The images and the sound in a film have a large impact on how we see the world, and the representations used are nothing but comment on society. However, these representations add greatly to our worldview and how we perceive society. It helps both the producer (of the meaning) and receiver to speak and gather knowledge about social happening or social changes.
Indian cinema is filled with polarized representations of girls nearly as good and evil, pure and polluted, wife and whore. Often, wider political and social concerns or religious discourses and mythological character attributes are mapped symbolically into female characters both in Bollywood and regional cinema and shape how female characters are portrayed. Female characters are often linked to religious or mythological iconography including the Ramayana’s Sita indicating chastity and vulnerability, to Durga as avenging and righteous, to Kali as destructive and violent. Any women, on off-screen, who do not conform to idealized notions of femininity, are coded as bad, polluting and threatening of patriarchal status quo. This includes women who are a conscious or unconscious threat to the established order and who are polarized against truer women who are symbolic markers of national identity, morality, chastity, and worthy of reproducing tradition. These bad women often meet an untimely and self-destructive moment on the screen, unless their power is successfully contained and curtailed by the men in their lives.
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The most remarkable thing about the film Kothanodi is a radically different way during which portrays motherhood, otherwise, away revered idea, both in Indian cinema also as actually too. Director Bhaskar Hazarika shows another questionable side of it. For him, the reverence for mothers happens in patriarchal cultures and is not entirely based on reality. In real life, mothers, and more generally women, are as fallible as men and are equally capable of giving in to their dark sides. “Qualities like goodness and evil are gender-neutral,” he says and so he does not treat the lead protagonists of the film as ‘women characters’ but as simply ‘characters.’ This is the rationale why the film is one among the foremost intriguing, beguiling and disturbing feminist statements that one has seen on Indian screen in recent times.
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Kothanodi is unusual and noteworthy in its portrayal of women, standing out as a female-centric film. Women in Bollywood are often portrayed in traditional ways and while Hazarika frames his female characters in traditional clothing and roles, their actions are sometimes abhorrent and abnormal, the very juxtaposition of what Bollywood has taught us to expect. A reinterpretation of the normal maternal trope, extending the concepts of Bollywood’s monstrous Other women – an idea supported Barbara Creed’s analysis of girls in Hollywood horror and Freudian ideas around rejecting the Other– portrayed as sadistic, neurotic, threatening and narcissistic evil souls existing outside of acceptable boundaries of gender which invite divine punishment. Barbara Creed’s monstrous abject feminine presents an archaic mother refusing to relinquish control of her child and therefore the monstrous other feminine portrayed in Hindi horror cinema refuses to let go of desire and the gaze. In Kothanodi, this desire manifests as desire for power, the devil, and wealth.
Typical troops, associated with Durga, such as the avenging women with a cause are avoided. Instead, Hazarika invites the audience to travel, into a mere snapshot of four female protagonists’ lives and we are invited to gaze, momentarily, at the potential horror of women’s unrestrained and unaccountable possibility. More unsettling still is the lack of retribution. These stories are incomplete, the unrestrained behavior not admonished or punished. Threatening female characters are usually subverted and finally vanquished during the filmic narrative to enable normality to resume. This is only partially true in Kothanodi, and therefore the unsettling nature of simply ‘getting away with murder’ plays out before our eyes.
Simply Kothanodi is the multi-narrative script revolves around four shades of motherhood – about a mother who puts her daughter’s life at stake for her pride; a woman who has given birth but still isn’t a mother; a mother who makes a represent her child; and a mother who never wanted to be one within the first place.
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