The Unmaking and Remaking of the Self: Internalisation, Rupture, and Emergent Agency
in Praveen Kandregula’s Paradha
Nibedita Mahatha,
Ph.D. Research
Scholar,
Department of
English and Foreign Language,
Guru Ghasidas
Vishwavidyalaya, Bilaspur,
Chhattisgarh, India.
Abstract: Praveen Kandregula’s Paradha (2025) traces the
psychological and existential consequences of a tradition so thoroughly
internalised that it becomes indistinguishable from selfhood. This paper
focuses on the arc of Subbu, the film’s central character, whose subjectivity
is constituted through the paradha - a veil-based tradition that operates not
through overt coercion but through the intimate transmission of belief, fear,
and identity foreclosure. The paper traces the process through which tradition
migrates from external rule into interior selfhood, and the crisis that follows
when that selfhood is violently exposed as constructed. The paper argues that
Paradha resists the consolations of a liberation narrative, presenting selfhood
instead as a fragile, ongoing negotiation - one that begins not with triumph
but with the radical act of doubt, and ends not in freedom but in the courage
to be seen.
Keywords: Female Subjectivity, Internalisation,
Deterritorialisation, Trauma, Agency
What does it mean to
be made by a belief you did not choose? Praveen Kandregula’sParadha (2025) poses this question not
as an abstraction but as the governing condition of a woman’s life. Set in the
village of Padathi, the film centres on the paradha,
a tradition that compels women to veil themselves from puberty to death,
grounded in the myth of Jwalama, a violated woman whose rage is said to have
cursed the village with stillborn children. The paradha, as the film presents it, is not simply a practice observed
by its subjects; it is a reality inhabited by them. Subbu, the film’s central
character, does not follow the tradition as an external rule. She has been made
by it. Her sense of self, her understanding of safety, her aspirations, and her
instinctive responses to danger have all been constituted through its terms.
This paper focuses on the consequences of that constitution and on what happens
when the belief that an organised self is exposed, through violence and
rupture, as incapable of delivering what it promised. It traces the arc from
internalisation to crisis, from crisis to threshold, and from threshold to the
fragile, incomplete emergence of a selfhood that can no longer be secured by
inherited faith.
Tradition’s most
consequential operation is not the transmission of content but the shaping of
the subject who receives it. When that shaping is thorough enough, it ceases to
feel like shaping at all. The tradition no longer appears as something imposed;
it appears as something one simply is. This paper examines Paradha as a cinematic study of that process and of the violent,
disorienting rupture through which one woman begins, however partially, to see
it for what it is.Subbu’s subjectivity is shaped precisely through this
internalisation. From the moment she attains puberty, the paradha is presented to her not as a restriction but as a
protection. Her mother’s voice plays a decisive role here. The injunction to
veil is delivered in the language of care, safety, and love. The mother does
not threaten punishment; she promises security. This is the precise mechanism
Althusser identifies in the family as an Ideological State Apparatus — ideology
is transmitted not through coercion but through affection, making it far more
durable than any externally imposed rule (Althusser 153). What is learned at
the threshold of adulthood is not simply a rule but a worldview: the idea that
a woman’s safety depends on her invisibility, that danger lies not in violence
but in exposure, and that survival is contingent upon self-effacement.
Over time, this
belief does not remain external to Subbu’s sense of self. It becomes
constitutive of it. The paradha
begins to define where she can go, what she can imagine, and how she
understands her future. Her aspirations are carefully calibrated within the
permissible limits of tradition. When she expresses a desire to work as a
teacher, the suggestion is not violently rejected; it is gently corrected. The
implication is clear: ambition is not forbidden, but it must not disturb the
primary role assigned to her as wife and mother. This gentle narrowing of
horizons is what Betty Friedan, writing in a different but structurally
analogous context, terms “the problem that has no name” — the systematic
confinement of women’s selfhood to domestic and reproductive roles so thorough
that the loss itself becomes difficult to articulate (Friedan 15). In this way,
obedience is not demanded outright; it is cultivated through narrowing
horizons.
What emerges here is
a form of self-policing that aligns closely with Michel Foucault’s
understanding of disciplinary power. Subbu does not need to be constantly
watched; she watches herself (Foucault 195). Foucault’s figure of the
Panopticon is instructive here: the inmate who cannot know when they are being
observed begins to behave as though under permanent surveillance, eventually
internalising the warden’s gaze as their own (Foucault 200–201). Tradition thus
succeeds not by restricting movement alone, but by shaping perception. The
world is no longer experienced as open or plural; it is filtered through the
binary of safety and danger, purity and contamination. This internalisation
also reveals how womanhood is rendered singular and exhaustive. The film
repeatedly shows how Subbu’s identity is collapsed into a narrow set of
functions: marriage, reproduction, and sacrifice.
Perhaps the most
tragic consequence of this internalisation is that it forecloses the
possibility of injustice. If suffering is interpreted as duty, there is no
language left to name harm. This is precisely what Spivak means when she argues
that the subaltern woman cannot speak — not because she is literally mute, but
because the available discursive frameworks do not accommodate her experience
as injury (Spivak 92). When Subbu’s engagement is cancelled following her accidental
visibility, the community’s response is not to investigate the circumstances
but to moralise the event. Innocence becomes irrelevant. What matters is the
breach of belief. Subbu herself initially accepts this logic. She pleads not
for her right to live freely, but for recognition of intent. Her appeal remains
trapped within the moral grammar of the tradition, revealing how deeply she has
absorbed its terms.
Yet the film does not
portray Subbu as weak or passive. Her obedience is not a sign of intellectual
deficiency but a consequence of systematic emotional training. She has been
taught to equate survival with submission and morality with endurance. In this
sense, Paradha resists the temptation
to frame belief as ignorance. Instead, it presents internalisation as a
sophisticated mechanism through which power reproduces itself across
generations, especially among those who have never been offered alternatives.
In Paradha, the undoing of tradition does
not begin with rebellion but with rupture. The system that governs Padathi is
not challenged through collective dissent or conscious refusal; it is
destabilised by a sequence of crises that expose the fragility of belief when
confronted with lived reality. These moments do not immediately liberate the subject.
Instead, they generate disorientation, uncertainty, and psychological fracture.
This liminal condition resonates with Victor Turner’s concept of liminality —
the threshold phase in which the subject has been stripped of a former
structure but has not yet been incorporated into a new one, producing a state
of radical openness and vulnerability (Turner 95). The film treats crisis not
as resolution but as a threshold, a liminal space in which the self is
suspended between inherited faith and emerging doubt.
The first rupture
occurs through accidental visibility. Subbu’s face appears on the cover of a
magazine, captured without her consent, stripped of context, and circulated
beyond the boundaries of the village. The circulation of Subbu’s image
initiates destabilisation. The photographer - significantly, a wildlife
photographer - captures her face not as scandal but as presence. His profession
matters. He searches for wilderness in landscapes. Yet behind the paradha, he recognises another kind of
wilderness - not chaos, but uncontained subjectivity. His gaze contrasts
sharply with the disciplinary gaze of Padathi. One territorialises; the other
aestheticises. The image does not violate her; it reveals her beyond coding.
The journey beyond
the village intensifies this threshold state. Removed from the spatial and
ritual confines of Padathi, Subbu encounters alternative ways of living that do
not fit within her inherited moral framework. These encounters do not offer
instant liberation; they amplify her confusion. She oscillates between
defensiveness and curiosity, anger and vulnerability. When Ami questions the
logic of the paradha, Subbu responds
not with reasoned argument but with visceral hostility. This reaction is
theoretically legible through the concept of cognitive dissonance - the
psychological discomfort produced when new information fundamentally challenges
deeply held beliefs, often triggering not revision but intensified defence
(Festinger 3). To question the tradition is to threaten the self that has been
built around it.
Here, Deleuze and
Guattari offer a powerful lens. Padathi functions as a territory, not only
spatially, but symbolically. Territory provides coordinates of meaning. It
determines what counts as danger, virtue, and transgression. To live within it
is to inhabit a fixed grid of interpretation. This territorialisation is so
complete that women internalise it as identity. Subbu does not just wear the paradha; she believes her invisibility
safeguards life. The curse has migrated inward. Deleuze and Guattari describe
territorialisation as the process through which flows of desire and meaning are
captured, organised, and fixed into stable codes that govern what bodies can do
and where they can go (Deleuze and Guattari 40–41).
Crossing the boundary
- literal and psychological - initiates deterritorialisation.
Deterritorialisation, in Deleuzian terms, is not mere movement. It is the
destabilisation of the system that made reality intelligible (Deleuze and
Guattari 508–509). When Subbu steps outside Padathi, she does not simply enter
a new space; she encounters a world where the curse is not self-evident.
Meaning begins to loosen. Yet deterritorialisation is not liberation. Anthony
Giddens’ concept of ontological security helps explain Subbu’s unease. The self
depends on stable interpretive frameworks, and when those frameworks are
disrupted, what follows is not freedom but existential anxiety (Giddens 35–36).
Ratna and Ami experience behavioural discomfort; Subbu experiences ontological dislocation.
Her identity was not built around a role but around a cosmology. To question
the curse is to question reality itself.
Crossing the boundary
into Dharamshala intensifies this rupture. The mountains operate as what
Deleuze and Guattari would call a smooth space — a space not yet rigidly coded,
in contrast to the striated space of Padathi, where every movement is
prescribed and regulated (Deleuze and Guattari 474–475). Scale disrupts
hierarchy. Padathi’s cosmology shrinks against the Himalayan vastness. Yet
deterritorialisation does not produce immediate freedom; it produces anxiety.
Subbu’s belief sheds layer by layer. It begins with Ami’s questions, with small
irritations in certainty, and culminates in embodied confrontation.
The wilderness becomes
crucial here. Women are often symbolically associated with nature - fertility,
continuity, reproduction - yet their own “wildness” is suppressed in the name
of order. In the film, nature reverses this symbolic hierarchy. Mountains,
rivers, and open skies offer scale rather than confinement. The wilderness
becomes a site where inherited meanings weaken. It does not provide answers; it
suspends inevitability.
The presence of
Rathnamma and Ami is central to how this unfamiliar space becomes navigable.
Together, they form an uneven but crucial constellation of care that counters
the isolating logic of tradition. Ratna inhabits a quieter version of the same
logic. Domestic endurance is framed as familial harmony, and the moral weight
of maintaining stability rests upon her willingness to absorb strain. There is
no declared curse, yet the consequence of deviation - discord, blame, or
emotional fracture - functions similarly. It is in Dharamshala that she is
exposed to a new and different life; she understands her worth better, which
has been suppressed in the form of duty, and thus becomes vocal about her
importance and existence. Ami’s arc is crucial in this theoretical frame. She
represents another territory - modern meritocratic patriarchy. Her confrontation
with the drivers exposes everyday gendered dismissal. Her aggression is not
temperament but resistance to being reduced to a category. Later, the army
officer articulates a radical proposition: femininity or masculinity should be
a choice, not a performance undertaken for validation. This moment reframes
gender through Butlerian performativity. Ami has been performinghard to shun
away any form of femininity to avoid gendered bias over her capacity as an
engineer. Subbu has been performing invisibility to belong. Both are responses
to territorial expectations (Butler 33).
The tension between
Subbu and Ami is one of the film’s most incisive moments. Their initial clashes
reveal how women positioned differently by patriarchy often struggle to
recognise each other’s oppression. Subbu’s belief that marriage and motherhood
define womanhood, and Ami’s contempt for what she perceives as “typical”
femininity, expose the narrow frameworks through which both have learned to
measure value. What allows these differences to evolve into solidarity is not
ideological agreement but shared exposure. As the journey unfolds, moments of
conversation, silence, and shared vulnerability create a space where judgment
gives way to understanding. The film is careful not to romanticise sisterhood;
it emerges slowly, through discomfort and conflict. Care here is not
sentimental but ethical. It involves listening, accompanying, and refusing to
abandon one another even when belief systems clash.
The encounter with
Krishna further expands this ethical landscape. His articulation of belief
stands in sharp contrast to the absolutism of Padathi. For him, belief is
acceptable only insofar as it does not demand human sacrifice. This seemingly
simple assertion destabilises Subbu more profoundly than direct criticism ever
could. It introduces the possibility that faith and harm are not inherently
linked, that belief can exist without domination. The Tibetan prayer flags,
fluttering freely in the wind, become a quiet counter-image to the paradha. Unlike the veil, which
restricts movement and vision, the flags signify openness, circulation, and
plurality. They do not demand obedience; they invite reflection.
The natural landscape
itself plays a significant role in this reorientation. Mountains, valleys, rivers,
and open skies contrast sharply with the enclosed spaces of the village. Nature
here is not romanticised as pure or redemptive, but it does offer scale. Subbu
begins to perceive her life as part of a world far larger than the one defined
by tradition. This perceptual shift resonates with what Gaston Bachelard terms
the poetics of space — the idea that inhabited and encountered spaces are not
neutral but actively shape the imagination, expanding or contracting what the
subject can conceive as possible (Bachelard xxxv). Possibility, once
unimaginable, becomes thinkable, even if not yet attainable.
The story of the bird
narrated during the journey crystallises this ethical shift. The question posed
— whether freedom is worth the risk of death — forces Subbu to confront the
moral economy of safety that has governed her life. The bird that hesitates
before flying mirrors her own condition. Safety within the cage guarantees
survival but denies purpose. Flight offers risk, but also meaning. This parable
maps onto what Erich Fromm identifies as the “escape from freedom” — the
psychological tendency to retreat into the security of submission when
confronted with the vertigo of genuine self-determination (Fromm 4–5). The film
does not offer an easy answer. Instead, it frames choice as an ethical burden
rather than a triumphant solution.
Yet the film resists
a narrative of immediate awakening. Subbu mourns the loss of belief because
belief had structured her sense of coherence. Berger and Luckmann remind us
that social realities become real through habitualisation and internalisation,
and when the structures that have made the world legible are disrupted, what
follows is not relief but grief (Berger and Luckmann 53–54). The unmaking of
the self is not triumphant; it is disorienting.
The most decisive
rupture in Paradha occurs not through
debate, persuasion, or theological doubt, but through trauma. The attempted
sexual assault on Subbu is the moment where belief collapses under the weight
of lived experience. Until this point, the paradha
has been questioned, strained, and destabilised, but it has not been decisively
undone. Trauma performs what argument cannot. It exposes the fatal
contradiction at the heart of the tradition: the promise of protection is
revealed as illusion precisely when protection is most needed. Judith Herman
argues that trauma shatters the fundamental assumptions through which the self
organises its relationship to the world — safety, trust, and meaning — leaving
the subject without the frameworks necessary to make experience coherent
(Herman 51).
The scene is
carefully constructed to echo the foundational myth of Jwalama. Like the
goddess, Subbu is targeted while vulnerable, isolated, and displaced from the
protection of familiar structures. Like the goddess, she is seized by men who
view her body as available, despite the codes meant to regulate visibility and
desire. By repeating the violence that supposedly gave rise to the tradition,
the film exposes the circular logic of belief. The paradha was instituted, the myth claims, to prevent harm. Yet harm
persists, undeterred by ritual or obedience. What changes is not violence
itself, but who is blamed for it.
Subbu’s instinctive
response during the assault is devastating in its clarity. She clutches the
veil, struggling to keep it intact, as though it might still fulfil the promise
it has always made to her. This gesture encapsulates the depth of
internalisation. Even in the face of direct bodily threat, belief overrides
perception. The paradha is no longer
just fabric; it is her last moral anchor. When the veil finally tears, it is
not merely a physical rupture but a psychic one. The symbolic centre of her
faith gives way under force, leaving her exposed not only to the world but to
the truth she has long been shielded from. This tearing is legible as what
Frantz Fanon describes as the violent unmaking of the colonised self — the
moment when the structures of meaning that have organised subjectivity are
stripped away, leaving the subject to reconstitute identity from the ground up
(Fanon 41–42).
The aftermath of the
assault is marked by silence rather than spectacle. Subbu does not articulate
her pain in language; instead, she performs it through gestures. She washes her
body repeatedly, attempting to erase the memory of touch. She tears apart the
pages of the magazine, an object that had come to signify both exposure and
punishment. These actions are not attempts at purification in the ritual sense,
but expressions of rage, grief, and disorientation. The compulsive washing of
the body after sexual violence is recognised in trauma studies as a somatic
response — the body attempting to restore a sense of boundary and integrity
that violation has destroyed (Herman 51–52). The film refuses to aestheticise
trauma or convert it into a moment of instant empowerment. What follows is not
clarity, but collapse.
This collapse is
epistemic as much as emotional. Subbu confronts the unbearable question she can
no longer suppress: if the paradha
could not protect her, what has she been protecting all along? The belief that
once structured her world now appears hollow, yet its absence leaves a void.
Her breakdown is not simply a rejection of tradition, but a mourning for the
self that tradition had given her. This is what Giddens identifies as the
collapse of ontological security — when the narrative of the self that makes
daily life possible fractures, what follows is not liberation but existential
crisis (Giddens 35–36). Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann further clarify that
when the socially constructed reality one has internalised as natural is
suddenly denaturalised, the individual experiences a profound sense of “anomie”
— a condition in which the world no longer makes normative sense (Berger and
Luckmann 119–120).
Crucially, the film
situates this moment of awakening within care rather than isolation. Rathnamma
and Ami do not demand that Subbu renounce belief or embrace a new ideology.
They sit with her grief, acknowledging both the harm she has endured and the confusion
that follows it. Their intervention reframes the goddess not as the source of
violence, but as a figure whose story has been distorted. They ask the question
that the village has long refused to consider: would a warrior who resisted
violation demand the sacrifice of other women? Would a mother who lost her
unborn child punish other mothers? This reinterpretation does not destroy
faith; it relocates responsibility, shifting blame from the divine to the human
structures that manipulate belief.
This moment marks
what can best be described as a partial awakening. Subbu does not emerge with a
fully articulated counter-belief or a clear sense of autonomy. What she gains
instead is doubt, and doubt here is not weakness. It is the first ethical
opening in a system that has long denied uncertainty. She admits, perhaps for
the first time, that she does not know what to believe anymore. This admission
is radical precisely because tradition has allowed no such space. To not know
is to step outside obedience. This epistemological rupture resonates with what
Paulo Freire terms “conscientisation” — the process through which the oppressed
begin to perceive the contradictions of their situation and emerge from naive
acceptance into critical awareness, however partial and painful that emergence
may be (Freire 17).
The tearing of the
veil thus operates on multiple levels. It is the exposure of the body, the
shattering of belief, and the beginning of self-recognition. Yet the film is
careful to show that awakening is not synonymous with freedom. Subbu does not
instantly reclaim her identity or agency. She remains haunted by fear, by the
weight of tradition, and by the possibility of consequences that belief has
taught her to anticipate. What changes is not her certainty, but her
orientation. She begins to see that the harm she has endured is not an anomaly,
nor is it divine will. It is the result of a system that demands women’s
suffering to sustain itself.
In Paradha, the movement toward selfhood
does not culminate in escape or rupture alone, but in choice. Yet the film is
careful to redefine what choice means within a system that has long denied it.
Choice here is not freedom in its celebratory sense; it is risk. It is a
conscious step taken in full awareness of potential loss, violence, and
rejection. After the tearing of the veil and the collapse of belief’s
protective promise, Subbu occupies a precarious psychological terrain. She is
no longer able to submit unquestioningly, yet she is not fully liberated from
fear. The film refuses to replace one certainty with another. What she acquires
instead is the ability to choose in the absence of assurance. This capacity
resonates with what Simone de Beauvoir identifies as the condition of authentic
existence - the willingness to act without the guarantee of divine or communal
sanction, accepting full responsibility for one’s choices in a world that
offers no transcendent justification (de Beauvoir 267). To act without divine
guarantee, without communal approval, and without moral certainty is to reclaim
selfhood under conditions of profound vulnerability.
Subbu’s decision to
return to Padathi without the paradha
must be read within this context. It is not a gesture of triumph or
provocation. Nor is it an act of martyrdom disguised as defiance. The film
makes it explicit that she is fully aware of the consequences. She knows that
the villagers will read her visibility as a threat, that she may be blamed if
the pregnant woman loses her child, and that violence remains a real
possibility. Yet she returns nonetheless. What distinguishes this moment from
the earlier demand for self-sacrifice is agency. This time, the choice is hers.
She is no longer offering her body as unquestioned payment for belief; she is
placing belief itself on trial. This transformation enacts what Michel de
Certeau distinguishes as the difference between “strategy” and “tactics”, where
strategy belongs to those who own the territory, tactics are the weapons of the
weak, the small, subversive acts through which those without institutional
power make use of spaces not of their own making (de Certeau xix).
The birth of the
child becomes the narrative fulcrum upon which this wager turns. When the baby
is born alive and healthy, the myth collapses under the weight of its own
claims. Importantly, the film does not frame this moment as divine vindication
or miraculous intervention. It is not the goddess who is proven benevolent; it
is the tradition that is exposed as unnecessary and cruel. The absence of
catastrophe reveals what belief had long concealed: that women have been dying
for nothing. This exposure enacts what Barthes terms the “demythologisation” of
cultural signs, the moment when the naturalised appearance of an ideological
construct is stripped away, revealing the historical and political interests it
has always served (Barthes 142–143). The harm inflicted in the name of
protection is revealed as gratuitous rather than sacred.
The unveiling of the
goddess that follows carries immense symbolic weight. When the statue’s
covering burns away, and her face is revealed, the film stages a powerful
reversal. The deity once invoked to justify women’s invisibility is now made
visible. This act does not destroy faith; it reclaims it from patriarchal
mediation. The goddess is no longer a distant authority demanding obedience,
but a figure whose story can be reinterpreted outside the logic of punishment
and fear. The gradual removal of veils by other women in the temple signals not
mass liberation, but the beginning of collective hesitation. The first step has
been taken; the path forward remains uncertain.
Subbu’s reclamation
of selfhood remains incomplete, and the film insists on this incompletion. She
does not leave the village, nor does she assume a fully articulated new
identity. What she gains is not clarity, but courage. The courage to be seen,
to be uncertain, and to live without the guarantee that belief once provided.
This emergent, processual selfhood resonates with Hall’s understanding of
identity as never fixed but always in the process of becoming — constituted
through representation and difference rather than originating from any stable
interior essence (Hall 225). Her selfhood emerges not as a stable essence, but
as an ongoing process shaped by choice, risk, and ethical responsibility.
The film’s insistence
on partial rather than total liberation is therefore significant. Subbu does
not emerge as a fully emancipated subject, nor does the village transform
overnight. What changes is the moral landscape. Once the tradition is forced to
confront evidence, once a woman survives visibility without catastrophe, the
system can no longer rely on fear alone. The birth of the child does not redeem
the past losses; it exposes them. It reveals that women have been sacrificed
not out of necessity, but out of unquestioned belief. This is precisely the
operation Freire describes as the beginning of liberation — not the abolition
of the oppressive structure but the moment when the oppressed cease to host it
within themselves (Freire 28–29). This realisation does not heal trauma, but it
alters the terms under which tradition can continue to operate.
By ending with hesitation
rather than triumph, Paradha
foregrounds the ethical complexity of change. Breaking a tradition does not
automatically dismantle hierarchy, nor does it erase internalised fear. What it
does is open space. Space for doubt, for reinterpretation, and for alternative
futures to be imagined. This opening resonates with what Ernst Bloch terms the
“principle of hope” — the capacity to anticipate a not-yet-realised future, not
as guaranteed destiny but as an orientation that makes present action meaningful
despite uncertainty (Bloch 5). Subbu’s final act is not heroic rebellion but
deliberate exposure. She stands visible, knowing the risk, refusing both blind
obedience and simplistic rejection. In doing so, she transforms the meaning of
sacrifice itself, from imposed duty to conscious ethical confrontation.
In tracing the making
and unmaking of Subbu’s self, this paper has argued that Paradha offers a meditation on belief as lived power and selfhood
as a fragile, ongoing negotiation. The removal of the paradha does not mark the end of tradition, but the end of its
moral immunity. What remains is uncertainty, resistance, and the difficult work
of reimagining life beyond fear. If the curse is broken, it is not through
divine intervention, but through the courage to be seen and the willingness to
accept that faith, when stripped of coercion, must answer to life rather than
demand it in return.
What Paradha ultimately refuses is the
comfort of resolution. Subbu does not walk out of the village into a new life;
she walks back into it, visible, uncertain, and without guarantee. The film
understands that the dismantling of a deeply internalised belief is not an
event but a process — slow, disorienting, and never complete. The self that
emerges from such a process is not liberated in any triumphant sense. It is
simply more honest about its own construction. And in a system that has always
depended on that construction remaining invisible, honesty is the most radical
act available. To see the paradha for
what it is, that is not a divine command but human manufacture, not protection
but control, is to begin, however haltingly, to exist outside its terms. This
is not freedom. But it is the threshold through which freedom, if it ever
comes, must pass.
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