Gender, Culture and Manifest Oppression: A Study of the Film, Ozhimuri

Abstract

The dialogue, the film, Ozhimuri initiates, is that of a class, the oppressed. As against the conventional patterns of duals oppressor and oppressed, powerful and powerless, man and woman and traditional and modern, Ozhimuri unravels a kind of unique pattern of human existence where the comparative stance are fluid terrains. It reveals the inherent ideology of oppression as projected through the patriarch Thanu Pilla, and the matriarch Kali Pilla. On a later stage it reveals the oppressed face of the oppressors. The Film, with a shocking cipher to the prejudiced, a divorce petition from a lady past sixty, in view of regaining her property and identity from a man past seventy, opens a new perspective on violence, power and revolt. The present paper aims at deciphering the mysterious and mixed threads, the clues to which are given in the voice and silence of the characters. The objectives include searching: the oppressed in the film, what makes the oppression, the key forms of oppression, the culture and the oppression and /oppressed, how the economic, ownership oriented thoughts added to the dilemma of the oppressed, the role of the institution of marriage to enhance oppression and the possibilities of divorce out of love versus marriage out of hatred. The paper also throws light of the way, how the history of a place and community turns to be the history of the oppressed. By comparing the characters that are oppressed, but holding power, the study throws light on understanding polyphonic nature of the knowledge and beliefs justified, related to existence in general and gender, culture and individual in specific.