Fierce of face, dark with flowing hair and four-armed,
Dakshina Kalika, divine, adorned with a garland of heads.
In her lotus hands on the left, she holds a severed head and a sword.
She bestows sanctuary and blessings with her right hands.
The “Dakshina Kali Dhyan Mantra” hymn of the Ancient Sanskritic texts conclusively proves that the image of the ‘ferocious female element’ has always been deeply entrenched in Indian culture. From the mother-goddesses worshipped in Ancient East India by the indigenous communities (forest-dwellers, hunters and pastoralists) to propitiate nature against calamities and diseases that could destroy their livelihoods, to the “Kali” that came to be hailed in mainstream Brahmanical tradition, the ‘feminine rage’ has been used as a defence against the natural and social evils that posed a constant danger to the human worshippers. This feature of goddess-worship continued into modern times. In the early 20th century Bengal, the Goddess Kali was invoked by revolutionaries as a symbol for armed struggle against British colonial rule.
The female characters depicted in the ancient Indian epic “Ramayana” (traditionally attributed to sage-author Valmiki) were vastly different from Kali, perhaps because these characters were formulated in the mainstream Brahmanical tradition, wherein the ‘virtues’ of chastity and devotion (pativrata) were more strictly enforced in women. The image of Sita has been moulded by contemporary and present-day rural women storytellers quite differently from Valmiki’s magnum opus, with their folklores and songs largely focussing on the sufferings of Sita which they could relate to, understanding her as the ‘essential orphan’ who was found by King Janaka in a field at the tip of a plough (Nabaneeta Dev Sen, 2009), and as the wife of the revered King Rama, who, in conforming to his values and serving as an example to his public, demanded Sita (who had been rescued by him from Ravana’s clutches), to undergo an ‘agni pariksha’ (fire ordeal) to prove her chastity. Sita’s refusal to do so is viewed by these women as her exercising her agency, and her asking her mother-earth to take her back if she had been ever-loyal to her husband, is seen either as an act of self-abnegation, or as her embracing liberty from social norms. In Mallika Sengupta’s “Sitayana” (2009), Sita realises that she has a duty larger than the one to her husband: The duty to uphold justice toward women and other subaltern people. In decrying the reign of Rama which marginalises its women and lower classes, she is shown to be more than capable of carrying out the feminist dharma.
Draupadi’s rage in sage Ved Vyasa’s “Mahabharata” is more direct, as, after she was dragged mercilessly into the Kaurava court after having been staked and lost in a game of dice by Yudhishthira, her husband (of the five Pandavas), to Duryodhana (eldest of the 100 Kauravas, the nemesis of the Pandava brothers), her first instinct was to question the legality of her being oppressed as such: If Yudhishthira had staked and lost himself before her, did he have the right to stake her? Her attempted disrobing (only made unsuccessful by Lord Krishna lengthening her robe in a depiction of his godly miracles), and the lack of protest from her husbands and the elderly courtiers at this assault to her ‘dignity’ was what led to her display of rage, with her exposing the onlookers’ hypocrisy. In Pratibha Ray’s “Yajnaseni: The Story of Draupadi”, Draupadi raises questions against the injustice meted to women in the Kshatriya Moral Code, and in Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” (2009), the protagonist, Dopdi Mehjen, an Adivasi member of the Naxalite Movement in eastern India, showcases her rage by confronting the Senanayak (police chief) with her naked, assaulted body (a result of his orders to his subordinates to torture her). While her circumstances were in many ways different from Draupadi’s in Mahabharata, her having gone through the many horrors that her predecessor escaped, they are both similar in their outspokenness and unwillingness to back down from societal pressure.
In the midst of the beautiful, dutiful and docile image of the ‘feminine’ in mainstream Indian cinema came the decisive, strong female of the Hindi parallel cinema, spearheaded by the “New Wave Glamour Queens” or the “Angry Young Women of the 70s Indian Cinema”: Shabana Azmi, Deepti Naval and Smita Patil. In the 1974 Shyam Benegal directorial “Ankur”, Azmi, as a Dalit woman named Lakshmi, has to fend for herself after the disappearance of her husband by entering the realm of the upper-caste Zamindari household, but nonetheless expresses her rage strongly on the injustice of her husband being beaten by the zamindar after his return to the village. Lakshmi was a woman owning her sexuality and still rallying against social injustice, something rarely shown in Indian Cinema in contemporary times. In Ketan Mehta’s “Mirch Masala” (1987) set during the colonial period in India, Patil and Naval, as rural women Sonbai and Saraswati respectively, lead the womenfolk in revolution against the patriarchal violence meted out to them by the village.
The female characters in the post-liberalisation Indian Cinema reflected the everyday woman’s difficulty of shifting between the traditional and the modern realms, through on-screen characters which showed them as ‘liberated’ in their educational and ambitious pursuits, but subjugated to the male protagonists’ goals. It is only recently that the women in mainstream Indian Cinema emerged as main protagonists, with sufficient nuance given to their rage through adoption of a “female gaze” in direction: Anvita Dutt’s “Bulbbul” (2020) and Amar Kaushik’s “Stree” (2018) turn the misogynistic ‘chudail’ (witch) trope on its head by employing supernatural elements to showcase a woman retaliating in a ferocious ‘devi’ form by punishing the society that was built upon patriarchal violence and injustice meted out to women. Recent films like Jasmeet K. Reen’s “Darlings” (2022) and Anubhav Sinha’s “Thappad” (2020) show women independently seeking justice for the domestic violence inflicted upon them, by taking legal recourse in the latter film, and taking ‘the law into their own hands’ in a black-comic fashion, in the former. These films show women disassociating completely from their traditional roles to exact full-blown street-justice, and are a far cry from the ‘subservience = virtue’ propaganda of yesteryear films.
REFERENCES:
- Luthra, R. (2014) ‘Clearing Sacred Ground: Women-Centred Interpretations of the Indian Epics’ in Feminist Formations, Summer 2014, Vol. 26, No. 2 . Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press & JSTOR. pp. 135-161.
- Sengupta, M. & Ganjoo, M. (2021) ‘The ‘New’ Woman In Bollywood: Reconstruction Of The Feminine Identity And Its Social Acceptance’ in Shodh Sarita, January-March 2021, Vol. 8, Issue 9 . Research Gate. pp. 21-25.