'THAPPAD' AND GENDER POLITICS: A RECONSTRUCTION (Pages 21-29) by Parvathy B.M in THE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH SPECIALIST / ISSN: 2350-1499 (Online); 2350-0751 (Print)

Indian Cinema which had been once the domain of patriarchy and which encompassed a bunch of puppet-like heroines, submissive to the whims and fancies of the male chauvinism, now a days witnesses a deliberate shift which has shaken the very centres of observation. Such path breaking ventures have resulted in a dramatic transition from the typical heroic to “sheroic” movies which had put an end to the othering of the female sex. Such movies started to place woman at the centre and the entire world was started to be depicted through her eyes, foregrounding her unseen, unheard and unfelt aspirations, frustrations and inner psyche. The 2020 movie Thappad directed by Anubhav Sinha is such a movie which throws light on the exploration of the inner psyche of womanhood, through the determined, iron-willed character Amrita (enacted by TaapseePannu) who breaks away from the shackles of confinement which made her a mere puppet in the hands of her husband, subsiding all her limes and dislikes. This paper titled “Thappad and Gender Politics: A Reconstruction”, is an attempt to analyse, up to what extent the film is successful in portraying the heroine as a contrast to the cliché d stereotypes and to analyse how the text deconstructs itself, using the tenets of Derrida's Deconstruction.

Keywords: Cinema, Gender, Patriarchy, Deconstruction, Binary opposition, Aporia, Phallogocentrism, Dismantling. etc.