ROLE OF WOMEN IN INDIAN CINEMA

    The cinema of India includes film produced across India. It is majorly divided into Bollywood, Kollywood, Tollywood and Mollywood. Shree Pundalik (silent film) by Dadasaheb is the first Indian film released in Marathi on 18^th May 1912. From here it has travelled a long way in terms of technology, traditional thinking, story angle etc., Cinema is always a mirror of social culture which proceeds with social, political and religious issues.

Ladies of Indian Cinema

Role of women in Indian cinema has travelled from traditional boundaries to modern free zones. Early cinemas during 1950-60 (even few of today’s cinema) has been depicted women has mere addition to male leads. Their on-screen image and the treatment of fairer sex have remained as secondary role to the male leads, where whole story revolves around the hero. Female characters played a dutiful housewife, who tries to win her husband’s love with virtue of all scarifies or a silent widow mother or a young lady who is madly in love with 60 years old male lead. Other roles such as female entrepreneur, working woman, well educated woman are shown as egoistic negative character. Though most of the Indian cinemas are dominated by male leads, famous actress like Jaya Prada, Asha Parath played their own right however always preferred playing secondary addition to their male leads. Only female actress like Zeenat Aman, Sharmila Tagore, Nadita Das brought in ‘brave roles’ challenging traditional Indian thinking. This is the high time to realize that our heroines in many films are given glamorous roles and projecting as ‘sex toys’ that religiously follows the golden rule of  running behind heroes whose ultimate goal in their life will be to get married with hero. It is fun to see that such a glamorous role will change into 100% homely wife with blushes in face as soon they get married. In short, during 1950’s to 1960’s the oriental values of women are meant to suffer and scarifies. This been changed by 1980’s till now were women dared to take lead roles, set free from orthodox thinking. There are movies which proclaim women empowerment and freedom, importance of their contribution to community and society. Although such films gain international awards they lose their shades among normal society. Famous heroines of recent times are Kajol, Aishwarya, Asin, Madhuri Dixit, Sridevi, Vidya Balan.

Not only as heroines, their footprints in various genres of cinema such as production, direction, comedy, music etc.  Bela Sehgal director of English, Vinglish, Deepa for Water, Earth, Fire Nadita das for Firaaq are few notable directors of our film Industry. Aishwarya Dhanush, Soundarya, Lakshmi Ramakrishnan are few of upcoming directors of modern cinema. On Comedian side no one can forget Manorama and Kovai sarala. Shreya Goshal, M.S Subulakshmi, Andrea, Usha Uthup, chinmaye are few of the famous playback singers.

Top women oriented movies released in india which had controversial effect are Fire, Kahaani, Page 3, Lajja, Mirch Masal, Mother India, No one killed Jessica, Water reports a website.