Department of English

Tagore's dance drama Chandalika is a literary representation of the controversial subject of untouchability. Prakriti, a Chandal girl, becomes a live character in Tagore's hands. She jettisons the religious and social discourse by which she and her race have been relegated to hellish untouchability, meanness, subalternity and marginality. Her inner consciousness as a human being is rekindled by the Buddhist monk, Ananda. This paper is an effort to revisit the religious and social nuances prevalent in the contemporary society of ancient India. A female subaltern stands as a resolute challenge to the inequitable discourse of untouchability. She becomes a spokeswoman of Tagore's ideal of humanitarianism and universalism. Tagore gives a strong espousal to Buddhism, which rendered shelter to the untouchables and subalterns in its liberal religious gamut.

Gender is a social and ideological construct and ideology is a shrewd veneer over the surface of reality. The New Indian Cinema or the Indian New Wave emerged as an artistic practice for uncovering such realities in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a resurgence of the parallel cinema of the 1940s, which had received remarkable prominence with Satyajit Ray. It penetrated into the reality of such stagnant ideologies through its counter-discourses and enabled its audience to interrogate these 'seemingly truthful' stereotypes. The hypocritical charade of society is brought forth on the cinematic screen. Ketan Mehta's film Mirch Masalaaims to question such ideological stereotypes in the light of gender inequalities. The protagonist Sonbai is a self-esteemed, poor village woman, who for the sake of her self-respect as a woman stands as a powerful challenge to the inequitable advances of the Subedar, the native colonial agent. Set in the pre-Independence Kutch of Gujarat, the story visualizes a vivid spectacle of the colonial rule in India. Colonialism was always a patriarchal enterprise and the Subedar is one of its arrogant (native) agents, but this strait-laced patriarchal agency is valiantly confronted and splintered by Sonbai. She does not succumb to the unfair intentions of the Subedar and the luring conciliations of the villagers. On the whole, the film ".. . hits out at a whole value system and ideology which legitimizes the subordinate position of women" (Mazumdar WS-83). For the Subedar, woman is merely a means of sexual gratification. He victimizes poor women of the village and threatens the men by extorting heavy 'lagaan' from them. Poor village women succumb to his masculine overtures, but Sonbai turns down his inequitable advances and stands as a powerful challenge to the patriarchal orthodoxies in pre-Independence India. Mukhiya's wife also questions the patriarchal orthodoxy and masculine chauvinism in the film. When the schoolmaster asks her about sending her daughter to school, she retorts saying, "Yaharivajkahahailadkiyokopadhaneka" (There is no cult of sending girls to school here). The schoolmaster tells her that cults are changed with the course of time, but she answers saying, "Pahle log tohbadalnechahiyena" (First of all people must change). Unlike other people of the village, Sonbai does not feel intimidated or frightened of the threats of the Subedar. She says, "Khathode hi jayega. Aadmihi tohhai, koi hauwatohnahi"(He will not gulp me. He is a human being only, not a ghost).Ketan Mehta also attacks the conservative and submissive propensity of the village women. Poor and illiterate village women hold a view that a girl child cannot and should not go to school. The director aims to foreground the mental setup of the contemporary rural India. He puts a question mark on the stagnant orthodoxies.