Kimberly's Thesis: Chapt. 2: Review of Literature

Literature Review

Movies play a very important role in the lives of the people who go to watch movies at a regular basis. Globalization of media brings opportunities to broaden the youth’s outlooks and provide more equal access to information. Technological advances bring the promise of new skills and greater youth participation in society, but also increase the risk of child utilization and informational divides.

Television is the dominant medium for young people—and adults—around the world. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the number of television channels, household television sets and hours spent watching television more than doubled. The Indian Telecommunication industry, it is the third largest telecommunication network in the world and the second largest in terms of number of wireless connections. For the past decade or so, telecommunication activities have gained momentum in India. Efforts have been made from both governmental and non-governmental platforms to enhance the infrastructure. The idea is to help modern telecommunication technologies to serve all segments of India’s culturally diverse society, and to transform it into a country of technologically aware people.

Television ownership is growing fast, and it has plenty more room to expand. The current number of television households is about the same as in the United States, though for India that amounts to only about half of the country’s households, compared with 98 percent in the United States.

Satellite television reaches all continents, offering increasing numbers of channels targeting specific market segments, including young viewers. In the late 1990s, some 50 television channels directed specifically to children were launched. However, this has caused national television services in many areas to cut back their own production of programs. Average daily use of television among youth around the world with access ranges from between 1.5 hours to more than four hours; many of these youth will rarely read a book. The prominence of television in young people’s daily lives makes it one of their major information sources about the world around them. The prevalence of television viewing among young people raises serious concerns about recent national and global trends in the television industry. The rampant consolidation of commercial media has meant the dominance of only a handful of large and powerful companies. In industrialized countries, there has been recent protest over rising levels of aggression, obesity, substance abuse, eating disorders and unsafe sexual behavior among youth, increasingly attributed to commercial media aimed at children and youth. Unfortunately much of the content contains characters and messages that, at best, are simply not relevant to local cultures, and at worst convey violent images and mass marketing messages. Plus, public broadcasters that have traditionally produced some of the best-quality children’s media have had to reduce their youth programming in the face of funding cuts and growing competition from private channels. Clearly the case for media pluralism, which is access to media that effectively, communicates and supplies relevant content, applies to young people as well.

Market Research

In any movie there has to be a market research done, as they say trends in Bollywood keeps changing and moving in cycles. An idea that is relevant today may not be applicable tomorrow, but the idea never dies only that it should await its time. According to Derek Bose movies like ‘Page 3’ (2005) or ‘Black’ (2005) there would be difficult to even find a distributer in the seventies and the eighties and likely not to have any distributers. ‘Jai Santoshi Maa’ (1975) had made a box office history but if it was in this century it would not have lasted for even a week. Derek Bose opined that if movies like ‘Main Prem Ki Devani Hoon’ (2003), ‘Chingari’ (2006), ‘Fight Club’ (2006) would have been a success if the directors re-released it in the future. In a hurry to produce the movies most producers have clones of the last big hits, most film-makers lose sight of this fundamental facts during the time of release. Why do we need to have market researchers, it is to influence the creation of bench mark among the audience through a variety of means, be it publicity means or launch announcements and even feeding the gossip mills.

Hindi cinema has been a major point of reference for Indian culture in this century. It has shaped and expressed the changing scenarios of modern India to an extent that no preceding art form could ever achieve. Hindi cinema has influenced the way in which people perceive various aspects of their own lives. The three movies that the researcher has discussed have three different points of view towards women.

Mohra in 1994 which stared Akshay Kumar (as Amar Saxena), Raveena Tandon (as Roma Singh), Sunil Shetty (as Vishal Agnihotri) and Naseeruddin Shah (as Mr Jindal). Vishal is imprisoned in the jail where Roma's father is the superintendent. Roma goes to visit her father's jail in order to write an article about it. There some prisoners try to rape her. Vishal rescues her from them. Roma finds out that Vishal is imprisoned for murder. On probing she finds that Vishal had been married and his wife's sister had been raped and killed by some boys in her college who were under the influence of drugs. Due to a corrupt prosecutor the boys went innocent. They then tried to rape Vishal's wife. She stabbed herself before they could get to her. In response, Vishal killed all four of them and got imprisoned for it. Roma, with the help of Mr Jindal, the blind owner of the paper she works for, arranges a second ‘trial’ for Vishal in which his case is reviewed and he is released. Mr Jindal convinces Vishal that he should become a vigilante and kill the real culprits behind his wife and sister-in-law's deaths that is the drug dealers. Amar Saxena is a police officer who is also involved in busting the two main drug dealers of their city, the evocatively named Tyson and Gibran.

The film ‘Mother India’ made in 1957 by Mehboob. This is the story of Radha (Nargis Dutt) who marries Shamoo (Raj Kumar) and comes to his village. There she discovers that Shamoo's mother, Sundar Chachi, has pawned their family land to pay for the wedding. The village usurer, Sukhilala, takes three-fourths of their produce as interest on the loan of 500 rupees that he gave her. Every year they give most of their produce to Sukhilala but they are unable to pay off the loan because all they give to him is counted as interest. Sukhilala is able to get this deal through because Sundar Chachi is illiterate and has put her thumb imprint on a contract she cannot read. In an effort to clear an arid piece of land which they own, Radha and Shamoo try to move some big boulders. In this process one of the boulders rolls on to Shamoo's arms and he has to have them surgically removed. He is unable to come to terms with his helpless condition and runs away leaving Radha alone. Soon after this Sundar Chachi dies. This is followed by a flood in which two of Radha's four sons die. Sukhilala offers her food in return for her sexual favours. She resists for a long time but is unable to bear the fact that her children are starving. So she goes to his place. Just as she is about to submit to him she gets a divine signal that her husband is still alive. She leaves Sukhilala's house and confronts her problems with new hope. Next it is seen her as an old woman and her two sons Birjoo (Sunil Dutt) and Ramoo (Rajendra Kumar) as grown men. Ramoo is a responsible type but Birjoo is a good-for-nothing who dislike the fact that Sukhilala continues to take three-fourths of their produce. Birjoo's inability to control his aggression makes him a nuisance to the villagers and finally, despite Radha's pleas, he is thrown out of the village and becomes a dacoit. When Sukhilala's daughter is getting married he threatens to come and abduct her. Radha assures Sukhilala that she will protect his daughter's honour and, when Birjoo comes and tries to abduct her, Radha shoots him dead.

In the film Mirch Masala, made in 1989 by Ketan Mehta. Who tells the story of Sonbai (Smita Patil) who works in a chili factory somewhere in the western part of pre- independence India.  Her husband gets a job in the railways and leaves for the city. In the meantime the Subedar (or tax collector, played by Naseeruddin Shah) arrives to collect taxes and he sees Sonbai. He is attracted to her and asks the village headman, the Mukhi, to send her to him. He sends the wrong woman. The next day she is passing by the place where the Subedar has his camp. He stops her and grabs hold of her. She frees herself and slaps him. He asks his soldiers to catch her. She runs into the chili factory where she works. The old muslim watchman Abu Miyan (Om Puri) takes her in and closes the gates. A parallel thread is that of the Mukhi's wife, the Mukhiain, who is not treated well by her husband. Abu Miyan refuses to open the doors and the Subedar's men break it down and kill him. In the final scene of the film the Subedar approaches Sonbai when suddenly the other women in the factory take bags of chili powder and throw them in his face.

The main female character in Mohra is Roma Singh. She is a journalist working for a newspaper called Samadhan (literally meaning solution). The name of the newspaper implies that it is an activist publication typically expected to do battle with corruption and government neglect. Roma's position as the assistant editor of this paper is supposed to establish her as an activist journalist. Her activism and the moral righteousness that it suggests along with her enterprising nature (she lands up at her father's place without even telling him, she is not daunted by the idea of roaming around in a jail) are the initial attempts to establish her as a ‘modern’ woman. However, the undercutting of this begins even as it is being established. She explains to her father how she has managed to wangle a trip to meet him, he is a jail superintendent, by coming up with the idea of doing a story about the jail he works in. Her professional life, the source of her ‘progressiveness’ is trivialized by the implication that she is just using it as a means to further her family life. The operating assumption is that a professional woman's work is not to be taken seriously and nor is she.

Roma's body language is the other thing which is supposed to depict her as a ‘liberated’ woman. In all her encounters with Amar she is shown to be sexually aggressive. This doesn't bring her down off her moral base since the audience knows that they are going to fall in love and, inevitably, get married. This knowledge is conveyed indirectly through a system of codes within and outside the film's narrative and we will discuss these a bit later in this essay. The construction of this sexual aggression follows concepts of male sexual aggression. Roma is shown chewing gum and checking out Amar in the same way in which the boys in Vishal's sister-in-law, Rita's, college check her (Rita) out. Roma even sets up a rendezvous with Amar where she wriggles and dances her way into his heart. This song sequence ‘Tip Tip barsa pan’ is probably one of the most explicit of such performances to bypass the Indian Central Board for Film Certification. It is the apogee of the trend of sexually explicit song sequences which started in the early '90s. It is these song sequences which have relentlessly undermined the female characters in contemporary commercial Hindi cinema. In Mohra this process of undermining is seen in all its glory.

Commercial Hindi cinema has had musical content from its very inception. Often enough extremely popular songs have caused otherwise mediocre movies to achieve superhit status. Mohra packed the theatres because of one of its songs: ‘Tu cheez badi hai mast mast’. Months before the actual release of the film this song was at the top of the various top ten or top twenty countdowns which have become an integral part of TV and radio programming in India in the '90s. Millions of Indian's saw fragments of this song every week. A regular exposure to these fragments before they saw the film established Raveena Tandon (the actress, as distinct from Roma Singh the character) as the point of reference for this film. This was a process existing outside the framework of the film but it went a long way in making two associations for the viewing audience. The first was that the character that Raveena Tandon is playing in Mohra (later they will discover that she is called Roma) is an intoxicating thing ( Mast cheez). The second is that she, Raveena Tandon, is a mohra.

Establishing relationships through such short hands is a practice which runs through this film. These codes are derived from a Hindi film based view of Indian culture. One of the first examples is when Roma is going around the jail and is attacked by some of the inmates. As they are about to rape her, Vishal appears. She runs over to him. As the attackers come towards them Vishal uses some milk to draw a line on the floor between the two of them and the attackers. This is a reference to the line drawn by Rama's brother Lakshman in the epic poem Ramayana to protect his sister-in-law Sita from the demons. By putting the line on the floor, Vishal indicates to the audience that he and Roma are related in the way that Lakshman and Sita were. After this there can be no sexual possibilities between them. But by doing this he also indicates and re-affirms the modern popular reading of the epic which re-affirms the notion that a woman can be safe only under the protection of a man who is either her husband or bears a chaste relationship towards her.

Roma's being a journalist is an attempt by this film to bring the stereotype of modern woman as journalist into the discourse. The unfortunate aspect of this is that the addition may not be the most progressive one imaginable. For this the makers of Mohra have no one to blame but themselves.

Mother India was made exactly ten years after India became independent of British rule. The socialist experiment initiated by Nehru was in its early years. In this film the director, Mehboob, attempts a marriage between socialistic ideals and ‘traditional values’.

With three-fourths of the produce going to Sukhilala, Shamoo and Radha have to work hard just to make ends meet. There are numerous images of Radha and Shamoo, sickle in hand, harvesting the grain. She is alongside him always, the perfect comrade, unhindered by her gender. There is no contradiction between this role and the traditional wife's role. The effective interleaving of the shoulder-to-shoulder images with the silent housewife images makes their coexistence credible.

‘Mother India's’ Radha is not a superwoman. She is extremely believable. Yet she provides an empowering example. It is incontrovertible that Mehboob is `engaged with people's lives and ideas' in the making of this film. Whatever may have been his own ideological bent, it is doubtful that a male Hindi filmmaker in the 1950s would have been a feminist his film works towards constructing a positive view of women. The film is as self-conscious of its role in shaping the discourse as the most blatantly propagandist film.

The movie, ‘Page 3’ is directed by Madhur Bhandarkar, in the year 2005. The movie is about a girl Madhavi Sharma (Konkana Sen Sharma) who came to Mumbai from Bagngalore to work in a newspaper called nation today in the movie Konkana Sen Sharma has played the role of a journalist. As this is the first time she works in an organization she is given the Page 3 beat. In the page 3 beat Madhavi Sharma has to go and cover the news that takes place in the city where all the celebrities meet. The movie revolves around the celebrities and the lives that they lead. The objective of the thesis is the role of women in the media and the social messages that were given out in the movie, social concepts like homosexuals and peer pressure and the conceopt of “wanna be” the fact that one has to be the most happening if you want to get into the page 3 of any news paper, the NGO’s are invited for the parties thinking they will raise their funds for the charity and the lives of the rich and famous is shown in the movie. The movie has put light on the social issues that are taking place in the society like that of pedophiles and how the children are used to fulfill the desires of the rich and the famous. The drug abuse among the youth and the rave parties that take place, and the influence one needs to have if they land in any kind of problems.

 As seen through the years that Indian women, find that the society is changing a lot in terms of acceptance of women as professionals. They become the bread owners of the family and are considered to have a mind of their own. Women have been considered themselves as equal to men in any profession, they are proved to be better then men at t heir work. The position for working women is excelling fast.

On the other end, in the conservative Indian Society, you find that there are still varied attitude and presumption about women that are not so much applicable to their existing status of running the family and the family matters, but a clear overshadow from out suppressive past. This may be more evident in rural societies, but it is extremely widespread in urban ones as well.

Konkona Sen Sharma plays Madhavi Sharma, a young and talented journalist who covers page 3 for Nation Today. Initially content with her job, she soon begins to see the ugliness of this underbelly that is covered by its fake and cosmetic profligacy. But Bhandarkar resists the temptation to make this subject into a moral-policing movie and avoids concentrating on one character alone. Hence the movie is not only about Madhavi, but also equally about Deepak Suri(Boman Irani)- Madhavi's editor who passively accepts his role as a cog of a larger machinery, Anjali Thapar(Soni Razdan)- a socialite suffocating from the social pollution, Abhijeet(Rehan Engineer)- a homosexual make-up artist and Madhavi's roommates Pearl(Sandhya Mridul)- the sassy airhostess and Gayatri(Tara Sharma)-an aspiring actress. It seems like an impossible task to assimilate so many characters (and more) in one story, but full credit to Nina Arora and Manoj Tyagi for penning a tight screenplay. The dialogues by Sanjeev Datta and Bhandarkar have been written with great attention to detail. The director Madhur Bhandarkar, attempt is to satisfy voyeurism, but he takes it a step further. He takes the viewers inside the photographs and exposes to the viewers, to the horrific realities of this sect of humanity that strangely seems to be living in a different and remote world. These are the same people that indulged in new-year's festivities while a few hundred kilometers away their fellow countrymen had been ravaged by nature's rage! 'Page 3' is an optimum way to enter a new type of cinema.

The movie ‘Page 3’ Madhavi Sharma comes to Mumbai to work for a daily news paper. The movie shows at to how this young girl goes through a lot of hardships in life as she always wanted to get into a media related organization. The very fact, that her parents are letting her go out of Karnataka to an unknown land to Maharashtra. This shows the fact that there is an openness of girls going to unknown area to fulfill her dreams. But while she is packing her clothes to go her mother stops her and does not allow her to go. The movie shows that there are a lot of people who would like to get famous and according to them the only way to get famous is to go for the parties in which the celebrities go. For example in the movie Hiren Sanghavi a NRI wants to be famous and for this reason hosts a party where the rich and famous are invited. The movie also shows that the only way to get noticed is the photos of oneself with the stars. In this movie a lot of importance is given to working women.

 On an average, in any home where women are working, their income is also important to the well-being of the home and the living standards. Where it is not a question of money, it is generally possible to employ someone for the work in the house. So when we speak of a traditional role of a woman being responsible for the efficient running of her home, it is something we need to be aware of as an additional expectation made from her.

The traditional role of a man has been the one of earning the money for the running of the home. This has changed to a great extent. Working women contribute to the expenses of running their homes as well. However, there has been little contribution from men in terms of shouldering some of the responsibilities of women. 

The women were not seen much in the field of journalism and specially when it come s to crime reporting in an article on India Together one of the most renowned journalist mentioned that the women journalist should work in magazines like Femina, and not newspapers. Almost 20 years later, although several Indian women have made a mark in hard news reporting, and there has been a phenomenal increase in the number of women journalists in the country, many women in the profession continue to get a raw deal.