Kolkata: Ketan Mehta's historical film Rang Rasiya, challenging the hypocrisy of a male-dominated society, takes inspiration from Sita's agnipariksha and Draupadi's cheerharan, two of the most infamous episodes of the Indian epics representing the ordeal of women.
"Isn't it true that every day women are still forced to give modern versions of the agnipariksha? A woman's virtue has never stopped being on trial in India," the film's actress Nandana Sen told PTI. Ketan Mehta directed Rang Rasiya has courted controversy for taking artistic liberty in portraying nudity, but won applause at film festivals in Cannes, London, New York and Florence.
In the film Randeep Hooda plays the role of a 19th century painter Raja Ravi Varma, while Nandana plays his muse Sugandha, who faces ostracism by the political class for baring her body for artistic expression. It got a standing ovation at the Chicago Film Festival last month and was voted as the Best Film this summer in the London Film Festival.
"It has a powerful scene which is a metaphorical combination of Sita's agnipariksha and Draupadi's cheerharan. Not much has changed in the way women have been relentlessly judged by men, from Sita to Sugandha," she says. When she was on the jury of the National Council for Protection of Child Rights, Nandana was shocked to find policemen at a public hearing on trafficking in Kolkata identifying children forcibly sold into prostitution as 'girls of bad character'.
"Sugandha, the true-life personality I play in Rang Rasiya, had exactly the same fate."
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