Crossing the Threshold: Empowering Gender in Marathi Cinema

Cinema, besides being a medium of entertainment, has been used to represent the evils in the society and awaken the masses from their pretentious sleep by mirroring the social realities around. Meeting the requirements of changing time and space, the objectives of cinema in the world has been in the constant process of transformations. The objective of this paper is to presents such transformations that took place through various film movements in world cinema. The paper is intended to discuss how gender as a taboo was present in the earlier cinema in India and how Bollywood came over such social taboos over a period of time. After the initial hurdles, Marathi cinema, coming out of the frames, has contributed in reshaping the traditional conservative ideas leading to social gender norms. The Marathi films on gender make a strong statement, sometimes being within the confines of social moral codes and at times crossing the thresholds of such patriarchal moral codes. The gender resistance leading to the crossing of the male-defined threshold is discussed by analysing two Marathi films i.e. Jabbar Patel's Umbartha (1981) and Sanjay Surkar's Gharabaher (1999).