Mother India and Fire

Films like Mother India and Fire both show what it is like to be a woman in Hindu society, but do so in different ways. In Mother India, the mother is shown as a strong, heroic woman. She marries for love, which was rare, and had children. She worked in the fields alongside her husband, which showed the equality between man and woman. When her husband died, she carried on by herself and managed to take care of herself and her small children. By the end, she is viewed as a heroic figure because she killed her own son in order to protect the honor of the village. In this film, the lead character was a woman who was strong and self assured. She did the things that she needed to in order to survive, but she did not sacrifice her morals along the way.       

Fire, on the other hand, showed the women as being inferior, meant only for cooking and sex. Sita married Jatin in an arranged marriage, although he is still in love with Julie. Everyone in the house knows that Jatin is going to visit Julie while his wife Sita stays at home. From the get go, the men are put on a higher pedestal. Throughout the film, we see Sita and Radha endure relationships with their husbands that lack affection, honesty, and respect. As a result, Sita and Radha grow closer and begin to fill the void in each other’s lives. Although both women are portrayed as inferior, Sita’s courage and loneliness leads her to a relationship with Radha, which was unheard of. Both Radha and Sita leave their husbands and continue their relationship. Sita and Radha showed courage because they recognized that they were not happy in their lives and instead of moping around, they did something about it.

In the end of each film, the woman was portrayed as heroic, which is a stark contrast from how women in the Hindu religion typically are viewed. Although it took Sita and Radha longer to reach heroism than it did for the woman in Mother India, the women shrugged off the duties that were thrust upon them by their culture and instead created their own. I think that it was interesting that in Mother India¸ the main character was viewed as a strong, independent woman from the beginning while Sit and Radha were not viewed that way until the end of Fire. This was interesting to me because Mother India was made in 1957 while Fire was made in 1996. If anything, I thought the views on women would have been reversed in the films.