Theater as the Means of Distressing the Damsel

Abstract

Woman in the utmost need for a man to live a fulfilling life, the damsel in distress trope has been the part of women‟s life as well as literature since time immemorial. In 1919, P. G. Woodhouse wrote a novel, A Damsel in Distress with the similar patriarchal plot line, wherein distressful Lady Maud Marsh, as she is not allowed to marry her beloved Geoffrey Raymond, is saved by George Bevan. This narration is changing gradually as women are realizing to help themselves from their distressed state. This paper endeavors to focus on one such narrative. After 100 years of the novel, director Shelly Chopra Dhar, co-writing the screenplay with Gazal Dhaliwal, retells the Woodhouse plot in the form of motion picture named Ek Ladki Ko Dekha to Aisa Laga (2019). This film pioneers the positive queer representation in commercial Bollywood cinema, through the love story between two women. As Damsel in Distress has been the model of representing women, similar is the case in portraying heterosexuality, these two ways of representing womanhood and sexuality has become extremely common that it seldom gets noticed to be refuted. Thus when two women writers, one of whom a Trans woman, re-narrates a man‟s story, they rebuke both the above mentioned tropes. Shelly employs theatre as tool for her narration, ensuing from another classic narrative technique of play within a play. As Ek Ladki Ko Dekha to Aisa Laga is the very first film to present a different kind of love story, it slyly hides the homosexual innuendoes from the trailer as well from the promo, therefore inviting the audiences, without any prior prejudices. Similarly within the film, theatre is used to familiarize the people of Moga, a community not homophobic but unaware about the queer identity. Thus the paper will attempt to study the role of theatrecinema, replacing the helping hand of a man in distressing the damsel.