A Critical Rhetorical Analysis of Women Empowerment in NH10

A Critical Rhetorical Analysis of Women Empowerment in NH10 Dr. Braj Mohan ABSTRACT Ideologies are constructed, propagated and finally established and the established ideologies set a parameter of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ inside the social circles where they prevail. The same is true about the established image and gender role of woman. These social ‘norms’ constructed by patriarchal culture present a woman as ‘pretty’ ‘timid’ fickle minded, untrustworthy, frail, etc. Mass media, particularly movies and television programmes, meant for entertainment, play a very important role in propagating and establishing these ideologies. The same media can play a positive role by working on improving the image of women and motivate them to assert their individuality and claim their power in society. Some movies like NH 10 seem to be working on this feminist agenda of empowering women. The avenging-woman narrative presented in NH10 can be read as a representation of cultural constructions of women empowerment. This movie features a woman transgressing social norms of traditional female behavior through violence with the purpose of exacting revenge. This paper focuses on evaluating NH10 in promoting the idea of empowered woman. KEY WORDS Rhetoric, woman empowerment, NH10, Gender, media studies INTRODUCTION Mass media has the caliber of creating and affecting the social image of individuals or class as it has direct access to a large population (Milkie, 199: 190). It has a wide reach as majority of people cannot avoid getting the inputs from the media in the form of ads, movies, and reality shows. Mass media generally presents the negative image of woman particularly television soaps, ads, and movies. She is presented mostly as an object of desire, as body, as a commodity or as a weak and untrustworthy person who generally involve in backbiting, and creating problems in families. She is seldom presented as an independent thoughtful individual with a caliber of guiding, motivating and managing people around her. Women are portrayed as performing more interpersonal actions than similar males and fewer decisional, political, and operational actions (Berg and Streckfuss 1992: 206 ). The same media can create a positive image of woman and certainly affect the collective psyche of society in the favour of women and boost their confidence to empower them. The movies projecting woman as the central character exhibiting positive qualities will not only alter the established negative image of women but also encourage women to follow the example of those role models. NH10 is such a movie that presents a woman as a central character fighting her challenges and finally overcoming them. The image of women presented on mass media has generally been weak if not always negative. Woman has been presented as secondary and the prime focus of media has always been on man. Man is the central character in most of the movies made all over the world. Woman is presented as man’s shadow or even property, whose only duty is to exist and look beautiful for his pleasure. The collective psyche of our society has been nurtured in such a way as it somehow feels that the work, place and importance of man and woman is essentially different and this difference leads to inequality and subjugation of women. Today’s patriarchal society is not very different from A. L. Tennyson when he writes in The Princess: Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion. This difference in role and place in society makes her an animal that is hunted by man. In the same poem, Tennyson writes— Man is the hunter; woman is his game: The sleek and shining creatures of the chase, We hunt them for the beauty of their skins; They love us for it, and we ride them down. Somehow girls are given such a thorough training of becoming weak right from their birth that they accept their weakness as the truth based on commonsense and they become man’s shadow, cook, or sex-doll for the rest of their life. The popular TV soap shows like, ‘Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki’ ‘Kyonki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’ although women centric do more harm than they promote the cause of women empowerment. In most of these soaps, women are shows as sufferers, or plotters. These soaps make the women of our country very family-centric as if there was nothing else in the world that can interest them except conspiring, back-biting or at best suffering and winning the sympathy of males. The acculturation of women is essentially different from men. Every now and then a girl is told in plain words or through actions and gestures that she cannot do anything and everything her brother does. The irony is a girl is the strongest in her childhood. She becomes weaker and weaker as she grows up losing her independence by degrees. By the time she ages 15 years or so, she ceases to exist in the right of an individual and becomes a precious property that needs to be transferred to its rightful owner. Till then she needs to be guarded, protected and best locked inside the house. This may not be true in the global context but has considerable truth in Indian Context. Let me give a live example of day-to-day family interaction in a typical Indian town. Mother (to her son): You go to market and bring some apples. Boy: Mother, send Didi with me. Mother: You are grown up so you can go alone. Girl: Mother, may I go to market and get a notebook. Mother: You are grown-up now so how can you go alone? The redemption of women lies not in just making them essentially hate man but in making a conducive society where a woman can grow as a powerful and self respectful individual. There is need to create a culture that trains our girls that need not be afraid of a lizard or cockroach to become a woman and a sally of tears should not be their essential identity. A woman-friendly culture and a better society can be constructed by producing literature that presents woman as powerful, thoughtful and capable of existing as independent individuals. We need to make films and TV shows in which women are given the leadership roles and they prove themselves equally intelligent and powerful if not better than man. Stache (1913) examines the contemporary avenging-woman narrative in popular television and film. She argues that although the image of the avenging-woman can be read as representative of female empowerment, the narratives simultaneously portray her as a cautionary tale against subversion within the system. NH10 also depicts avenging-woman narrative in Indian context. Ideologies are constructed, propagated and finally established and the established ideologies when hegemonized set a parameter of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ inside the social circles where these ideologies prevail. These social ‘norms’ constructed by patriarchal culture present a woman as ‘pretty’ ‘timid’ fickle minded, untrustworthy, frail, etc. Due to these established ‘norms’, by mass media, women are generally presented as weak persons whose only duty is to look pretty and get impressed by the bravery of the hero and finally fall in love with him and become his parasite or sex-slave. This ideology of ‘timid woman who looks pretty’ presented in these movies further motivates the women viewers that they should lose weight by fasting and become as frail as possible. This ideology somehow makes women believe that being timid and emotional is somehow fashionable and desirable so they start cultivating the virtue of getting afraid of lizards and cockroaches and capability of shedding tears at any given moment. But some movies like NH 10 seem to have a feminist agenda of empowering women. The avenging-woman narrative presented in NH10 can be read as a representation of cultural constructions of female empowerment. This movie features a woman transgressing social norms of traditional female behavior, through violence with the purpose of exacting some form of revenge. In this paper I tried to evaluate NH10 in promoting the idea of ‘empowered woman’. ANALYSIS OF NH10 NH10 is a 2015 Indian crime-thriller film directed by Navdeep Singh. It stars Anushka Sharma and Neil Bhoopalam in lead roles, and marks the production debut of Sharma. The film is co-produced by Phantom Films and Eros International. It tells the story of a young couple whose road trip goes awry after an encounter with a group of violent criminals. The film's title refers to the 403 km long National Highway 10 in India. There are four important female characters in the movie NH10 – Meera, Pinki, Satvir’s wife and the Sarpanch (village head) and these four women present almost all the issues related to women subjugation and their empowerment in India. While Satvir’s wife represents a silent sufferer, Pinki the Sarpanch’s daughter unsuccessfully tries to assert her freedom. Meera, the protagonist, goes through three stages the victim, dependent on her husband, and finally the powerful individual who fights back and asserts her power and individuality. The Sarpanch, though a powerful woman, is the enemy of her own gender who gets her daughter murdered and her daughter-in-law brutalized. She sees the society from very patriarchal perspective of Khaap rule. Satvir’s wife is a silent sufferer who has lost her right of taking any decision and even to think independently. She has been made a puppet of her husband and of her mother-in-law. She is the burning example of how sexuality is controlled through the institution of marriage and used as weapon to brutalize women and to legalize those brutalities. Satvir’s wife has not been given right even to take decisions about as small matters as sleeping or sitting at a certain place. Her only duty seems to exist as a sex doll and punching bag of Satvir and a personal slave of her mothe-in-law, the Sarpanch. Still she cannot be called a weak woman as her passive resistance while undergoing all these demeaning behavior from her own family members due to not-so-woman-friendly social structure requires a lot of courage. It would be unfair to call her just a victim of family violence rather a victim of the injustice of unfair social structure in which she was commoditized. Her father treated her just like a precious commodity that needs to be transferred to its rightful owner, her husband, who, in turn, will use her the way he likes without caring for her individuality and respect. She does not have even the right to return to her parents as the social structure generally dictates that the parents of a girl have no right to intervene into the family matters of their daughter. Moreover, their own wives and daughter-in-laws might be suffering the same way so they take the torture of brides as normal social practice. Although this example is of a bride from family of khaap-ridden Haryana yet such examples are certainly not rare to find in other states in India. The character of Pinky presents another aspect of social injustice with women. Although from a khaap ridden society, she musters courage to go to college for her education. Her only fault is that she decides not to become a sex doll and punching bag of her husband by marrying according to khaap rules but to marry the person of her own choice. Her action of marrying with a boy of her choice is looked upon so objectionably that she along with her husband was got murdered by her own mother at the hand of her own brother. Her effort of liberating herself from the iron grip of society that does not give girls the right even to choose their life partner goes futile. Her story is the same as the story of the victims of honour killing so common in India. In the character of the Sarpanch, we find a woman who has ‘power’ but her power has strictly been defined according to patriarchal notion of women subjugation and sexual domination. She gets her daughter-in-law beaten, her own daughter murdered, and a woman seeking her help brutalized still she cannot be called the real culprit. Her condition is like that of a pet hawk that kills its own kind for its master. The Sarpanch only seems to be powerful but in fact she is the slave of her rotten culture and society around her. Although she is the Sarpanch of her village and the head of her family, she does little for the rights of women. She sends her daughter to college but wants to keep the remote control of her daughter’s life in her hand. She represents those women who are wrongly thought to have power because they see the world and its practices from the male perspective. They only become accomplice in subjugating women even more and their female cover sometimes seems to legalize all the atrocities they inflict on their own gender. Meera’s story is totally different from the stories of all these three characters. She is an affluent professional from Gurgaon happily married with Arjun, a doting husband, who treats her as equal and gives her all liberty and space she wants. He presents her a packet of cigarettes on her birthday, which shows that he cares about all the likes and dislikes of his wife. While travelling alone, she is harassed by hooligans and her complaint to police proved futile. She was just advised not travel alone or to keep arms. In fact she was given two options –either to accept her fragility and keep safe with male or to claim her own power by using weapons and physical force. She keeps a pistol but more like a burden than a weapon and whenever she is in the company of Arjun she relieves herself of that burden. While going to celebrate their weekend with her husband, she is unintentionally caught in ruckus due to good intentioned yet unwise intervention of her husband Arjun into a case of honour killing. They are chased by the gang of killers headed by Satvir, the son of the sarpanch, and find no safety in any corner of that society. Even police proves traitor and seems to help the killers as the policemen also find themselves in the grip of an unjust social structure that can outcaste even the family of a police officer. She is captured in the house of the sarpanch where she goes to seek security. With fear mixed with bravery she tries hard to escape and seems to be almost successful but when she finds her husband killed, she determines to take revenge and shed all coyness and fear that society has been training her in so long. She punishes all the male culprits and walks to freedom although with a broken heart. She has certainly learnt a lesson that fear chases you until you turn to fight it. The character of Meera shows the transition of a woman from a weak woman seeking protection of police, her husband as she realizes that in the power structure of male dominated society women are perhaps left with no other option but to hide behind a male for their protection. Her struggle with the odds of her life makes her realize her own potential and she claims her liberty and power by challenging and overthrowing the established power set-up. She transgresses commonly accepted gender role of ‘a pretty doll’ ‘her papa’s pet’ and a docile and humble wife who is supposed to suffer and cry for mercy. Meera goes through three stages, a sufferer, a reconciled woman safe with husband, and a powerful individual who is capable of rewarding tit for tat. DISCUSSION The study of the women characters in the movie and the social milieu, we find that sexual subjugation is the root cause of physical and psychological subjugation of women. Women’s sexuality has been being romanticized, deified, controlled, and throttled. Interestingly, this sexual subjugation is sometimes done under the garb of ‘honour’ and ‘respect’ of women. Almost all literature of religion is about cherishing and establishing the importance of feminine ‘chastity’. For effecting sexual subjugation, plethora of words has been coined. These words look quite innocent at their surface level but in fact have formed the base of the rhetoric of women’s subjugation. Some of these words are – honour, chastity, sati, purity, veil, respect, marriage, etc. The use of this rhetoric of women’s subjugation somehow makes women feel how important they are for man and how important is their chastity and purity for the respect of their family and country. Impressed by all this false glorification of their ‘purity’ they become ready to immolate themselves as sati and accept sexual slavery of their husband. Silently suffering the thrashing and insult by the husband and his kin, sexual and psychological harassment by males in the streets, secondary treatment in most of the socioeconomic matters are just the byproducts of accepting and getting impressed by these words of ‘honour’. The same society that has created these words of ‘respect’ for women has also created some sexual barbs like ‘randi’ (whore) Raand (widow) and plethora of sexual abuses and metaphors so popular among males. Interestingly these sexual abuses are used even when there is no involvement of women in the conversation. By using these sexual abuses, males psychologically harass women who are present there and also strengthen the rhetoric of their subjugation. If Satvir had done something of same type as Pinki did, his case could have been taken from a different perspective as the burden of protecting the family respect is not so much on chastity of males as of females. Even the religious scriptures are full of heroes who married with a number of women and even had some concubines. For male, sleeping with a concubine is sometimes treated as luxury while for a girl choosing her husband is looked upon as a serious crime. The sexuality is so much glamorized and deified that it seeps deep into the collective psyche of the society and women are locked inside the four walls so that their chastity could be retained. This notion of ‘chastity’ becomes a true curse which they live with throughout their life. CONCLUSION The above analysis leads to the conclusion that NH10 is movie with a feminist agenda aiming at the empowerment of women. On the one hand it unveils the dirty face of khaap ridden society where girls are treated as sex slaves and their individuality and freedom to choose their partner is crushed brutally and on the other hand projects how women suffer in the patriarchal system. Love has nothing to do with marriage in such social systems as the reward of love and marriage without the consent of family results in murder of the couple in many states like Haryana. NH10 also seems to indicate the solution to this problem, which is in trashing the established rhetoric of women’s subjugation and the reconstruction of the rhetoric of women’s empowerment. The moral code of conduct that controls the sexuality of women in the name of ‘chastity’ and ‘honour’ needs to be trashed. The mass media can play a very important role in shaping the psyche of women and society about the individuality of women. The presentation of women as powerful individuals who have confidence, independence and ability to fight the odds and lead the society will not only change the image of women in collective consciousness of society but also motivate women to follow their example and claim their individuality and power in society. REFERENCES Singh, Navdeep (Dir.) (2015): NH10 (feature film). Mumbai: Eros International. Milkie, Melissa A. (1999) Social Comparisons, Reflected Appraisals, and Mass Media: The Impact of Pervasive Beauty Images on Black and White Girls' Self-Concepts. In Social Psychology Quarterly (Special Issue: Qualitative Contributions to Social Psychology). Vol. 62, No. 2, pages 190-210 Berga, Leah R. Vande & Diane Streckfuss (1992) Profile: Primetime television's portrayal of women and the world of work: A demographic profile. In Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media . Rutledge. Volume 36, Issue 2, pages 195-208 Stache, Lara C. (2013) The Rhetorical Construction of Female Empowerment: The Avenging-Woman Narrative in Popular Television and Film (Dissertations). Madison: University of Wisconsin System.Paper164. http://dc.uwm.edu/etd/164 Literaria Linguistica: A Journal of Research in Literature, Linguistics, and English Language Teaching ISSN: 2454-5228 Volume 1 July 2015 PP- 27-32 6