Filmmaking and the India-Pakistan partition: the representation of women in contemporary commercial Hindi cinema

The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan has been the subject of great scrutiny and debate. In particular, significant research has been done on the roles of women during the era and the injustices committed upon them in the name of religion. The partition in itself has been the subject of commercial Hindi cinema for the last several decades. Filmmakers have portrayed the epic migration through their own peripheries. Through this paper, we have analysed how contemporary Hindi cinema (2000 onwards) has constructed the archetypical female during the partition era while drawing upon the Ramayana. The paper analyses injustice through three forms of perpetration: communal, familial, and national. Gender identities and sexual violence have become of increasing importance in India over the last few years. At the same time, religious identity continues to play a huge role in day to day living. With the pervasive mass appeal and the rising globalisation of Indian cinema, it is critical to understand how the country's most successful films portray gender in conjunction to religion.