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 âferocious female elementâ 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 âKaliâ that came to be hailed in mainstream Brahmanical tradition, the âfeminine rageâ 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 âRamayanaâ (traditionally attributed to sage-author Valmiki) were vastly different from Kali, perhaps because these characters were formulated in the mainstream Brahmanical tradition, wherein the âvirtuesâ 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 Valmikiâs magnum opus, with their folklores and songs largely focussing on the sufferings of Sita which they could relate to, understanding her as the âessential orphanâ 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 Ravanaâs clutches), to undergo an âagni parikshaâ (fire ordeal) to prove her chastity. Sitaâs 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 Senguptaâs âSitayanaâ (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.Â
Draupadiâs rage in sage Ved Vyasaâs âMahabharataâ 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 onlookersâ hypocrisy. In Pratibha Rayâs âYajnaseni: The Story of Draupadiâ, Draupadi raises questions against the injustice meted to women in the Kshatriya Moral Code, and in Mahasweta Deviâs âDraupadiâ (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 Draupadiâs 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 âfeminineâ in mainstream Indian cinema came the decisive, strong female of the Hindi parallel cinema, spearheaded by the âNew Wave Glamour Queensâ or the âAngry Young Women of the 70s Indian Cinemaâ: Shabana Azmi, Deepti Naval and Smita Patil. In the 1974 Shyam Benegal directorial âAnkurâ, 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 Mehtaâs âMirch Masalaâ (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 womanâs difficulty of shifting between the traditional and the modern realms, through on-screen characters which showed them as âliberatedâ in their educational and ambitious pursuits, but subjugated to the male protagonistsâ 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 âfemale gazeâ in direction: Anvita Duttâs âBulbbulâ (2020) and Amar Kaushikâs âStreeâ (2018) turn the misogynistic âchudailâ (witch) trope on its head by employing supernatural elements to showcase a woman retaliating in a ferocious âdeviâ form by punishing the society that was built upon patriarchal violence and injustice meted out to women. Recent films like Jasmeet K. Reenâs âDarlingsâ (2022) and Anubhav Sinhaâs âThappadâ (2020) show women independently seeking justice for the domestic violence inflicted upon them, by taking legal recourse in the latter film, and taking âthe law into their own handsâ 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 âsubservience = virtueâ propaganda of yesteryear films.
REFERENCES:
- Luthra, R. (2014) âClearing Sacred Ground: Women-Centred Interpretations of the Indian Epicsâ in Feminist Formations, Summer 2014, Vol. 26, No. 2 . Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press & JSTOR. pp. 135-161.
- Sengupta, M. & Ganjoo, M. (2021) âThe ‘New’ Woman In Bollywood: Reconstruction Of The Feminine Identity And Its Social Acceptanceâ in Shodh Sarita, January-March 2021, Vol. 8, Issue 9 . Research Gate. pp. 21-25.