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34 Soc. Change 1 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/sclcnge34 and id is 1 raw text is: 1-9 Social Change : March 2004 : Vol. 34 No. 1 The female character in Indian moving images Sujata Mukherjee* Our popular Hindi filmic genres are influenced by the Grand Narratives of Indian culture - namely, the two great epics - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and also, to some extent, our folk traditions, mythologies, Parsi theatre, and the Vedas. The contemporary intermingling of cultures in the era of globalisation has however laid the foundation for a new interpretation of the social situation. It is in this framework that this paper tries to deconstruct the erstwhile orientations towards gender, sexuality, modernity, and so on, all associated with the portrayal of the female character in Indian moving images. It is argued that the current global scenario is such that no culture can claim to be entirely original. A bricolage of ideas have created a postmodern situation that has been reflected in our tastes, preferences, outlooks, languages, essential concepts like truth, race, gender, God, life, and death - and most importantly, in our moving images. The process of de-colonialisation, the rise of transnational cultures and the spurt in satellite communications has compressed the world, and at the same time, given rise to a highly complex, global situation where the local is as important as the global, and there is no static standpoint as to where power actually resides. The intermingling of cultures across continents has created such a bricolage of hybrid identities that the boundaries among nation states have diffused. This hybridisation process has led to the emergence of the 'global ecumene signified as a cultural flow, where there is the coexistence of cultural homogeneity and cultural disorder, the spilling of cultures across boundaries, moving, in non-linear, 'non-isomorphic paths'. It is this question of the hybrid that is now the buzzword of contemporary social and philosophical circles. The 1 Muller, Bob 'Seeing Things' (Routledge) pp. 44-46. * UGC Senior Research Fellow, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Calcutta, Kolkata-700 001.

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