66. Dr. Jigna Vyas

Abstract 66
Dr. Jigna Vyas                                      

Tradition of Dissent in Sub-continental Films:
A Reading of Manish Jha’s ‘Matrubhumi’ and Shoaib Mansoor’s ‘Bol’Abstract

Abstract

Cinema is one of the most revolutionary art forms today. Locally and globally film as an art form is being used to provoke, agitate, ask questions and generate new politicized communities.  Experimental films in India and Pakistan have contested political, social and cultural status quo. Any art is inevitably a cultural text. Any text can be said to have artistic merits if it has socio-cultural concerns. As an art form a text (visual or verbal) shapes the society and vice versa. Socially, culturally and politically marginalized groups across the globe have found adequate place in visual media like film. Different reading strategies help us examine different visual/verbal texts so that we can hear and understand the voice of dissent in them. The ulterior aim of such depiction is to expand the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’.

Indian film director Manish Jha’s ‘Matrubhumi- A Nation without Women’ (2005) and Pakistani film director Shoaib Mansoor’s ‘Bol’ (2011) depict women issues of two different religions of two different countries. ‘Matrubhumi’s Kalki is the last surviving woman who like Draupadi of the Mahabharata undergoes tremendous sexual oppression in Indian patriarchal society. She lives in a world which has become barren as a result of female infanticide. The film depicts the horrors of life in a woman-less world. The narrative of ‘Bol’ is based in the heart of Lahore and is placed in a house full of daughters. It is the story of a girl who challenges the mindset that closes all doors of light on women of the house and considers them nothing more than a machine that produce children. It also takes into account the situation of transgender in Pakistani society.

The paper makes an attempt to assess two films from two countries and see how they depict women characters in essentially patriarchal worlds of two cultures. Film as visual text with its own aesthetics very effectively presents the predicament of women and helps the reader to understand it in broader political context.