Assignment Code: MWG-003/AST/TMA-2022

Course Code: MWG-003

Assignment Name: Constructing Gender through Arts and Media

Year: 2022

Verification Status: Verified by Professor

Q No.1. Choose a novel written by an Indian women writer that has been adapted into a film (Bollywood or Vernacular/Regional). Critically analyse that novel and the film using the units of Block 1 and Block 2. (For example, Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar or Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake) (Marks: 50)

Ans) The 2003 book The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri starts with the birth of Gogol in a New England hospital in 1968, far from Kolkata, where his parents grew up. The name of the book comes from Gogol's attachment to his name, which is the same as that of a famous Russian writer. The Namesake is about the problems and confusion he had with his parents' choice of name, which made him want to change it. At the end of the book, Gogol, who was already Nikhil, finds the writer again and finds a way to connect with his own father.

Sooni Taraporevala wrote the script for Mira Nair's 2006 movie, which goes right to Kolkata in the late 1970s. You can tell because the Howrah Bridge has a cantilevered span. People know the city from its protest marches, where the familiar "hammer and sickle" flag and a picture of the goddess Durga are held high. Ashima's sweet singing floats over, leading to scenes where Ashima (Tabu) meets Ashoke (Irrfan) for the first time as a potential bride. The movie also ends with Ashima singing again, which is a way for her to show that she wants to go back to Kolkata for a few months every year and to her music.

This last part is what makes the movie stand out and make it a classic in its own right, just like Lahiri's book is a classic because it spends a lot of time on the pain and problems of growing up close to your parents but still separate from them. The Namesake was the first of many books about the ABCD experience, but calling it a book about the ABCD experience only shows one of its many themes. Tanuja Desai Hidier's young adult novel Born Confused came out in 2002. More recent ones include Mira Jacob's Good Talk, Sejal Shah's upcoming This is One Way to Dance, and Sopan Deb's Missed Translations: Meeting the Immigrant Parents who Raised Me.

Even though a screen adaptation needs to be true to the book, it also needs to be visually appealing and expressive. For example, how people talk and how they look when they talk are just as important as what they say, and there are good examples of how the best prose writers do this.

Ashima leaves Kolkata and moves to cold New England, where the dripping ice from the eaves makes its own slow music. She used to know how things worked back home, but now she has to teach herself everything from how to use the subway to the fact that some sweaters shrink too much in the washing machine.

It's the kind of education that helps her get close to and understand Ashoke, whom she only met a week before their arranged marriage. Irrfan Khan played Ashoke in a memorable role. Take, for example, the scene in which Ashima has to deal with the memory of how upset Ashoke is that his sweaters have shrunk. This is one of the things she learns and has to remember about her new husband. In Lahiri's book, this is part of a very important, urgent sentence. In the movie, Ashoke scolds his wife softly while holding up the sweater. His wife then locks herself in the bathroom to cry softly. Ashoke gets her to come out by teasing her and calling her "my funny Ashima" and "my crazy Ashima" over and over again.

Ashoke Ganguli, played by Irrfan, is more than just the quiet, humble, and funny character he is in Lahiri's book. (He isn't "slightly plump" or have a "slight pot belly," either, like he does by the end of the book.) Even though he dies a little more than halfway through the movie, he is still a part of everything in the movie, including his family and their memories. Irrfan's slow, lingering looks, the way he lifts his eyes to look at someone or out the window, his crooked smile, his slowly greying, frizzy hair, and the one time he laughs show a lot more about Ashoke Ganguli and what's going on underneath, like the nightmare that bothers him, especially in the early years of his marriage. The storey of the accident that gave Gogol his name and how he told it to his son many years later is told in a book and a movie.

The last sentence is added by Nair's film, which gives the exchange between father and son more visual meaning and more of the film's aching, almost indescribable love.

Gogol's emotional, rebellious struggle with his name shows more than just his anger. It shows the unspoken problems of being an unwilling stranger in your own land, even among the people you call your own. In Nair's version of The Namesake, two people, Ashoke and Ashima, fall in love in a country that is their home but not really their own, just like their two children, Gogol (Kal Penn) and his sister Sonia (Sahira Nair).

It's a love that can't be put into words and doesn't really need declarations of love, though Ashoke sometimes wishes it were different. In the scene, Ashoke walks around the Victoria Memorial with his wife. He gives an embarrassed nod as his wife walks away. When he first sees Ashima with his parents, he gives her a half-smile and feels like he has found a new love.

It is the closeness that doesn't need to be said out loud in a book, because Ashima never tells her husband that she tried on his shoes the first time, but she does tease him about being impressed by his shoes on that same walk around the Memorial. Ashoke hesitantly tells Ashima that he wants her to go with him to another town, Cleveland, for a short time. He never comes back from Cleveland. It's the way they look at each other through the glass at the departure gate. Ashoke's eyes stay on Ashima for a long time as he slowly nods his head. The space between him and the other passengers grows, and Ashima smiles as she turns away. Love is like a treasure or a memory that you always remember.

Q. No. 2. Discuss street theatre in India from a gender perspective, using this picture as the theme. (You can use Block 3 as reference) (Marks: 50)

Ans) The body as a place to learn has become more popular for a number of reasons. Whether it's medicine, philosophy, or the arts, the way the body works and how it works have always been at the centre of research. In the study of the body, caste, race, colour, religion, and nationality are important, but sex, gender, and sexuality are also very important. The material construction of the sexualized body is a place where other inscriptions, both forced and engineered, compete with each other. Body wounds are the easiest way to punish people, especially those who are on the outside of society. In a casteist society like India, where untouchability is still used, the body as a place of oppression and resistance becomes even more urgent and important. The body is part of nature, culture, and society all at the same time. This is the starting point for the study of gender and theatre.

The way the body is described in language, art, literature, and the performing arts becomes the codes on which hierarchical structures are based. In other words, a person is born into a gender, caste, and religion that are already set. In theatre, it becomes even more of an art form and a universal category. Based on these practises, ideas of beauty, health, sanity, and dignity are formed. At this point, it's also interesting to see how contradictory ways of building images can coexist in the same system, even though they both use the same hierarchical method. Even though gods like Lord Krishna and Goddess Kali, who are said to be "beautiful," have "dark" skin, one can still sell fairness creams successfully. The archetypal dark beauty gives way to the industrialised, Eurocentric "fairness," but the same colour, caste, and beauty hierarchy is still in place.

The study of theatre and performance is based on the rules of body language. Most studies about rituals and performance norms in India assume that both men and women take part in community rituals. In reality, though, women in the performing arts are a separate subgenre of performance that is rarely treated as part of folklore or performance. In some situations, like puberty rituals, the women guard that space as their own and don't let anyone else in. In different parts of India, there are different rules about how women can take part. That is something that can be studied on its own. The fact that Victorian morality was the most important in colonial India had a big effect on how men and women did in their jobs. People thought it was rude for a woman to be looked at in public. Sharmila Rege shows how caste was used to force women in Maharashtra to perform for men (Singh, 2009, p. 1-24). This caste-gender dynamic in performance was only made more stable by making sure that forms in which middle-class and upper-caste women took part became "classical." In this way, for example, the arguments between Rukmini Devi and Balasaraswathi are interesting.

Oral stories that are performed as a group and don't follow a straight line have been important for both gender and theatre. Studies of these kinds of stories, like those by Iravati Kave, Paula Richman, Alf Hiltebeitel, and others, have brought to light a number of interesting versions of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The most important thing about both gender and theatre is "ways of seeing." Different kinds of theatre have been created based on the role of the audience. When you look at things through a "gender lens," you have to learn and unlearn a lot about gender.

Theater on the can be defined by its history, like Shakespearean theatre, its style, like Noh theatre, or its ideas, like feminist or Dalit theatre. Sometimes, theatre can also be used to describe the style of presentation, such as street theatre, classical theatre, or post-modern theatre.

The body presented on stage almost always represents something. There cannot be a totally idiosyncratic gesture because our social and cultural contexts encode and imprint gestures. As Judith Butler would say, they are "codes" that get the job done. In a place like India, where traditional and modern forms of performance coexist, these rules are set by the performance systems. The code for a symbolic mime of a flower or bird would come from a certain dance tradition of a region; a melody that is used might have a ritualistic meaning, like a lullaby or wailing; and an instrument will become a symbol of the region, caste, and gender.

The main goal of grassroots feminist groups putting on street plays is to bring attention to the fact that common women have been left out of stories about Indian history. In place of the elite, high-caste Hindu virangana women, the street plays try to make the common women seem like they are from the tribal, Dalit, and other marginalised groups. Its goal was to show, through the women's everyday experiences, how they fought for democratic rights, environmental protection, and a public-private space without violence where they could get the economic security they need to live healthily. These performances help them realise that they have the power to bring about long-lasting changes in society. They came together to create a women's culture in their own communities because they had all been marginalised, excluded, or oppressed. Garlough, an Indian feminist scholar, thinks that the way street theatre reinterprets and connects pieces of oral history, memory, and folk tradition aims to rethink everyday actions as revolutionary, heroic, and, in the end, possibly part of an Indian feminist consciousness. So, even though people's experiences are different and unique, the aesthetics of Indian feminism make up a feminist constituency because they have all been oppressed.