The construction and (re)presentation of Indian women in recent mainstream western cinema

Priyanka Aich

Previous research has demonstrated that the media perform several important functions in our lives, including shaping our opinions about ethnic minorities. In the absence of intercultural contact, people tend to believe media representations of minority groups as accurate although it has been established that the media are instrumental in disseminating dominant ideologies and suppressing minorities. Cinema is a complex ideological apparatus because of its reflective nature and its enduring popularity. Informed by the tenets of Critical Race Theory and Orientalism, this thesis investigated the representation of East Indian women in recent mainstream Western cinema by undertaking a Critical Discourse Analysis of five contemporary Western films. Two research questions were posed in this study: RQ1: What cinematic stereotypes or conventions are used to represent Indian women in Western cinema? RQ2: How has the 'ideal' Indian woman been constructed by Western cinema? This thesis took a critical stance in its analysis and interrogated how the plot, dialog, and characterization within the dataset cumulatively constructed Indian women and situated their femininity within the White patriarchal framework. Critical Discourse Analysis was used to analyze the dataset because it helped explicate how mediated discourse (such as cinema) originate from and are shaped by the organized power dynamics of society. Findings of the study revealed a constellation of seven thematic categories or tropes upon which the depiction of Indian characters was based. These categories were: domesticity and marriage, self-sacrifice, entertainment and servility, virginal purity, hypersexuality, unambitiousness, and the (White) male gaze. The 'ideal' Indian woman was thus constructed by the movies in the dataset as docile, family-oriented, selfless, and bereft of ambition. The analysis also revealed that Indian women were re-presented as ethnic-exotic (serving to entertain the male gaze) and hypersexual but that they also existed in a state of virginal purity - uncontaminated by sexual knowledge or experience - until they are initiated into sexuality by White masculine agency. Finally, critical media literacy was recommended as a potential tool that can help audiences interrogate media manipulations such as stereotypes.

The construction and (re)presentation of Indian women in recent mainstream western cinema

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