about consent in dating and marriage, and highlights how the absence of clear, informed consent can turn both dating and marital relationships into potential spaces for violence and harm.
Representation of Aged Female Fans in Select Malayalam Films: An Intersectional Feminist Perspective
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Priyanka Tripathi
Source Title: Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Quartile: Q1
View abstract ⏷
An enormously loaded term in the current political scenario, ‘fan’ originates from the Latin word fanaticus, which translates to ‘fanatic’. Though the literal meaning points out to mere devotion to a particular person or practice, the idea of fanatic quickly metamorphosed to inculcate several negative (deviant) connotations. While media representations have continued to marginalize the subversive category of fans, academic inquiry into the terrain of fan studies has begun to disseminate the negative undertones that underlie the collective understanding and cultural construction of the said category. Therefore the dialectics of fan representations within the Indian cultural scenario appropriated the gendered hierarchization entrenched in the nation’s cultural psyche, thereby rendering Indian fandom a predominantly gendered space. The tendency within the mediated representations to associate Indian female fans with transgression/deviancy gets further complicated when the age variable comes into play. Anchoring on the disciplines of Fan studies and Gerontology, this paper examines the Malayalam films Manasinakkare (Beyond the Mind, 2003) and Mohanlal (2018) through the framework of intersectionality to analyze the multiple axes of inequalities that prompt complex discrimination against aged female fans in India and thereby tease out the inherent codes of social dysfunction these narratives highlight.
Stardom and Media Trial: Review of the Film Selfiee
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Priyanka Tripathi
Source Title: Media Asia, Quartile: Q2
View abstract ⏷
The Indian audience has always been enamored by the silver screen, creating a “cult-like following of actors and actresses” (Dickey, Citation1993, p. 52) which dates back to the 1930s. The Hindi film industry (Bollywood) underwent a pivotal shift in the 1940s when the studio system was destabilized and replaced by a star-centric system (Majumdar, Citation2009). This centrality—or as Srinivas (Citation2021) puts it, the recognition of the star as the “pretext and facilitator of exchanges between fans” (p. 85)—is a defining characteristic of Indian cinema. The evolution of the star system as the nexus of Indian cinematic discourse prompted newer modes of star-centric cinephilia. The percolation of cinephilia as a thematic construction beginning with Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi or The Doll in 1971 augmented the establishment of stars as a “generic feature” (Anjaria, Citation2021, p. 119) of Hindi cinema. Post-millennial films including Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon or I Want to be Madhuri Dixit (Arora, Citation2003), Om Shanti Om or Peace be with You (Khan, Citation2007), Billu (Priyadarshan, Citation2009), Heroine (Bhandarkar, Citation2012) explored distinct modalities of production, consumption and celebration of Hindi cinema and stardom. However, the profound upsurge of “liberalized media and surveillance culture” (Lau, Citation2022, p. 140) in South Asia began to destabilize the monopoly of the “gatekeepers of the celebrity industry” (Kurzman et al., Citation2007, p. 354). Films like Fan (Sharma, Citation2016), An Action Hero (Iyer, Citation2022), and most recently, Selfiee (Mehta, Citation2023) deftly explicate media’s percolation and even persecution of the star system. A remake of Jean Paul Lal’s Malayalam film Driving License (Citation2019), Selfiee is a mediated re-articulation of the quintessential star-fan relationship infused within the cinematic culture of India. The film revolves around Om Prakash Aggarwal (Emraan Hashmi), a Motor Vehicle Inspector, and his intense deewanapan (devotion) to the Bollywood superstar Vijay Kumar (Akshay Kumar). Selfiee (Mehta, Citation2023) adroitly replicates Akshay Kumar’s “Khiladi” (player) identity (Mukherjee, Citation2020, p. 196) while simultaneously reworking Emraan Hashmi’s “subversive”, “anti-hero” image (Chaudhuri, Citation2020, p. 59). Anchoring on the dynamics of the star-fan relationship, Selfiee (Mehta, Citation2023) unravels the intricacies of stardom and the transience of fame in the age of media sensationalism.
Locating Epistemic (Dis)Privilege of Female Fans in Select Indian Narratives
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Priyanka Tripathi
Source Title: Feminist Media Studies, Quartile: Q1
View abstract ⏷
As a relatively new category in academia, discourses on Indian Fan culture, both digital and non-digital, are filled with apprehensive perforations. Rapid globalization and the digitization of media have enabled western fan practices as well as a scholarship to permeate into Indian culture but with a twist of patriarchy fused into it. Despite the involvement of female fans in the first wave of western fan practices, feminist cultural studies rarely found a place within fan studies. This article analyses two films Fan (2016) and Mohanlal (2018), set against the backdrop of culturally diverse regional fandoms to critique the gendered heterogeneity within Indian fandom. While the films selected for analysis ostensibly seem to celebrate the rich culture of media fans in India, nonetheless, they also serve as controlling images that reinstate the hermeneutical injustice perpetrated on female fans, thus marginalizing them. This article aims to tease out the epistemic injustice embedded in the gendered space of Indian fandom and calls attention to the need of establishing a feminist standpoint in the discourse.
The Pilgrim’s Progress: An Analysis of the Journey to Self-Discovery in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Rajeesh Rajkumar
Source Title: Avshamegh Indian Journal of English Literature,
View abstract ⏷
The sacramental journey towards self-realization and self-purification has always been a rite of passage in the Indian culture. The journey which concurrently allows the ‘pilgrim’ to both evade and experience the divine is profoundly elucidated in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. The paper attempts to explicate how the work coalesce the outwards (physical) and inwards (spiritual) journey in Siddhartha’s quest for self-discovery.
Deconstructing the Machine: A Study of the Conflicts in the Imitation Game
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Rajeesh Rajkumar
Source Title: ROOTS Interdisciplinary Journal of Multidisciplinary Researches,
Vikruti Evam Prakruti: An Analysis of the Identity Crisis in Devdutt Pattanaik’s The Pregnant King
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and K Varsha
Source Title: International Journal of English Language, Literature,
View abstract ⏷
Among the stories narrated in Mahabharata, lies the story of a Yuvanashva, a childless King, who accidently drinks a magic potion meant to make his wives pregnant and gives birth to a son. Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik reiterates the story through his fictional work The Pregnant King examining the blurring lines in gender roles. Yuvanashva’s entire life becomes a dilemma of whether he should act like the mother or father of his child. The codes of Dharma tells him to pretend like a father and king, while his heart tells him that he is the mother of his child. Ironically, the king who tried to be the embodiment of manhood and proponent of Dharma, longed till his last breath to be called ‘mother’ by his son. The paper expounds to analyse the identity crisis faced by Yuvanashva, befuddled and trapped in the grey areas between fatherhood and motherhood
The Reign of Deceit’s: A Retrospection of the Real Antagonist
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Kiran Jayan
Source Title: Ashvamegh Indian Journal of English Literature,
View abstract ⏷
The vileness of the deceivers has been portrayed to possess the power of a class higher than those held by the antagonists in literature since time immemorial. This paper endeavors to find the zeal such characters possess and how they cause the birth of the actual antagonist analyzing the roles played by Manthara and Shakuni from the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata respectively. The power withheld by the deceivers and how they trifle with the best intentions of the people while they themselves remain under the shadow of the antagonist is also presented.
Moiling to Survive: A Daunting Portrayal of the Womanless World in Mathrubhoomi
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Kiran Jayan
Revamping the Myth: A Reading of the Percy Jackson Series
Thinking Beyond Pink and Blue: A Reading of The House of My Soul
Ancient Promises: A Saga of Broken Promises
Dr Parvathy N, Dr Parvathy N, and Donna Pious
