Mothers of the South: power, suffering, and identity in maternal narratives of South Indian cinema
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The representation of motherhood in Indian cinema is often based on conventional gender norms, its ideology and performance aligning with the traditional patrifocal social structures where women are marginalised and oppressed. This paper dissects the portrayals of motherhood in South Indian cinema that intersect with various identities in which such representations redefine the concept of motherhood with diverse socio-cultural, regional, and personal identities. It examines how motherhood representations in South Indian cinema, with a special focus on two pan-Indian blockbuster movie series: Bahubali: The Beginning (2015) and Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017); K.G.F: Chapter 1 (2018) and K.G.F: Chapter 2 (2022) glorify the suffering of the mother and fundamentally elevate the mother’s role as a commanding and influential force, contributing significantly to the heroic stature of hypermasculine protagonists. It also explores Malayalam cinema, the film industry based in the State of Kerala, to understand how select films represent the mother as an emotionally vulnerable and transformative character. This study delves into cinematic examples that illustrate the evolving nature of matrescence, examining how South Indian filmmakers navigate the complex web of intersecting identities to present multifaceted maternal cultural narratives.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it