Giving Voice to Woman’s (a)Sexuality: Cinema of Kalpana Lajmi

Abstract

In the craft of Kalpana Lajmi, the journey of a woman is from body to soul. Her capturing of female sexuality, its desires and assertions to bodily and emotional needs was a step ahead to contemporary cinema and times. She questioned the binary sexual norms prevalent in the society and gave voice to retaliate and reject. Her portrayal of a Woman as a protagonist is someone who is unapologetic about her desires, relations and actions. Sexuality (Woman) lense in her camera travelled inside the body of a village woman to an urban damsel and touched the core (soul). A woman’s narration to the story and script was a big risk in patriarchal socialization as the sexual dilemmas, dreams and desires of the woman’s body are excluded while defining her. This article is an attempt to analyse and present the woman as an independent (a)sexual being in different contexts. For the analysis five Hindi movies (Ek Pal, Rudaali, Darmiyaan, Daman and Chingaart) are chosen which cover the wide socio-cultural and sexual spectrum.