RESEARCH ARTICLE A STUDY ON THEMITIGATION STRATEGIES OF VIOLENCE IN HINDI WOMEN CINEMA NARRATIVES *Rashmi Raja V.R. and Dr. Velayutham, C. Department of Media Sciences, Anna University, Chennai – 600025, India ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Gender scholar Michael Foucault when quoting about Justice says that, “Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and its institutions. “ (Foucault, 1978) There has been a sudden upsurge in women centric or women oriented films in the recent past which brings them carrying out positive roles, taking up challenges that reminds the audience of how strong they are. Hence this study aims to analyse the narratives of chosen women centric Hindi films and understand how the women characters try to mitigate the social violence they undergo. The study also touches upon the human rights issue faced by the women characters to analyse the violence against women and how gender equality is achieved in the narratives. Analysing the narrative strategies, mapping their character arcs, scrutinizing human rights issues and identify how violence is being mitigated are the objectives of the study. Copyright©2017, Rashmi Raja and Dr. Velayutham. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. INTRODUCTION Cinema in India is more than a hundred-year-old. Reports suggest that India has a mammoth film industry which produces as many as 1600 films per year with variety of narratives within. Yet, it never fails to evolve by the means of technology, storytelling technique and also by the different representational strategies given to it where at times, it also becomes the voice of the voiceless. When the case of gender discourses is considered, women were always considered as the weaker sex, more vulnerable, and cannot be independent throughout in most of the films. Very few films have been vocal enough to talk about women issues, violence against women which are generally considered to be minority crisis in mainstream cinema. Needless to mention about the recent ban on the film “Lipstick under my Burkha” by the CBFC, India who had quoted the reason for the ban as “the story is lady oriented, their fantasy above life” which proves India is still very far away in terms of gender equality. But the recent trend shift of Hindi films in terms of representation of women and their issues should be mapped, which previously showed them as only “damsels in distress”. The timeperiod after 2010 especially saw many women related cinema if not Women centric cinema. Examples can be No one killed Jessica (2011), *Corresponding author: Rashmi Raja V.R. Department of Media Sciences, Anna University, Chennai – 600025, India. English Vinglish (2012), Kahaani (2012), Queen (2014) etc. This paradigm shift was radical enough to put women into picture and many women conflicts which were previously trivialized got represented. This paper, studies the selected women centric films in order to understand the agenda set by the society, as the films made are generally societal themes which are fictionalized. Review of literature Andre Bazin who is a renowned and influential French film critic and theoretician states that “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires”(Bazin, 1960). For a world we desire, we tend to add more colours and drama to it, thus becomes different forms of storytelling which later evolves into a cinema. On talking about the analysis or the studying functionality of films, David Bordwell, in his essays on cinema states that “Film analysts and theoreticians often seek functional explanations; for e.g.: howx and y work together at a given moment to create z. The interpretations of films often include the non-obvious meanings that one can find in films. But the overall significance of a film is around making of meanings”. (Bordwell, 2000) Thus the analytical study is nothing but scrutinizing of the process of meaning making the films have created within. There have been many feminist film theorists and scholars who have traced the causes and reasons for the movie texts to be reiterating on the subordinate image International Journal of Information Research and Review Vol. 04, Issue, 09, pp.4477-4480, September, 2017 Article History: Received 22 nd June, 2017 Received in revised form 11 th July, 2017 Accepted 16 th August, 2017 Published online 27 th September, 2017 International Journal of Information Research and Review, September, 2017 Keywords: Women Cinema narratives, Mitigation strategies, Gender equality, Character arc, Human rights.