Women centric cinema and emergence of the female protagonist in Bollywood

Abstract

The commercial mainstream Hindi cinema known as Bollywood is seeing exemplar shift in the ideologies that rein the business of creating narratives in the 21st century. The Multiplex, the achieving of a legal industry entity for Mumbai films which earlier belonged to primarily unorganized sector, vertically integrated conglomerate structures and Hollywood collaborations have influenced changes in stylistic elements of storytelling. Bollywood's strongest element is emergence of the new gender narrative, metamorphosed heroine, incipient as a protagonist on reel. This change is a symbolic, reflective of urban socio-political-economic India, which has witnessed a systemized entry of women professionals in mainstream workspaces involving leadership, technical skill, and a gradual increase of a strong women workforce in many specialized domains including the commercial film making landscape. This paper examines the characteristics of visible change in character construction of female protagonists and their interrelationship with an evolving spectatorship within the domain of discourse analysis and spectatorship theory. The term, ‘quasi-empowered’ deciphers the cosmetic from the empowered reflection of Bollywood's new women who represent desire, aspiration, and corporeal and cerebral ambition. It also looks at intersection of politics of representation, feminist film theory while integrating reel and real dynamics within case studies. The paper aims at deconstructing select Bollywood narratives to assess ‘lack’ with respect to presence and absence of agency within popular contemporary film text.