Sisterhood on screen: Celebrating female bonds in Indian Cinema |
Female bonding, specially the mother-daughter relationship in cinema continues to provide a rich seam of source material for filmmakers around the world. Filmmakers have deployed a wide range of cinematic languages and genres, from fictional narratives through dramatised documentary to experimental and avant-garde forms, to explore questions of identity. However, it may be noted that unlike in the West, with special reference to women filmmakers, there has been no obvious attempt to structure films on autobiographical or quasi-autobiographical narratives.
The issue of female bonding arises against the recent release of the film System, in Hindi on an OTP channel. Directed by Ashwini Iyer Tiwari, this courtroom drama that deals with a father-daughter conflict over a murder case, is strongly underwritten with a strange female friendship between a young, fledgling lawyer Neha Rajvansh (Sonakshi Sinha) and an ordinary but firm court stenographer Sarika Rawat (Jyotika) a famous actress from the South.
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The friendship is strange because the two women are as different as chalk from cheese. While Neha is the legally educated daughter of the famous lawyer (Asutosh Gowarikar) and is affluent, sophisticated and umarried with a boyfriend who dotes on her but she is not all that interested. Sarika (Jyotika) is married to a husband permanently maimed in a fierce fire in his workplace and has a growing daughter. She also sleeps with a police officer as ‘this is the only way I can pay through for my fight.’ When the mystery of the murder is solved and Neha learns who the real killer of the young woman was, she still wins the case and though Sarika assumes that their friendship has ended, it has not. A beautiful portrayal of female bonding in Indian cinema.
This harks back to films that focus on female bonding not necessarily linked to any romantic segment but only commenting on the solid bonding that two or three women can form. Neither are they always linked to sister-sister or mother-daughter relationships that were the focus on earlier Southern and Indian cinema.
One of the earliest ventures in celluloid sisterhood happened in the 1940s in the Tamil film Sakuntalai starring MS Subbalakshmi. The film was drawn from a mythological tale in which........