"The World of Women Arises" (To Work)

The hugely popular 1962 Telugu film Gundamma Katha borrows heavily from William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The film is a social comedy in which two male protagonists work together to tame a shrewish woman and her mother, saving a virtuous sister in the process. The objective of such taming is the conversion of the shrew into that of the virtuous housewife. This essay argues that both shrewishness and virtue are indexed in the film to a particular conception of labor that tropologically surrounds Telugu regional identity. In this framework, the virtuous woman is expected to work while also being indifferent to the accrual of material wealth. The economy of virtue and labor in the film emerges as a reading of The Taming of the Shrew’s mechanics of misogyny, and can thus be put into conversation with criticism that focuses on the economics of the play. Rather than disavowing the play’s misogyny, the film showcases how Shakespeare becomes a source in the making of a Telugu regional identity in the twentieth century.