Becky Blab

I found this blog post by Purple Passion which gives thoughtful insights into Indian feminism and representations of women in Bollywood, specifically in the film Mohra, and in media such as advertisements (not unlike those written about at feministing).

Purple Passion refers to a critique written by male feminist writer and Computer Science professor Amitabha Bagchi, who explains the significance of song sequences and the eroticisation of women. Interestingly enough, the songs are sometimes released before the movie, thereby creating a hype and familiarity with the movie and characters before actually seeing them in full. In the case of Mohra, this exposure was paralled by the main actresses public presence as a ‘cavorter’:

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. She was seen cavorting on TV screens months before the relevance of this cavorting in the narrative scheme of the film was established for the people who saw it. 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 (literally pawn, or piece on the chessboard).

It is the security of this knowledge, gained before entering the theatre, which allows the audience (or at least the male component of the audience) to accept Roma’s sexuality and even revel in it. Divested of all politically unsettling possibilities Roma can relax into “.. [the] traditional exhibitionist role [in which] women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearances coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.“