DIVINE FEAR AND SOCIAL CONTROL: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF AYALI AND PARDHA THROUGH MYTH CRITICISM AND FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGY

Across cultures, 'divine fear,' the belief that supernatural forces can punish or withdraw protection, functions as a powerful tool of social regulation. Although different cultures employ various gods, spirits, or deities in their own ways, they often utilize divine authority for the same purpose. It becomes a powerful tool for controlling people's behaviour. By comparing the Telugu movie Pardha (2025) and the Tamil web series Ayali (2023), this paper examines how South Indian contemporary visual media deploy sacred fear and create curse stories to regulate girlhood at puberty. This paper analyses how divine cautions, myths, and ritualised principles are used as instruments of patriarchal social control. By implementing Feminist Anthropology and Myth Criticism, the paper contends that the Goddess's curse and the other ritual injunctions function as ideologically driven plans that normalise and enforce representative sacrifice, gender discipline, and limit autonomy. In both texts, puberty becomes a biocultural boundary at which girls are forced to assume oppressive roles in their lives, early marriage in Ayali, and lifelong veiling in the movie Pardha to safeguard communal honours or to avoid a socially constructed crisis. These texts do not represent isolated cultural anomalies but participate in a broader worldwide phenomenon in which fear, myth, and gender are profoundly intertwined.