Book Title: The Male Gaze Redefined: Through Mother India and Other Classics of Indian Cinema
Written by: Shoma A. Chatterji
Language: English
Classification : Reference/Cinema
Publisher: Hachette India
Format: Paperback
Page Extent : 232
Price: INR 499
Redefining male gaze in cinema as one of sympathy and compassion
The theory behind the male and female gaze has been rather confusing as to who has what. It is this which we need to clarify first before I review Shoma A. Chatterji’s latest book: The Male Gaze Redefined: Through Mother India and Other Classics of Indian Cinema.
Laura Mulvey who first raised the question of this gaze had coined the term male gaze in her iconic works Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema and Feminist Film Theory, sometimes during the mid-1970s. While discussing the heterosexual male gaze in cinema (broadly media), she identified this gaze as something which ‘objectified’ women and was the basis of how we placed women in society.
The reasoning behind this was that since women back then were hardly part of the crew – the director, the cameraman and editor all being males – the woman was viewed solely through the male lens. Despite the feminist movement this gaze or view, even in liberal societies, hoped to ensure a film’s success. The women unconsciously or consciously become tacit supporters of this gaze, an extension of patriarchy.
In her latest book, she looks at Mehboob Khan’s Mother India, Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar, Vijay Anand’s Guide, Gulzar’s Aandhi, Shyam Benegal’s Zubeidaa, Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Andhi Gali, Mrinal Sen’s Ek Din Pratidin and Nabyendu Chatterjee’s Parasuramer Kuthar.
The ‘male gaze’ is, therefore, a theory propounded by Laura Mulvey. There is no ‘female gaze’ as such to counter it but both men and women are equally capable of “gaze” but in different ways. The argument that Chatterji, well-known film scholar and author, puts forward in her latest book is that for a film’s success – art house or commercial – it need not necessarily depend on exhibiting the woman’s body as a sexual object. To argue her case, Chatterji selects films that defy a certain stereotyping of women as made by these male directors.
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Whatever maybe the argument, the camera has always acted as the voyeur. Men and women directors can choose to visually caress the body like an artist painting a picture as visible to his/her ‘way of seeing’. Perhaps in mass media such as in advertising, feminists have come a long way in protesting against advertisements that use a woman’s body to sell anything from cars to liquor, leading to their bans.
In television too, women are increasingly shown to be focusing on their own sexual pleasures and not just as objects of pleasure of men. The films and series on the OTT channels bear this out.
The book The Male Gaze Redefined challenges the Mulvey (who has since retracted from her position on this) binary by rejecting male directorship as a monolith of voyeurism. Instead, she writes that by choice or inadvertently, some directors have shaped the narrative in different ways. Even while the story maybe rooted in patriarchy, the directors have not objectified the woman’s body; rather they have bestowed a woman’s perspective upon the audiences.
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So while the female gaze is not the antonym of male gaze, it certainly gives agency to women’s issues. When one probes a little deeply into Charulata, one discovers that Ray, despite being a man, has ‘gifted’ his heroine, Charu, with her own point of view and her own “female ‘gaze. She argues Ray’s concern with the woman and with her social emancipation began with Mahanagar, which he followed up with Kapurush. He presents the women in these films not as the shadows of their men, but as individuals in their own right.
According to Chatterji, we tend to cite western examples of emancipation when back home filmmakers such as Bimal Roy, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen showed great sensitivity in their portrayal of women. In Ek Din Pratidin by Sen, we do not even see the heroine for much of the film, though it is about a woman who fails to return home after work!
In her earlier book The Female Gaze: Essays on Gender Media and Society, Chatterji scrutinizes the intertwined fabric of social and financial milieu that determines a woman’s place in society. Her observations on the systemic silence of women, the physical and mental abuse, and the stereotypes that women are forced to live up to, are shown in media not to reform, but reinforce.
In her latest book, she looks at Mehboob Khan’s Mother India, Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar, Vijay Anand’s Guide, Gulzar’s Aandhi, Shyam Benegal’s Zubeidaa, Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Andhi Gali, Mrinal Sen’s Ek Din Pratidin and Nabyendu Chatterjee’s Parasuramer Kuthar.
The author argues that these films bestowed on women their own pair of eyes in which to see the world. In her earlier work Woman at the Window while studying the material universe of Tagore’s short stories and interlinking it with women in Indian cinema, she credits Ray in giving Charulata an opportunity to see her own world though the symbolic binoculars.
Soma A. Chatterji‘s works, therefore, are great assets of film and gender studies urging us to look at the works of great writers in newer eyes, and through their celluloid readings.
So much for art cinema, and the sharper feminist lens, but when it comes to mainstream cinema, despite a handful of women directors, it has always been one of titillation through item songs and a greater show of women’s flesh. Even a reputed director like Raj Kapoor was guilty of this with his later films.
Shoma A, Chatterji’s selection is mostly that of the outliers in Indian cinema, though opening up a new thread of argument that for the critical and commercial success of a cinema, a film can also dare to challenge this male gaze. Perhaps in including some more contemporary films, she could have widened the scope of this argument further as to whether this gaze has really changed or shifted. It could have brought into purview some films which bombed at the box office in spite of a strong male gaze.
In the days to come, the book will definitely act as an excellent reference for more points and counter points.
Image Courtesy: Internet Collection
For a living, Manjira Majumdar has traversed the world of reporting, feature writing and editing. Today an independent journalist, she likes writing essays, fiction and translating from Bengali to English.
