Clashes of Womanhood: Concepts of True Woman and New Woman in Satyajit Ray’s Devi and Mahanagar

Abstract

Indian cinema has been inspired and influenced by many literary works including the plays of Kalidasa and the novels of Chetan Bhagat. Indian filmmakers have directly or indirectly taken narratives from various mythological and regional texts in order to make their films. Adaptations of books into cinema are not a recent phenomenon for Indian cinema because the impact of literature on our films is as old as the cinema itself. The first ever Indian film Raja Harishchandra is an adaptation of a story taken from the great Indian epic The Mahabharata. This trend is observed even today as we can see many literary adaptations in films likeGuide, Devdas, Omkara, Hello, Two States, Three Idiots etc. Different theories of literature like Modernism, Feminism, Colonialism, Post-Modernism, Structuralism are applied in films also.