Character Prototypes in Indian Epics &
Their Influence on Story Telling in Indian Cinema
The origins of the characterization of women for script and story purposes in Indian cinema has its roots in the epics of India. The two greatest and widely acclaimed Indian epics are the Ramayana, the story of Prince Rama and his wife Sita, and the Mahabharata, the story of a family feud between cousins for their kingdom.
In the Ramayana, the female protagonist Sita is the exemplified perfect woman, who stands by and supports her husband right through all his hardships. After Rama marries Sita, Rama’s stepmother Kaikeyi, one of the Queens of the kingdom, who wants her own son Bharath to inherit the empire, manipulates her husband, King Dasaratha, into banishing the eldest son, Rama, from the empire. Rama, who has given word to his father that he will do anything to help his father, agrees to be in exile for 14 years. His wife Sita, accompanies him into the forests to spend her life in exile with her husband.
During this period Rama and Sita, accompanied by one of Rama’s brothers Lakshmana, live in the forest and help the sages from the atrocities of the demons and devils in the forest. During this time, Sita is captured by a demon king, Ravana, who wants her to be his wife. Rama goes on to overthrow Ravana in order to win his wife Sita back. In trying to do this, Rama helps, befriends and builds relationships with various beings in the jungle to help him in the war against the demon king Ravana of Lanka. After Rama wins his wife back, in some versions of the epic, he is supposed to have asked his wife Sita, to walk through and bathe herself in fire as a proof of her purity. Sita acquiesces to this.
The idea behind this fire bath or fire walk is for Sita to prove to the world, that during her period of captivity, she remained untouched by Ravana and that she did not succumb to a physical relationship or violation of any sort with Ravana; that she was neither raped nor willingly accepted Ravana. She is so pure, that the god of fire, Agni, can’t much as even give her a small burn. This is popularly referred to as Sita’s test of purity. According to Hindu religion, Rama is an incarnation of the Lord Vishnu, and his wife Sita, an incarnation of the Goddess Lakshmi, wife of Lord Vishnu. The purity of Sita has led to the Madonna complex in society, where the woman, bearer of children and the enhancer of lineage is supposed to be as pure as Sita in the Ramayana. This is a powerful concept in the minds of people in India. Films and film stories are many a time based on these epic prototypes and powerful impressions that epic characters make in the minds of people. Pattanaik (2009) says, “We're looking at stories that have lasted the test of time, like the Ramayana, the Mahabharata… That's proof of their effectiveness.”
This is because stories of the Gods, myths and epics are the stories people are told through their lives. They are stories children are raised with. Since it is so much a part of everyday life, people internalize the values in these stories for life. According to Pattanaik (2009), epics and stories that people hear all their lives, create subjective realities in their minds and these subjective realities are internalized, leading to the construction of their world views and perceptions. These world views then begin to dominate their ideas, attitudes, beliefs and approaches to life situations including management and business.
In the case of film stories, internalization of epics creates epic based ideas and fantasies in the minds of the people, which then enter the realm of popular culture, influencing character stereotypes in film.
In the controversial film Fire 1996 directed by Canadian-Indian film maker, Deepa Mehta, one of the two female protagonists is named Sita. While the film itself was not a commercial blockbuster and aroused violent sentiment amongst religious fanatics and political parties, the idea of naming the character Sita comes from the epic Ramayana, and the director, in an interview on the DVD of the film says, “The point is to make somebody, women especially, go through continuous trials, to prove their purity, this seems to be a part of our ethos and that is why I called her Sita.” In the film the character named Sita has a situation in the story where her husband questions her because she breaks tradition and makes an independent choice overruling her husband. This is the moment the director is referring to in the interview and she says that this notion of the woman’s test of purity is an integral part of many Indian traditions and in some way permeates Indian society in so subconscious a manner that people hardly realize it.
In the second greatest Indian epic, The Mahabharatha, two sets of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, fight over a kingdom. The first set, named the Pandavas, are five people with one wife named Draupadi. The second set, are one hundred brothers, the sons of King Dirdashtra. The Kauravas call upon the five Pandavas to gamble. The Kauravas cheat and manipulate putting the Pandavas in a position of tremendous loss. The Kauravas are greedy for territory and want to possess not only their part of the kingdom but also the part of the kingdom that belongs to their cousins, the Pandavas.
The Pandavas gamble everything they have until finally, after losing all they have, their territory, property and wealth, they gamble their wife Draupadi. Draupadi is dragged into court by one of the Kaurava cousins, who insults her and starts to strip her off her saree. This is referred to as Draupadi’s violation in court.
Draupadi, a great devotee of the Lord Krishna, prays to him and miraculously, her saree can never be pulled off of her; as the Kaurava cousin tries to strip her off it, more and more layers of cloth just keep making the saree longer and longer. Lord Krishna protects her by making sure her saree magically becomes longer and longer, so much so that the Kaurava prince tires of trying. The point to be noted in this story is the idea of treating a woman, one’s wife, as property that can be gambled with. As in all societies, women are more vulnerable and any mishap leads for them to be raped or molested or violated in some form or the other. This vulnerability of women is used in Indian cinema very frequently. While rape may be a real social human rights issue in all countries, the problem with Indian cinema is that rape is a cinematic tool that leads to some empathy for the victim for sure, but it is mostly a cinematic moment that is used to exhibit the heroic nature of the male protagonist, who always ends up saving the damsel in distress. More often than not, the female lead will never get raped because it challenges the notion of feminine purity. The rape scene is only an attempt by the bad guys to rape the female and how the male lead saves her, showing off his brawling abilities, is the real story there. If at all a woman gets raped onscreen, it will be someone’s maid, or the male protagonist’s sister, and then the story is about revenge. It is never the main female lead who gets raped.
Why have these repetitive and monotonously predictable rape scenes then? Why can’t the male character’s greatness be demonstrated in something else? Why should a rape scene or a dance sequence for the villain by the female lead be the cinematic tool through which the audience understands the male character? – This is because men see themselves as saviors of women in society and the male character’s actions are their fantasy.
It is possible that women have fantasies of being saved by the handsome prince or perhaps some other very different fantasy, but somehow, that is a point of view that is never really explored. Not a whole lot about female fantasy finds voice in Indian cinema, because it is not a subject openly discussed or explored, nor is it considered appropriate in a patriarchy governed family system to even try to express women’s sexuality or fantasies openly. Women are so used to this system and it is so internalized in them, that even women find other modern women (who are open about this subject), “not modest enough about femininity”, “immoral” or “wrong”. Women have come to believe that there is a certain patriarchy in the system that is legitimized and they must behave in accordance with this power structure. It has become an internalized value system which is further reinforced by the media and its portrayal of women.
In the case of the female lead dancing or sexually enticing the villain or antagonist - this again is a classic male fantasy, where they want to be the saviors of their women, but also want their women to do almost anything for them; be the chaste woman when needed and be the stripper when needed, satisfying the need for the Madonna and the whore. So it is all about the man’s gallantry and the woman’s vulnerability and these extreme character traits seem to have come from the epics. Smriti Nandakumar, in a telephonic interview says,
In a land where pagan worship is so intense, and the deities are Goddesses of power, rage and a certain wildness and empowerment to them, why does the average woman always have to be compared to the relatively softer epic prototypes? We worship Goddess Durga, and Goddess Kali, who are symbols of absolute power, and empowerment but we want the women in society to be Sita or Draupadi. (personal communication, January 8, 2011)
Incidentally, in the mythological stories of the Goddesses, they always kill evil which is in the form of male demons. There has to be some sort of a feministic ideal associated with the portrayal of these Goddesses, which was perhaps women’s way of associating with power, empowerment, opportunity and independence in a patriarchal, male dominated society. This portrayal somehow never made it to popular Indian cinema. This is because, in a patriarchal society, while men are willing to worship the powerful, empowered Goddess, they probably feel greatly threatened if the same traits of power come from the real woman, and incline towards suppressing women even more. So, they start to draw from the softer prototypes in epics and myths and try to impose those traits on women, thereby preventing the true empowerment of women.
In fact, Goddess Kali, is usually portrayed as being topless, with a garland made of the heads of the demons that she killed to save mother earth from their atrocities. This image of power, independence and the sort of fear that this image instills, is worshiped by people, men and women alike, but somehow never translates into reality. The male fantasy is the vulnerable woman, not the powerful, empowered woman. So the male controlled society tends to impose and emphasize on women’s vulnerability.
Women as symbols of purity, softness, obedience, chastity, virginity until wed, etc. are all concepts perhaps emerging from the prototypes in epics. The two epics are very important to Indian culture, religion, tradition and in many ways influence pop culture and therefore film, filmic situations, scenes, and values resonated in film and so on. As late as 2010, the film Rajneeti 2010, directed by Prakash Jha, is based on the story of the epic Mahabharatha adapted to modern times.
In an interview to Sengupta (2010), Director of Rajeneeti, Prakash Jha says,
Every kind of character, every kind of situation is embedded in the Mahabharata, he said. It becomes the reference point for our psyche. One is never out of the Mahabharata… There is no story that is not contained here.
This is the power of the epic and the many fascinating stories contained within it and it no doubt influences the story writer’s psyche.
The epics therefore form a great basis for story tellers to take morals from, to adapt stories from and in many ways might be acting as the foundation to building more and more stories, and a stepping stone to forming characters in these stories.
Pattanaik (2009), a writer who uses the Hindu epics in human resource management, describes them as ‘the template of Indian thought’.
Given that it is understandable as to how and why these epics subconsciously retain themselves in the realm of story-telling and story writing. Not only do epics from a basis for popular story writing and narrative patterns, but they have greatly influenced Indian classical culture and pop culture in various ways.
South Indian classical music popularly referred to as Carnatic music consists of the works of the trinity of composers, of whom Thyagaraja, who lived in the 18th century is very popular. A number of compositions of Thyagaraja are extremely complicated and unprecedented and remain unsurpassed to this day in the realm of Indian Classical music. Thyagaraja’s compositions are taught to students of vocal and instrumental music at a highly developed and advanced level of learning the art. Thyagaraja’s songs and verses are all his interpretations of various situations in the epic, Ramayana. Classical dance in India is also influenced by epics. Dance dramas portray stories of the Gods and Goddesses. The epics have influenced the basis of classical music and dance, and have been so much a part of classical culture that it is not surprising that they influence even modern day stories and popular culture.
Drawing from epic character prototypes to create new story characters seems the most natural and spontaneous thing to do while thinking of creating stories and characters.
Women in all these epics and other mythological stories have been portrayed as being obedient, subservient, complying, dutiful and enduring. Many a time they have been portrayed as being property to be gambled with or owned and these ideas tend to carry on in modern adapted ways into cinema creating a set of film stereotypes. People’s subjective realities are projected on to the big screen and these epic prototypes that conform to male fantasy, become character stereotypes of women in Indian cinema.
Pictures
Top left picture: Goddess Kali; Top right picture: Goddess Durga
References
Pattanaik has been quoted from www.ted.com/talks and the URL to his speech is http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/devdutt_pattanaik.html
Devdutt Pattanaik is a self-taught mythologist, and the author (and often illustrator) of several works on aspects of myth, including the primer Myth = Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology and his most recent book, 7 Secrets from Hindu Calendar Art. He writes a column called "Management Mythos" for and Indian business newspaper, Economic Times that juxtaposes myth onto modern leadership challenges. His newest area of inquiry: How is traditional management, as expressed in old Indian cultural narratives, different from modern scientific management techniques?"
Smriti Nandakumar is a student of sociology in India and did her group project on “Women in Unconventional Careers in India”.
Durga meaning the inaccessible in Sanskrit, the invincible in Bengali, is one who can redeem in situations of utmost distress. An embodiment of creative feminine force (Shakti), Durga exists in a state of svÄtantrya (independence from the universe and anything/anybody else, i.e., self-sufficiency) and fierce compassion. Durga manifests fearlessness and patience, and never loses her sense of humor, even during spiritual battles of epic proportion.
Kali means the Black one. She signifies time, death, the Lord of death. She is a form of Durga, considered the wife of the black one (Shiva, the destroyer of all creation is the black one, “Kala” and his wife, is “Kali” the Goddess of death and destroyer of evil).
Sengupta, S. (2010, July 3rd). The magisterial clout of 2 Indian epics; Stories of Mahabharata and Ramayana permeate country's popular culture. International Herald Tribune.
