Sandra Juliet Jose, Anusha Baby
Gunasekhar’s Shaakuntalam (2023), a pan-Indian mythological film starring Samantha Ruth Prabhu, presents a commercially sanitized adaptation of Kalidasa’s classical Sanskrit play Abhigyanashakuntalam (c. 4th–5th century CE). This paper examines the film’s deployment of “Disney-fication” as both an aesthetic strategy and an ideological apparatus — one that de-politicizes the source text, domesticates its female protagonist, and forecloses the critical possibilities opened by feminist adaptation theory. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s framework of the male gaze, Susan Napier’s work on spectacle in popular culture, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s critique of the “Third World woman” archetype, this paper argues that the film’s investment in visual grandeur, pastoral CGI, and melodramatic passivity reconstitutes Shakuntala not as a woman of complex desire and agency, but as an idealized, suffering princess designed for the consumption of a culturally conservative audience. The paper examines three key dimensions of this transformation: the aesthetics of visual spectacle, the gendered politics of the court scene, and the film’s uncritical retention of the Durvasa Curse as a device of patriarchal exoneration.