Framing Female Athleticism: Gendered Representation of Sportswomen in Contemporary Indian Cinema

Abstract

In the last two decades, the sportswomen have shifted from being on the fringes of Hindi cinema to its centre of the story. Previously female athletes were treated as minor characters, but now they are the main characters whose training, failures and successes drive the storyline. The study analyzes the change in five popular films, namely Chak De! India (2007), Mary Kom (2014), Dangal (2016), Panga (2020) and Rashmi Rocket (2021). Released between 2007 and 2021, these films span across sports like hockey, boxing, wrestling, kabaddi and track athletics. The rhetorical thrust is not so much about the fact that Indian cinema now depicts more and more women playing sports than it used to, but the impact that role of sportswomen has on the assumptions of the patriarchy and nationalism that it seems to be challenging. This analysis, using feminist theory and cultural studies, reveals that visibility is connected with subordination, not one after another in a fixed order. Both recognition and restriction can exist together. These movies celebrate women's accomplishments while regularly grounding their success in a family's approval, male protection and norms of femininity. Representation is not emancipatory, nor is it just a regressive process, but rather ideologically layered, with the promise of change and the residue of the older hierarchies. The paper uses the term ‘’conditional visibility for this arrangement and ends by making a call for a narrative that will handle caste, class and regional difference more readily than the exceptional individual