Indian Cinema as a Contradictory yet Efficacious Tool for Empowering Women

Abstract

Women in general spend their lives being always conscious of their surroundings. The way they walk, talk, smile, react, crack a joke everything is under continuous supervision. And their male counterparts enjoy the privilege of being the supervisors or even better judges of their moral standards. For ages women have been pulled and pushed into the backstage in the name of culture, tradition and values. Cinema has come a long way from depicting women as objects of admiration to women as self-reliant individuals equally responsible for the development of the house and the society. But there are still discernible barriers to achieving absolute women and men equality, and the most important of them is the mental setup that has been framed and reframed over centuries with men at the vantage point. Now a days, women- oriented cinema is breaking old records and setting up new benchmarks even for men- oriented films. It attracts a comparatively larger audience and satiates their appetite for content driven films. The present paper attempts to study cinema’s contribution in developing a less patriarchal and more equal consciousness.