Analysing the Concepts of Sexual Harassment: From Reel to Real in Hindi Cinema

MITASHREE TRIPATHY
Orissa Engineering College, India

Hindi cinema has been the most celebrated form of entertainment source around the world and since time immemorial. Behind the lyrics of pseudo romantic songs, dialogues, scenes of love and affection display, courtship, and so on, sexual harassment has been seen spreading it’s sickening aura to create some of the meanest examples in Hindi cinema. Sexual harassment has been a topic of worry and concern and has been accumulating a lot of attention in the recent decades. This paper examines in details the portrayal of sexual harassment with no regard to gender explicitly portrayed by famous actors in selected Hindi films, applying the qualitative methodology of textual analysis theory. The paper also gives some of the real life incidents of sexual harassment as experienced by celebrities mostly focusing on the recent #MeToo movement. The findings of the paper reveal that in films, the display of sexual harassment by men towards women ultimately ends up in a love story and by women towards men in quitting.

Keywords: Hindi cinema, films, sexual harassment, reel, real, #MeToo

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Mitashree Tripathy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at Orissa Engineering College, Bhubaneswar, India. Her areas of academic interest are: professional ethics and communication and interpersonal skills for corporate readiness.