What does it mean to be a feminist? Many of you showed a touching faith in the power of the dictionary to answer this question, without considering whether in different contexts, feminists might have different goals.

In western society, the goal of feminism has usually been female autonomy. You are autonomous when you are self-sufficient, don’t need help from anybody else, and can solve all of your own problems. Societies that value this form of autonomy above all else are called ‘individualist’ societies. The USA is the most individualistic society in the world. American women looked at the autonomy achieved by American men, and wanted to achieve this for themselves.

India is a collectivist society. In a collectivist society, people aspire to be part of a successful group. They want to be accepted as part of a team that achieves financial security and social status, because everyone in the group plays their part well. In this society, a feminist will not necessarily expect women to become self-sufficient economically-independent problem solvers, because nobody manages to achieve that. An Indian feminist need not encourage Indian women to aspire to live the lifestyle associated with successful American men.

I should acknowledge that life in the USA and India is, and always has been more complicated. In particular, individualism has long been an option for the most wealthy members of collectivist societies – but most people follow a different set of values. In the case of Satyavati, she aspires to be accepted as a valued member of her husband’s family. The obstacles are placed in her way by her sisters-in-law. The question is whether she can succeed in overcoming these obstacles.

Satyavati, the lead character of Jai Santoshi Maa, is the complete opposite of this idea. She relies completely on the goddess to solve her problems, and she never seems to have the intention of trying to solve her problems independently. In a feminist film the idea of equality and female independence from men should be present in the main character or at least in some characters ...

It is certainly true that Satyavati relies on her husband to save her from being raped. As one student observed (only to ignore this observation when evaluating the film), almost every Bollywood film at the time featured a man defending a woman’shonor. The film-makers need to establish the husband as a heroic figure, someone Satyavati would want to marry. Also, the presence of a strong male hero would help make the film more acceptable to a male audience – a woman could take her husband to see the film, and he would have a figure to identify with. In any case, you need to be considering not simply the cliches that the film shares with other Bollywood films of the time, but the points that set it apart. The really interesting point is what it means to say that Satyavati relies on Santoshi Ma.

Someone who is self-reliant has deep inner strength, a resilience that enables them to overcome any problem. Remember that all goddesses are manifestations of Shakti, feminine energy. Santoshi Ma embodies the strength inside all women – she is not an external agent who helps Satyavati, she is the representation of the strength that Satyavati, and any woman, has within herself. Many of you will be familiar with Gravity – if not, be warned, I’m about to spoil it for you. In that film, Sandra Bullock’s character is helped by the “ghost” of George Clooney’s character. Some viewers saw the scene as sexist, because the woman needs the help of a man. But most viewers realized that the woman is hallucinating: the help she receives from the ghost is simply her own unconscious mind reminding her of things she learned in her training. Some people still complained that her inner strength was represented by a male character. Satyavati’s inner strength is represented by a female character.

Of course, it is confusing that Santoshi Ma is presented as an external agent in the film, and that would be how many devotees would think of her. In Gravity, it is clear that the ghost was only ever there in the character’s mind. The airlock door did not really open – that was just a vision. In Jai Santoshi Ma, the goddess is not presented as just a hallucination, she is presented as having a physical life of her own. Gravity was an attempt to present science fiction in the proper sense, where the fiction builds on science. There may have been some scientific errors, but if so, they were flaws in the film. Jai Santoshi Ma is not attempting to be scientific, so of course Santoshi Ma does not need to be rationalized as nothing more than a hallucination.

So consider this example, which illustrates the Hindu way of thinking about goddesses. Srinivasa Ramanujan was one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century. He attributed his great achievements to the goddess Mahalakshmi (Great Lakshmi) who, he said, would visit him in dreams and reveal mathematical formulae. He was perfectly sincere, but nobody has ever claimed that he was simply an inferior mathematician who could not figure things out for himself, and had to plagiarize from a goddess. She is a real being, and yet she is also part of him. The boundaries between self and other are not drawn in the same way. One student came close to recognising this, by quoting Rita M. Gross’s contribution to Is The Goddess A Feminist?

(Santoshi Mata)is neither a feminist nor a non-feminist, since she does not exist as an independent autonomous entity, but only in a relationship with those who know her

This comment should lead you to consider the relationship between the worshipper and the goddess more carefully. Santoshi Maa acts through Satyavati not instead of her. However, the student who quoted Rita Gross did not follow up on this thought. Gross’ words appeared in the paper, but there is no indication that the thought expressed by those words really entered into the thinking process.

This does not suffice to show that Jai Santoshi Ma is a feminist film. In general, you all did well at seeing the problems with endorsing this as a feminist film. However, many of you missed the strengths that the film has from a feminist perspective, because, after all, understanding an artefact from a foreign culture is not easy.
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