Gendered Bhavas: Perpetuating Notions of “Ideal” Male and Female Behaviour Through Specific Emotions Highlighted in Acting in Mayabazar

Abstract

The concepts of ‘Bhava’ in acting and ‘Rasa’ in drama, as discussed in the Nātyasāstra, have served as valuable parameters for reviewing the merits of a play, directors’ intentions, and actors’ achievements for over two millennia in India. Their influence on meaning-making in Indian cinema is equally significant, given theatre’s continuing influence on its narrative and performance aesthetics, most evident in films of the mythological genre. Of all Indian cinemas, the ‘mythological film’ survived for the longest time in Telugu cinema, until the 1970s, with K.V. Reddy’s Mayabazar (1957) being its most influential landmark. The highlight of the film, a magical love story from the Mahabharata, is its heroine’s dual-personality premise. A plot twist has her character get impersonated by an illusionist demon, who ‘as-a-man-trapped-in-a-woman’s-body’, is a reveal of how ‘ideal’ notions of masculine and feminine bhavas in acting are perpetuated by an Indian actor’s portrayal of different reactions to similar situations based on the character’s gender. This article will establish how in her choice from the nine prescribed Sthayibhavas (primary human emotions) that the actress Savitri selects and rejects to distinguish, personify and limit her ‘woman-as-woman’ part from a ‘man-as-woman’ character that Mayabazar makes a test case for studying the selection, categorization and prioritization of major human emotions on the basis of gender in a performance.