Locating the Shifting Sphere of Gendered Identity Construction through the Cinematic Adaptations of Tagore’s Ghare Baire

Abstract

This paper seeks to look at the larger socio-political discourse that informs the two cinematic texts Ghare Baire Aaj by Aparna Sen and Ghare Baire by Satyajit Ray. Ray’s adaptation of Tagore’s novel explores the gendering of the public and private domain within the framework of the nationalist ideology. The film temporally embedded within a colonial context imagines the nation metaphorically through the woman whose possible transgression from private to public domain challenges both nationalist and colonial construction of the titular binary. Counterpoised against this, Sen’s deconstructive post-colonial and post-global adaptation challenges further the dichotomy of the public and private to expose its fault lines. Sen’s film brings to the fore the contemporary ideological contradictions interpellated within the construction of secularism and liberal discourses of gender. The genderization of popular discourses of nationalism, colonialism, and identity constructing the core of both Tagore’s novel and Ray’s film has been further extended and problematised by Sen through the Dalit identity of the central woman character of her movie. The paper then will try to unfold these critical nuances manifested through the dialogical engagement of these texts to unfold the influence of their multi-layered ‘sites’ on the gendered identity construction in the respective cinemas of Satyajit Ray and Aparna Sen.

Keywords

• dichotomy
• private/public domain
• gender
• identity construction
• geopolitical space