USR PUBLISHER

Historically, Indian cinema has been dominated by male-centric narratives, with women largely confined to domestic, sacrificial, or symbolic roles. Among marginalized groups, tribal women occupy an especially precarious position, facing layered exclusions shaped by patriarchy, caste, ethnicity, and class. In Hindi cinema, their representation has often been stereotypical, exoticized, or narratively muted. In the twenty-first century, however, select Bollywood films—Laal Salaam (2002), Chak De! India (2007), Raavan (2010), Chakravyuh (2012), Mary Kom (2014), Newton (2017), and Joram (2023)—appear to signal a shift in how tribal women are portrayed. This study critically examines whether these films genuinely subvert entrenched stereotypes or merely offer surface-level revisions that continue to reproduce dominant ideological frameworks. Employing qualitative narrative and content analysis grounded in feminist film theory and postcolonial theory, particularly Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of the subaltern, the paper analyzes the narrative agency, characterization, and ideological positioning of tribal women across these films. The study finds that while recent portrayals include moments of resistance and visibility, tribal women are still frequently denied narrative autonomy and full subjectivity, functioning instead as symbols of suffering, national unity, or moral legitimacy. The paper argues that meaningful representational change in Bollywood remains limited unless tribal women are positioned as narrating subjects rather than narrative instruments.