UNDERSTANDING THE POST SECULAR TURN IN MALAYALAM CINEMA: AN INTROSPECTION OF DIVERSE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY FEMALE CHARACTERS OF MOLLYWOOD

Abstract

Can a woman remain to be a feminist and religious at the same time? This has been a question of recent debates. The liberal feminists have labelled religious women as either fundamentalist or conservative. They think of religion as detrimental to the rights of women. The paper is an attempt to manifest that women can exercise their free will even under religious premises. It also promotes alternate thought approaches that go beyond the binaries of resistance and subordination and questions the conventional understanding of self-realisation with autonomous will. The analysis is carried out by studying the female lead characters in Malayalam movies like Neru (2023) Aami (2018), and Thattathin Marayathu (2012), in the backdrop of Post Secular Feminist theories proposed by Afia Zia, Saba Mahmood and like-minded theorists. The study further expands to define ‘agency’ as proposed by the feminist anthropologist Saba Mahmood under the semantic framework and an individual’s potential to realise the self under religious constructs.