Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema: Looking through their Gaze 3031102312, 9783031102318

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Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema Looking through their Gaze Edited by Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan

Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema “Despite being central to any Bollywood potboiler worth its salt, women rarely feature in critical thinking about Hindi films. Addressing women as directors, scriptwriters, and producers,  Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema opens up many doors for us to walk through. On women. By women. But not only for women.” —Madhavi Menon, Professor of English, Director, Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Ashoka University, India​ “Over the last three decades, the Bombay film industry has witnessed a significant rise in the numbers of women who, in different professional capacities, have contributed to the creation of films for theatrical release and streaming platforms. This anthology invites a range of scholars to reflect on this moment. The outcome is rich with ideas that promise to inspire a new set of conversations.” —Shohini Ghosh, Sajjad Zaheer Professor, AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, India

Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan Editor

Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema Looking through their Gaze

Editor Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan Department of HSS Indian Institute of Technology Madras Chennai, India

ISBN 978-3-031-10231-8    ISBN 978-3-031-10232-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: ©Linus Strandholm / EyeEm/Gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due as follows: Prof. Kamakoti, Director IIT Madras, for his inspirational leadership; Prof. Ravindra Gettu, Dean, ICSR-IIT Madras, for the generous grant provided through the Exploratory Research Project Grant towards this project in 2021; My family, for their unwavering support towards my academic endeavours; The contributors, for their valuable chapters, for their generosity with their time, for sharing their immense scholarship; Jyoti Mishra, my research scholar at Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, for diligently helping me with proof-reading the manuscript; Palgrave Macmillan family, top-lined by Lina Aboujieb and her team Petra Trieber and Antony Sami.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  Wonder Women, Iron Ladies  1 Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan Part I Auteurial Voices, Bollywood Glamor, Multiple Genres   9 2 ‘ Love You Zindagi’: Gauri Shinde’s Celebration of Women and Life on Screen 11 Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan 3 Zoya  Akhtar: Global Genres and Gendered Signatures 33 Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta 4 Revisioning  Family Drama: The Global Spaces of Romance and Science Fiction in Honey Irani’s Stories 55 Madhavi Biswas 5 Women  (Not) Telling Women’s Stories: Tanuja Chandra’s Directorial Journey from Action-Thriller to Romance and Beyond 79 Shreyosi Mukherjee 6 Reema  Kagti and the Ethics of Surprise 97 Ulka Anjaria vii

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7 Farah  Khan: Cinephilia, Nostalgia and Melancholia111 Sunny Singh 8 Guneet  Monga: Gender, Labour and the “Disrupter” Indie Film Producer137 Nandana Bose Part II The Transnational and Postcolonial Turns 159 9 Roots  and Routes: Home and the World in Sooni Taraporevala’s Transnational Storytelling161 Akriti Rastogi 10 Mira  Nair and the Cinema of Postcolonial Spectacle179 Benita Acca Benjamin and Meena T. Pillai Part III Gender, Sexuality, Subversions 193 11 Figurations  of Fallible Women: The Art and Act of Writing by Juhi Chaturvedi195 Madhuja Mukherjee 12 Queer  Counter-narratives, Feminist Authorship, and the Inclusive Storytelling of Gazal Dhaliwal215 Namrata Rele Sathe 13 “Rosy  Ki Khwaheeshein”: Scripted Romance and Acquaintance Rape in Alankrita Shrivastava’s Oeuvre of Female Desire237 Shuhita Bhattacharjee 14 Women  at a Distance: Gender Politics and the Past in Bhavani Iyer’s Writings259 Tanushree Ghosh

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Part IV Spatio-Temporal Specificities 281 15 Marginalizations  and Repressions in Vijaya Mehta’s Pestonjee and Hamidabai ki Kothi283 Smita Banerjee 16 Reconstructing  Motherhood in Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s Nil Battey Sannata305 Priyanka Tripathi Glossary319 Index321

Notes on Contributors

Ulka Anjaria  is Professor of English at Brandeis University, USA, with research and teaching interests in South Asian literature and film. She is the author of Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema (2021), Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture (2019) and Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (2012) and editor of A History of the Indian Novel in English (2015). Smita Banerjee  is Associate Professor of English at Delhi College of Arts and Commerce, Delhi University. She is interested in post-colonial and cinema studies. She has published articles on popular Bengali and Hindi films. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation: The Suchitra-Uttam Yug: Modernity, Melodrama and Self-Fashioning in Popular Bangla Cinema of the 1950s–70s. Her recent publications include a book chapter, ‘The Caged Woman: Female Desire, Guilt and Transgression in Bimal Roy’s Bandini (1963)’ in ‘Bad’ Women of Bombay Films: Studies in Desire and Anxiety (Eds Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy Sharmila Purakayastha; Palgrave Macmillan 2020); journal article, ‘Evolution of Dada Uttam Kumar: Performing Masculinity and the Disillusioned Bhadralok Mahanayak in the 1970s’ Popular Melodramas’ in BioScope 1–23, 2019 and a co-edited volume, The Working Woman: Indian Perspectives on Stereotypes, Marginalisation and Empowerment (2020). Benita  Acca  Benjamin  is a research scholar (JRF) in the Institute of English, University of Kerala. Her research focuses on television modernities and the mediation of gender in Malayalam Soap Operas. xi

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Shuhita  Bhattacharjee is Assistant Professor of English Literature (Department of Liberal Arts) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. She completed her PhD from the University of Iowa and is working on two monographs—on the fin-de-siècle representation of colonial idols and on Postsecular Theory. She has written essays on Victorian literature and culture and on the South-Asian diaspora in journals like English Literature in Transition, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, and with presses like Palgrave Macmillan and Lexington Books. She has also worked extensively in the social sector at national and international levels in areas like sex education, gendered HIV-related violence, and sexual harassment. Madhavi  Biswas  teaches English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her thesis is on globalization and three contemporary Hat-ke directors (Vishal Bhardwaj, Anurag Kashyap, and Abhishek Chaubey) of New Bollywood Cinema. Her interests include transnational cinema, adaptation studies, and translation theory and practice. Nandana Bose  is a film scholar and author of the BFI Film Stars series monograph Madhuri Dixit (2019). She was previously Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington from 2009 to 2017. She has written in such refereed journals as Cinema Journal, Celebrity Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Velvet Light Trap, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, and Economic and Political Weekly; and anthologies such as Figurations in Indian Film (2010), Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship Around the World (2013), Behind the Scenes: Contemporary Bollywood Directors and their Cinema (2017), and Indian Film Stars (2020). As a film educator, she teaches an online course entitled Global Film Cultures via an independent learning platform. Tanushree  Ghosh  is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-­ century studies, postcolonial literatures, visual culture, and Indian cinema and new media. Praseeda  Gopinath is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, New York. She is the author of Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (2013). She has written widely on masculinity studies, postcolonial literature, twentieth-century British literature, sound, film, and cultural studies. Her work has appeared in South Asian Popular Culture, Contemporary Literature, Textual Practice, Studies in the Novel,

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Journal of Celebrity Studies, and Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship (2020), among others. She is co-­editor of a special issue on masculinities for South Asian Popular Culture, as well as a special issue on gendered sound in South Asia for the influential academic blog, Sounding Out!. Her current transdisciplinary project, Vernacular Masculinities: Men in Place, explores the literary and cultural forms of local masculinities and their disruption in contemporary India. Monika  Mehta is Associate Professor of English at State University of New York, Binghamton. She is the author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (2011; 2012). Her articles and chapters examining trans/ national film regulation, globalization and cultural production in India, DVD compilations, music awards, cinephilia, film distribution, credit sequences, and authorship have appeared in journals and edited collections. She has co-edited Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of Korea and India (2019) and Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media (2020). Madhuja Mukherjee  is Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is involved in art-practice, curation, and filmmaking. Her research involves the film industry, regional cinemas, sound cultures, gender, labour, city, and new media. She is the author of New Theatres Ltd.: The Emblem of Art, The Picture of Success (2009), editor of Aural Films, Oral Cultures: Essays on Cinema from the Early Sound Era (2012), and of the award-winning anthology Voices of the Talking Stars: The Women of Indian Cinema and Beyond (2017). She co-edited Popular Cinema in Bengal (2020), and Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India (2021). She wrote and illustrated Kangal Malsat (2013, Bengali), graphic-­novel. Mukherjee is also the writer of the film Ekti Tarar Khonje (2010, Bengali), co-writer of Qissa (2013, Punjabi), and director of the experimental film Carnival (2012). Her second feature-film is titled DEEP6 (in production), and her current documentation project is ‘Women at Work/Film industry under construction’. Shreyosi  Mukherjee  is an independent scholar with a doctoral degree from the National University of Singapore. She is also a research scholar and assistant editor at the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A). She has a bachelor’s degree (2005) and master’s degree (2007) in English literature from Calcutta University (Presidency College) and Jadavpur University, respectively. She has presented a number of research

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papers at international conferences in Kolkata, India; Stanford and Austin, USA; and Taipei, Taiwan, among others. Her scholarly articles have appeared in academic journals including the Shakespeare Review and Confluence. Her most recent work is a book chapter, in an edited volume, titled Stardom in Contemporary Hindi Cinema (Springer 2020). Meena T. Pillai  is professor at Institute of English, and is also director of Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Kerala. She was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (2019–2020) and also a Fulbright Doctoral Fellow to the Ohio State University, Columbus, a Shastri Fellow to the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University, and a Commonwealth Fellow at the Media Studies Centre, University of Sussex. She has written widely in the areas of cultural studies and gender studies. Akriti Rastogi  is a PhD candidate in cinema studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research aims at mapping the monetization channels of cinema effects using the lens of Web 2.0. The project examines the shifting terrains of the contemporary Hindi film industry. The areas of analyses are film promotion strategies, stardom, exhibition spaces, and other “Bollywoodized” paratexts. She received the 2019–20 Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Fellowship and the 2018–19 ICSSR Doctoral Fellowship for this study. She was a visiting student researcher at the Anthropology department at New York University from September 2019 to June 2020 under the aegis of Prof. Tejaswini Ganti. She has an MPhil degree in cinema studies, for which she studied web-based do-it-yourself filmmaking circuits in urban India. This project helped her analyze the sites of competition and collaboration between the mainstream Hindi film industry and amateur filmmaking circuits. After completing her MPhil, she worked as a Transmission Executive for the All India Radio, New Delhi. She received her master of arts degree in mass communication from the AJKMCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Namrata Rele Sathe  holds a PhD in media studies from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her dissertation, You Only Live Once: Bollywood, Neoliberal Subjectivity, and the Hindutva State, focuses on the politics of gender, sexuality and caste in neoliberal right-wing India read through the lens of popular Hindi cinema. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Studies in South Asian Film and Media and the New Review of Film and Television Studies. She is the assistant editor of Studies

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in South Asian Film and Media. Her research interests include feminist media studies, literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, and popular culture. Sunny Singh  is Professor of Creative Writing and Inclusion in the Arts at the London Metropolitan University. She is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, Nani’s Book of Suicides (2000), With Krishna’s Eyes and Hotel Arcadia (2015). Her non-fiction volume Single in the City: The Independent Woman’s Handbook (2001), is a first-of-its-kind exploration of single women in contemporary India. Her latest book, published by the British Film Institute, is a study of the Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan (2017). Her essays, short stories, and columns are published worldwide in key journals, anthologies, and media outlets. She is the founder of the Jhalak Prize for Book of the Year by a Writer of Colour, the Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize and the Jhalak Art Residency. She is currently finalising a monograph on Indian cinema as well as a collection of short stories examining aspects of armed conflict over the past century. Priyanka  Tripathi is Associate Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Patna. Her work hasbeen published in journals such as Indian Literature, Literature & History, English, Journal of Graphic Novel and Comics, Contemporary Asia, Postcolonial Studies and Economic and Political Weekly, amongst others. She is also the book review editor of Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. She works in the area of Indian writing in English, place and literature, gender and sexuality studies. Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan  is professor at the Department of HSS at IIT Madras. She works in the areas of film studies, popular culture, American literature and drama. She has published articles in several peer-reviewed publications. Her books include edited anthologies such as Stardom in Contemporary Hindi Cinema: Celebrity and Fame in Globalized Times (Springer 2020), Behind the Scenes: Contemporary Bollywood Directors (2017) and Post-liberalization Indian Novels in English: Global Reception & Politics of Award (2013).​

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Wonder Women, Iron Ladies Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan

Despite the documented examples of trailblazers such as the first woman director Fatma Begum (Bulbul-e-Paristan, 1926) followed by women producers/directors like Devika Rani and Shobhana Samarth, women filmmakers have been cast as lesser forms of the masculine counterparts, in the popular imagination. The late seventies had Aruna Raje Patil, followed by Kalpana Lajmi and Sai Paranjpye, all of them occupying the liminal space in the film industry. Lajmi explored the issues of female agency, identity and sexuality in Rudaali (1993), Ek Pal (1986) and Darmiyaan (1997), the last work being one of the few Hindi films to initiate a conversation on the transgender community. Amidst the noise of big-budget, male-dominated films, the eighties also saw the quiet rise of Sai Paranjpye, who grappled with the concerns of the urban middle-class with her signature style of wit and humour. The 1990s onwards, the expatriates—notably, Deepa Mehta, Gurinder Chadha and Mira Nair— focused their gazes on the subjectivity of Indian women largely from an international perspective, and catering to a global market.

A. I. Viswamohan (*) Department of HSS, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_1

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By the late nineties, Hindi films started grappling with riskier subjects, primarily due to greater global exposure ushered in by the forces of liberalization and also the growth of the multiplex cinema. The rise of the so-­ called ‘indie’ cinema coincided with Bombay Boys (Gustad 1998) and Hyderabad Blues (Kukunoor 1998), where the latter was produced by a female producer, Elahe Hiptoola. The director-producer team went on to make a series of off-beat films experimenting with the themes of adolescence (Rockford 1999), disability (Iqbal 2005) and women empowerment (Dor 2006). It was during this phase when Jyotika Virdi had bemoaned the conspicuous absence of women behind the camera stating, ‘Women have no access to the means of film production and are virtually unrepresented as directors, producers, or screenwriters’ (2003, p.  61). This was soon to change. If before 2010, at one end of the spectrum was the flamboyant Farah Khan, who, with her strong commercial sensibilities steered star-studded, mainstream blockbusters like Main Hoon Na (2004) and her most representative Om Shanti Om (2007), there was also a space for someone like Aparna Sen who dazzled with Mr. & Mrs. Iyer (2002), an Indian English film, which became India’s official entry at the Locarno International Film Festival. Bollywood, post 2010, saw a surge in the number of young women carving a niche for themselves behind the camera, within the framework of the mainstream cinema. Interestingly, while directors such as Farah Khan, Meghna Gulzar, Zoya Akhtar and Gauri Shinde staunchly dissociate themselves with the label ‘women’s cinema’, a substantial number of women directors/screenwriters claim to be avowed feminists, deeply committed to various feminist concerns and inverting gender stereotypes. Women filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema comprises essays by scholars of academic distinction and is focused on major thematic concerns in the works of individual filmmakers. Add names like Rajshree Ojha (Aisha 2010) and Jasmeet K. Reen (Darlings 2022), and we get an eclectic bunch of women filmmakers leaving their distinct signature on contemporary Hindi cinema. The contemporary here refers to our post globalization years, 1991 onwards. The contributors have deployed the methodology of intersectional analysis of film scholarship, popular culture and gender that foregrounds the works of select group of women filmmakers. The interest is also to explore how different waves of feminism have impacted the works of women filmmakers of the Hindi film industry. These filmmakers and their body of work will be analysed through, but not limited to, the theoretical combination of semiotics, Althusserian

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Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey’s essay on ‘Visual Pleasure’ (1975) and male gaze, and Molly Haskell’s essay ‘From Reverence to Rape’ (1974). The endeavour is also to explore how different waves of feminism impacted the works of Hindi filmmakers, particularly the women filmmakers of the industry. Though recognizing Helene Cixous’ influential term écriture féminine in her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), where she asserts ‘woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies’ (p.  875), the anthology seeks to go beyond the constraints of being a woman and writing and making cinema about women. The essays feed off on the postulations of the Second Wave as well as the Third Wave feminism, in their various manifestations, while avoiding to offer a uniform theory of feminism. As in Hollywood, many of the Hindi films belonging to the third wave category, to quote Stacy Gillis et al., ‘veer towards a groovier or at least more in touch alternative to second wave feminism’ (Gills et al. 2007, p. xxvii). At the same time, ideas related to ‘grrrl power’ will also be invoked to analyse those works where women filmmakers take on a more confrontational style as they record the lived experiences of violence, oppression and inequality of young women in their stories. Apart from female directors, the edition also shines the spotlight on women screenwriters. From Honey Irani and Bhavani Iyer to Juhi Chaturvedi and Alankrita Srivastava, women screenwriters have engaged with diverse, and very often provocative themes, such as female agency, expression of sexuality, interrogation of patriarchy, questions of identity, class, beauty and body, trauma, displacement, sexual harassment, and #MeToo movement. By focusing on these screenwriters, the project privileges the question that to what extent do women screenwriters reinforce or subvert gender stereotypes. Moreover, it would also be instructive to note the perspectival shifts on social issues as reflected in the works of female writers with relation to their male counterparts. Additionally, cinephiles must recognize the role of women producers who have the wherewithal to realize a director or a writer’s vision. The forces of change are perceptible as an increasing number of A-list actors are turning to production, for instance, Deepika Padukone, Anushka Sharma and Priyanka Chopra. One must also take cognizance of the visibility film festivals, particularly smaller ones, are providing to the independent filmmakers. A few cases in point are Shonali Bose’s The Sky Is Pink (2019) and Aparna Sen’s The Rapist (2021). OTT and similar

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digital platforms too have given an impetus to more experimental forms of cinema, facilitating their release and viewership, for instance, Nandita Das’ Manto (2018) and Anvita Dutt Guptan’s Bulbbul (2020). With innovations in technology, along with novel modes of production, distribution and exhibition emerging at an incredible speed, the time is right for women narrating stories that interest them. The key research questions that the collection posits are: How have women filmmakers addressed the question of agency and subjectivity down the years? How far-reaching was the impact of Second Wave Feminism on the cinematic imaginaire? To what extent do the forces of Third Wave and also Fourth Wave Feminism influence the ongoing debates on gender concerns in recent years? Is the notion of ‘intersectional feminism’ present in the works of women filmmakers? For the ease of thematic navigation, the anthology is divided into four parts. The first part ‘Auteurial Voices, Bollywood Glamor, Multiple Genres’, starts with ‘“Love You Zindagi”: Gauri Shinde’s Celebration of Women and Life on Screen’ by Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan, where the focus is on Shinde’s treatment of feminist causes in her star-studded films. The chapter also notes that though Shinde refuses to identify herself as a ‘feminist’ or a ‘woman’s director, her work still echoes Helene Cixous’ idea of ecriture feminine. Shinde’s films are also remarkable in the way in which her heroines, in a media-saturated and culturally diverse milieu, negotiate their spaces, both at home and in the outside world. Monika Mehta and Praseeda Gopinath in their chapter ‘Zoya Akhtar: Global Genres and Gendered Signatures’ engage with the idea that how Zoya Akhtar wears a directorial mantle that exceeds the star-text in the Hindi film industry. They further examine the ways in which Akhtar’s experimentations with genre are intertwined with an engagement with and interrogation of ideas of gender, sexuality, family and class. In the same section, in ‘Revisioning Family Drama: The Global Spaces of Romance and Science Fiction in Honey Irani’s Stories’, Madhavi Biswas observes how the screenwriter pushes the boundaries of the ‘family drama’ to incorporate the more specialized genres of romance and science fiction as Hindi cinema entered a new, globalized phase of circulation. Shreyosi Mukherjee identifies Tanuja Chandra as a modern filmmaker who dabbles in multiple genres. In ‘Women (Not) Telling Women’s Stories: Tanuja Chandra’s Directorial Journey from Action-Thriller to Romance and Beyond’, Mukherjee points out that Chandra is an important pit stop in charting the emergence of the

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female director in Bollywood because of her continued improvisations and re-appropriations with genres that have traditionally been the stronghold of male directors. Ulka Anjaria follows a similar line of thought in her chapter ‘Reema Kagti and the Ethics of Surprise’ where she argues that Kagti’s works cut through the divide between popular and arthouse cinema by mixing modes and genres and refusing to conform to pressures on both sides about what makes ‘good’ cinema. This is followed by Sunny Singh’s chapter on Farah Khan, ‘Farah Khan: Cinephilia, Nostalgia and Melancholia’, which examines Farah Khan’s contribution to Indian cinema and considers her explicit cinephilic metatextual evocations of the golden age of the big budget, glitzy, multi-­ starrer that in many ways has come to define ‘Bollywood’, and analyses the complexities of the part played by her own gender as a filmmaker as well as gender constructs in her filmic texts. Nandana Bose considers the role of a powerful producer as a near-­ auteur in ‘Guneet Monga: Gender, Labour and the “Disrupter” Indie Film Producer’. Bose takes cognizance of the fact that female producers like Monga are gradually effecting shifts in gendered power differentials that exist in a patriarchal industry; thereby engendering more creative opportunities for the articulation of female consciousness, empowerment, subjectivities, perspectives and female-driven narratives. The first chapter of Part 2, ‘The Transnational and Postcolonial Turns’, is ‘Roots and Routes: Home and the World in Sooni Taraporevala’s Transnational Storytelling’ by Akriti Rastogi. Using Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope and Hamid Naficy’s ‘situated’ and ‘universal’, Rastogi explores how the exilic worlds of Taraporevala’s characters are built through a cinema vérité approach. The next chapter is Benita Acca Benjamin and Meena T. Pillai’s ‘Mira Nair and the Cinema of Postcolonial Spectacle’, where the author engages with the cinematic oeuvre of Mira Nair by placing her films within a framework derived from Guy Debord’s argument regarding the history of social life as ‘the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing’ (2002, p.7). In Part 3, ‘Gender, Sexuality, Subversions’, Madhuja Mukherjee’s ‘Figurations of Fallible Women: The Art and Act of Writing by Juhi Chaturvedi’ locates the screenwriter’s work within the framework of feminist historiography and refers the primary research, including recorded interview of Chaturvedi. The author attempts to enquire about the nature of work, processes of recruitment, contracts, subjects of payment/non-­ payment, the manner in which a number of women have repeatedly shifted

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their jobs or delivered multiple tasks, as well as issues of labour, leisure, leave, health, gender, workspace and hierarchies in the industry. This is followed by Namrata Rale Sathe’s ‘Queer Counter-narratives, Feminist Authorship, and the Inclusive Storytelling of Gazal Dhaliwal’ which fixes its gaze on the screenwriter’s critique of Bollywood cinema’s lack of LGBTQI + representation and her role as an activist for transgender rights. Sathe includes a textual and thematic analysis of Dhaliwal’s select films, in light of Dhaliwal’s own position as an out and vocal transwoman. The films are examined for major themes dealing with acceptance and awareness around sexuality, dissembling gender norms associated with femininity and masculinity, and their overarching message of inclusivity. Shuhita Bhattacharjee’s ‘“Rosy Ki Khwaheeshein”: Scripted Romance and Acquaintance Rape in Alankrita Shrivastava’s Oeuvre of Female Desire’ draws on theorizations of the hijab in the works of Reina Lewis, Fatima Mernissi, Saba Mahmood, Sadia Abbas and Sindre Bangstad, and it explores how Shrivastava’s formal and creative deployment of this contentious image further complicates the discourse of female sexual desire by echoing contemporary pornographic templates of the erotic feminine and political stereotypes of the primitive. This is followed by Tanushree Ghosh’s ‘Women at a Distance: Gender Politics and the Past in Bhavani Iyer’s Writings’, where the screenwriter’s work is discussed through the lens of ‘post-heritage’ cinema. Ghosh further examines examine how gender formations in Iyer’s adapted scripts functions as sites that generate a more plural understanding of femininities as well as non-normative ways of ‘doing gender’. Part 4, ‘Spatio-Temporal Specificities’, investigates the liminal spaces of the domestic and the public. Theatre-film director Vijaya Mehta’s work is analysed in the chapter ‘Marginalizations and Repressions in Vijaya Mehta’s Pestonjee and Hamidabai ki Kothi’. Here, Smita Banerjee examines Mehta as a feminist auteur of intimate and intense narratives of marginalized characters and locales. Banerjee posits the research questions: How does the trope of gender, especially the foregrounding of women’s lives from marginalized communities such as the Parsi community in Pestonjee and the narratives of the performing women, the baijis (courtesans) in Hamidabai ki Kothi, negotiate issues of the ‘self’ and identities? How do the spatio-temporal locations that the films signpost via the negotiations of mise en scene, and performance foreground complexities surrounding repressed sexualities of these women characters? And, in the final chapter, ‘Reconstructing Motherhood in Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s Nil

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Battey Sannata’, Priyanka Tripathi revisits the idea of motherhood in Hindi cinema. The essay also discusses the influence of certain socio-­ cultural factors upon the meaning and use of domestic/public spaces, and analyses the public and private dichotomy which often pushes women’s desires towards the margins. I am acutely conscious of some notable filmmakers missing in this anthology. Hopefully, there will be another volume to have them with us.

References Begum, F. (1926). Bulbul-e-Paristan. Fatma Film. Bose, S. (2019). The Sky is Pink. RSVP Films, Roy Kapur Films et al. Cixous, H. (1976). ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. Signs 1(4): 875-893. Das, N. (2018). Manto. Viacom 18 Motion Pictures et al. Debord, G. (2002). The Society of the Spectacle. Hobgoblin Press, Canberra. Gillis et  al. (2007). Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, 2nd edition. Palgrave Macmillan, NY. Guptan, A.D. (2020). Bulbbul. Clean Slate Films. Gustad, K. (1998). Bombay Boys. Kaizad Gustad. Haskell, M. (1974; Rev. 1987). From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Khan, F. (2004). Main Hoon Na. Red Chillies Entertainment and Venus Movies. ———. (2007). Om Shanti Om. Red Chillies Entertainment. Kukunoor, N. (1998). Hyderabad Blues. Nagesh Kukunoor. ———. (1999). Rockford. Padmini Kolhapure, Elahe Hiptoola and Nagesh Kukunoor. ———. (2005). Iqbal. Mukta Searchlight Films. ———. (2006). Dor. Percept Picture Company, SIC Productions, Sahara One Motion Pictures. Lajmi, K. (1986). Ek Pal. Kalpana Lajmi. ———. (1993). Rudaali. Doordarshan and NFDC. ———. (1997). Darmiyaan. Pan Pictures. Mulvey, L. (1975). ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Screen. 16 (3): 6–18. Ojha, R. (2010). Aisha. Anil Kapoor Films Company. Reen, J.K. (2022). Darlings. Red Chillies Entertainment and Eternal Sunshine Productions. Sen, A. (2002). Mr. & Mrs. Iyer. Triplecom Media Production. ———. (2021). The Rapist. Applause Entertainment. Virdi, J. (2003). The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History. Permanent Black, New Delhi.

PART I

Auteurial Voices, Bollywood Glamor, Multiple Genres

CHAPTER 2

‘Love You Zindagi’: Gauri Shinde’s Celebration of Women and Life on Screen Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan

The chapter examines how Gauri Shinde, an emerging directorial voice, reads women on screen and addresses perfervid social concerns through the lens of travel, public sphere, women’s empowerment and cultural inclusiveness; while doing so, the attempt is to understand the tropes and motifs that form the bulwark of her work; and how Shinde perceives gender dynamics in her work. Shinde started her career as an advertising filmmaker, and in her interviews often acknowledges the role of short films and ad films as instrumental in her gaining confidence and discipline necessary for a director. On different occasions, she has also been vocal on issues such as the plight of the elderly in metropolises and ageism. English Vinglish was conceptualized and released at a point when popular Hindi cinema was in a state of transition. The shift in tone, with regard to gender representations, that was perceptible in the early 2000s, became more pronounced with Ishqiya (Chaubey 2010), The Dirty Picture (Luthria 2011), Saat Khoon Maaf

A. I. Viswamohan (*) Department of HSS, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_2

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(Bhardwaj 2011) and Kahaani (Ghosh 2012). A common thread that ran through these films is that they featured marquee names toplining the cast. Though the plot of these films pivoted on strong female characters and these works were feted by critics and at film festivals, strictly speaking this was not low-budget or ‘art-house’ cinema. The considerable attention garnered by Onir’s I Am (2010) also helped the Indian audience to engage with issues such as homophobia and surrogacy. The artistic and commercial success of these films—all commandeered by established male directors—led to a vigorous interest in films powered by women protagonists. The films that followed Queen (Behl 2013), Highway (Ali 2014), Mardaani (Sarkar 2014), Finding Fanny (Adjania 2014), Mary Kom (Kumar 2014), Dedh Ishqiya (Chaubey 2014), Piku (Sircar 2015) and NH 10 (Singh 2014) were further indications of the alternative trends in Bollywood’s narrative of gender representations in mainstream cinema. While explaining ‘woman’s film’, Steve Neale cites Jeanine Basinger’s definition of the sub-genre: ‘A woman’s film is a movie that places at the center of its universe a female who is trying to deal with emotional, social, and psychological problems connected to the fact that she is a woman’ (2007, p. 325). Likewise, Molly Haskell states in her essay ‘The Woman’s Film’ that ‘a woman is at the center of the universe’ (1999, p. 21), in a woman’s film. Post-2000s mainstream Hindi films, apart from recognizing women as the centre of their universe, did not shy away from addressing topics that were so far beyond the purview of popular Hindi cinema, including child abuse, female infanticide, honour killing, single parenting and sexual desires. The chapter locates Gauri Shinde’s artistic sensibilities within this rapidly altering cinematic landscape. At an immediate level, English Vinglish and Dear Zindagi can be broadly categorized as women’s pictures with women protagonists at their centre. The setbacks Shashi Godbole (Sridevi) in English Vinglish encounters are a consequence of patriarchy and gendered education, where girl children are not provided with education in English-medium schools. To a large extent this is a lived reality for numerous women from Third World countries. The concerns that the still-in-her-mid-twenties, Kaira faces in Dear Zindagi are more complex. Unlike Shashi, Kaira is a cosmopolitan and independent working girl. Like her (most) urban counterparts, she has complete control over her body—and sexuality—and the freedom to make her own decisions. Her insecurities are perhaps less gender-­related than Shashi’s because of their different social conditions and backgrounds, but her internal conflicts and disaffections are no less

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serious. Gauri Shinde’s coming-of-age accounts, therefore, tap into the anxieties, fears, and insecurities of these very dissimilar women and give us a portrait of contemporary urban society. In her interviews, Shinde informs us that she based the central character on her mother (Kadapa-Bose 2012) who was not very conversant with the English language and always regretted this ‘shortcoming’. Indeed, India’s fascination with the English language can be traced back to its history as a British colony. As published on the Stanford website, scholars of postcolonial feminism ‘insist that it is impossible to understand local practices in developing countries without acknowledging the ways in which these practices have been shaped by their economic and historical contexts, particularly their connection to Western colonialism and imperialism’ (2014). In the last couple of decades, especially with India’s strides in digital technology and position in the global economy, English has become indispensable for career and social ascendance. The proliferation of coaching institutes for spoken English and also for cracking various competitive exams is evidence of the abiding relevance of English in India as well as in the global South. The chasm between those who can and cannot speak English has created a social and class divide in Indian society, leading to denial of opportunities and upward mobility for those who are on the wrong side. A good knowledge of the English language is concomitant of elite status. In its history of 100 years (Shinde dedicates English Vinglish to ‘100 Years of Cinema’), Hindi cinema has evinced negligible interest in the issue of women’s empowerment through education. While social concerns, such as the plight of widows and divorcees, child marriage, untouchability, caste discrimination and struggles of single working women, have been grappled with in the cinema of V.  Shantaram, Bimal Roy, B.R. Chopra, Basu Chatterjee and Shyam Benegal, there are very few films that have addressed the issue of women’s education. Apart from the melodramatic Anpadh (‘The Illiterate’, Kumar 1962) to the contemporary indie Nil Battey Sannata (‘Zero divided by zero equals nil’, Tiwari 2015), the theme of women’s education, particularly English-based education, has hardly been given any attention. In English Vinglish, the protagonist Shashi is a Pune-based middle-class housewife, an Everywoman. Shashi endures the quotidian acts of little cruelties and indignities in stoic silence as her self-serving husband, Sateesh (Adil Hussain) and her teenage daughter Sapna, ridicule her for her faltering English (hence the title, English Vinglish).

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In the Godbole family, the frissons between tradition and the forces of modernity are established at the outset. While Shashi reads the Hindi daily Navbharat Times, her husband subscribes to the English language The Times of India. In the opening sequence, we find Shashi attending to the needs of her family, apparently as someone who has ‘found true feminine fulfilment’ (Friedan 1963, p.  7). Shinde presents the mise en scene of a small-town, middle-class family and puts Sridevi (the film being the star’s comeback film after a long hiatus from the screen) at the centre stage. Like any average Indian housewife, Shashi is the first to get out of the bed and kick-start the day. Shinde celebrates Shashi in fragments—focusing on her hair, her back, her hands, and finally, her face—through a series of her body positions, gestures and movements, as she begins her day by performing her housewifely duties and prioritizing the requirements of the other members of the family over her own needs. We realize this when every time she tries to sip her coffee, she is called by her mother-in-law, her husband and her daughter. If Shashi’s mother-in-law prefers parathas, her young children demand boiled eggs and brown—not white—bread. The scene ends with Laxman Utekar’s camera panning on the mug with Shashi’s untouched coffee. Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963) considers ‘The Happy Housewife Heroine’ syndrome where years of conditioning have reduced the figure to a ‘suburban housewife with an up-and-coming husband and a station wagon full of children’ (1963, p. 21) and where women ‘in the name of femininity…are encouraged to evade human growth’ (p.  255). Shashi is an embodiment of ‘the feminine mystique’ and the ‘happy’ housewife syndrome, conditioned to give her all and expect very little in return. And, as Friedan wonders, ‘where is the world of thought and ideas’ (ibid., p. 23), we find Shashi has become accustomed to going through her life with stoicism, with scant regard towards expressing her wants and desires. Shinde underscores the intergenerational conflict as Shashi mispronounces the word ‘jazz’. Her husband and daughter’s sniggering at her ‘funny’ accent sets the tone of the plot. We become aware that Shashi’s position in the household is constantly undermined because of her lack of knowledge of ‘proper’ English and her absence of engagement with the western culture. Early on we notice Shashi’s husband’s dispassionate and condescending attitude towards her. Though he is appreciative of her beauty and culinary skills, it is established that sex is perfunctory and that there is scant romance in the marriage. When Shashi comes across Sateesh

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casually hugging a young and attractive female colleague, she complains good-naturedly, ‘We never hug’, much to the discomfiture of her husband. At the same time Shinde also explores the fraught relations between mothers and daughters, an issue that is not taken up very often in popular films. Patriarchal structures debase and devalue women and motherhood, often leading a woman to use her ‘daughter to compensate for her own supposed inferiority’ (Williams 1984, p. 3). We come across the first sign of this public anxiety when Shashi accompanies her daughter to the PTA meeting at school. Shashi’s inability to converse in English with a fellow parent and subsequently with the principal of the school becomes a source of embarrassment for Sapna, who brutally snubs her mother on their way back home. For Shashi’s English-speaking husband and daughter, her ‘domestic confinement serves as a kind of quarantine’ (Ghatage 2019, p. 5) that can keep her family free from social embarrassment. Shashi realizes, ‘No matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to please anyone’. Partha Chatterjee theorizes the distinction between inner and outer space, the ghar (home) and bahir (the outside), where the home must remain ‘unaffected by the profane activities of the material’ (1989, p. 625) where women essentially represent home. Additionally, to paraphrase Nivedita Menon’s arguments on gender, the maintenance of the status quo of the social order ‘requires the faithful performance of prescribed rituals over and over again’ (2012, p. 1). Shashi’s family is contented with her role as a homemaker and a small-scale caterer. Unlike the vocal Kaira in Dear Zindagi, Shashi harbours her dreams or aspirations (if any) in private. ‘Travel means venturing into new spaces, away from familiar people and contexts, thus providing opportunities for women to resist constraining ideas, beliefs and norms of “appropriate” behaviour’ (Wilson and Harris 2007, p. 240). An opportunity to get out of her shell comes her way, when Shashi travels to New York to attend a family celebration. Though initially reluctant to fly solo ahead of her family, Shashi agrees to take the leap of faith. She gets her first taste of freedom when, urged by a spirited fellow traveller played by Amitabh Bachchan in a cameo, she musters up sufficient courage to converse with the flight attendant and to express her food preferences (the film also pays homage to the star in the beginning with the epigraph, ‘100 years of Indian cinema. 70 years of Amitabh Bachchan’). Bachchan’s character advises Shashi to enjoy her first trip to the US, ‘surely, definitely, confidently’. For Bollywood cinephiles, the coming together of the two superstars (also former co-stars) brings on pure nostalgia, harking back to the times when Bachchan was a one-man industry

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and Sridevi was considered a female equivalent of Bachchan for her star-power. In New York, Shashi’s early experiences can be broadly summed up as that of a passive outsider, too timid and powerless to participate in an alien culture, and severely limited by her inability to communicate in English. In the song, ‘Manhattan’, Shinde takes us along a tour of the megapolis which we appreciate through its collage of fashionable streets, famed landmarks and consumer culture. Shinde situates a wide-eyed Shashi in apposition to the glittering spaces of the metropolis. Through music videos like quick-cuts Shinde positions Shashi as ‘an innocent abroad’, who is intimidated yet fascinated by the array of stores—Gucci, Versace, Vuitton, Chanel, Fendi, Armani, Valentino—on the Upper East Side. At the same time Shinde captures Shashi’s perplexity in an environment that accommodates racial diversity, personal idiosyncrasies and individualism. Shashi is intrigued by the variety of people (Jews, Black, gay couples, a man posing as Johnny Depp from Edward Scissorhands [Tim Burton 1990]); bemused on seeing men with body art and women with streaks in their hair; and bewildered on coming across a homeless man holding a sign that reads ‘Lets go for lunch. 10$. You buy’. This is a typical reaction of most people from the global South who are taken aback by any sight of poverty in First World countries. A major plot point occurs when Shashi first negotiates ‘the quasi-public spaces of leisure’ (McDowell, p. 148) in New York’s Washington Square Park and experiences what Linda McDowell would term ‘fear and anxiety’ (p. 148). Shashi visits a café where she is intimidated by a barrage of questions from the lady at the counter. She is asked to be specific about her choice of coffee ‘Cappuccino? Americano? Latte?’ ‘Nescafe’, she responds innocently. Shinde increases the drama using the shot-reverse-shot framing. Shashi’s anxiety increases in the same proportion as the café attendant’s condescension for her. She makes a quick exit from the café when she is unable to count and identify the American currency at the counter. Thoroughly humiliated, Shashi breaks down in the park, when she is consoled by a kindly stranger Laurent (Mehdi Nebbou). In Gender, Identity, Space, Linda McDowell talks about ‘the fleeting and anonymous nature of social interactions in the metropolis’ (1999, p.  154). This encounter with Laurent goes a long way in informing Shashi’s sense of self. It is at this juncture when, by happenstance, Shashi learns about a ‘Learn English in Four Weeks’ course at New York Language Course centre in Brooklyn that caters to non-native speakers of the English language

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based in New York. With a lightness of touch, Shinde signals at ‘English’s status as a global language’ (Ghatage, p. 2). Early in the film Shinde demonstrates that Shashi’s passion lies in making laddoos (sweets), which she home delivers to select clientele. She takes pride in her expertise and nurtures an ambition to expand her business. During the course of the film, Shinde makes us realize that laddoos are symbolic of Shashi’s identity, self-expression and self-actualization. In her first day’s session in the language classes, Shashi self-deprecatingly introduces herself to the class as just a ‘cook who sells laddoos, and runs a small business’. Her first taste of pride and confidence is palpable, when Mr David, the kindly instructor refers to her as ‘an entrepreneur’. However, the elation is short lived when Shashi excitedly informs her husband over the phone that people in New York call her an ‘entrepreneur’. In response, he mocks her with his customary cavalier attitude, ‘Hmmm…entrepreneur. Have you been feeding laddoos to them as well?’ In ‘Lois du 16e’ directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, an episode in the anthology Paris Je Taime (2016), we see the poignant story of a young Spanish immigrant woman who works as a babysitter for her wealthy employers. Shinde gives us a similar character of an immigrant nanny; however, the tone gets an upbeat treatment. In an interview, Shinde muses, ‘In the U.S., the Spanish people and a lot of outsiders and immigrants don’t know how to speak the language. The emotion is connectible, more than the language theme’ (Jamkhandikar 2012). Her narrative of an ensemble of immigrants crossing paths and striking a bond is closer to Mind Your Language (Allen and Moses 1977–1986) that generate humour through racial stereotypes, peculiarities of accent, food preferences and individual eccentricities. Using humour as her device, Shinde highlights that ‘to be denied access to the world’s lingua franca is to stand somewhat in the social periphery’ (Ghatage 2019, p. 2). As the film progresses, Shashi’s ‘Me time’, away from her family, makes her confident and self-assured. Shinde demonstrates the ways in which Shashi increasingly comes into her own as she negotiates routes, commutes to Brooklyn, and befriends the locals. Though at first she struggles with the numbered streets in New York (‘Why can’t they name their streets like we do? M.G. Road, Lakshmi Road’, she wonders), she gradually learns to navigate her routes and immerses herself in the New York crowd. Her self-assurance is demonstrated in the song ‘English Vinglish’, as she learns to have fun with her classmates and builds a familial bond with the motley crowd.

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Shinde also lends an interesting touch to Shashi’s commitment to learning English when she accompanies her classmates to a movie theatre. The director indulges in a bit of cinephilia as Shashi silently lip-syncs to the dialogues delivered by Elizabeth Taylor on screen in The Last Time I Saw Paris (Brooks 1954). The scene strikes a chord as we watch the smitten Laurent’s growing attraction towards her. (‘Food is art…food is love…you are an artist’, he responds, when Shashi dismisses her cooking skills.) Shinde develops the chemistry between Shashi and Laurent in delicate and graded shades. The contrast between the indifferent husband and the charming, solicitous Laurent is emphatically brought out by a range of mise en scene. Shashi and Laurent, rather than being hurtled into a whirlwind relationship, leisurely get to know and respect each other. Shinde unfolds their relationship by wielding familiar iconography of romance and attraction on Bollywood screen. The director shoots the pair using soft focus camera lenses and uses long and medium shots of the actors strolling down the streets, underscored by romantic music. They share inside jokes in the subway and confide in each other. Laurent shares his ambition of opening a French restaurant in New York, while Shashi reveals her anguish to Laurent when her daughter behaves rudely over the phone. ‘Am I a trash can to dump in whatever they feel like?’ she laments while Laurent mutters sympathetically in French. ‘It is good to talk…without understanding’, they both agree. When Laurent openly admires Shashi in the language class, Shashi is perplexed by the strangeness of these emotions. Though she does not reciprocate Laurent’s feelings, she recognizes later what it is like to be truly appreciated by a man. ‘It has been ages since someone appreciated me so much’, she explains to Laurent. ‘I was just taken aback’. The film celebrates the protagonist’s small gains, daftly avoiding the trap to portray Shashi as a superwoman. Consequently, Shashi’s first brush with success with the English language happens serendipitously when she places an order at a restaurant in perfect English. With new-found confidence, Shashi glides through the streets of New York with a trench coat smartly belted over her sari (Sridevi’s saris are credited to the ace couturier Sabyasachi), and with a cup of coffee, an image of tradition going hand-­ in-­hand with modernity. Hindi cinema, particularly in the last decade, has made considerable strides in its mediated representations of nation, class and gender and Shinde demonstrates that ‘clear distinctions between modern/traditional, East/West and Western/Indian no longer stand’ (Wright 2017, pp. 190–191). And as we see Shashi traverse the city, we

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realize ‘the empowering role of independent travel for women’ (Wilson and Harris 2006, p. 2) that promotes ‘a sense of physical, emotional or spiritual fulfilment’ (ibid., p. 2). It has been observed that ‘[w]ithin the constraints of patriarchal legacies, women have been seen to represent disorder, chaos and sexuality, and men rationality and control; therefore women were viewed as not compatible with the male conception of an ordered, utopian metropolis’ (Dreyer and McDowall 2012, p. 4). Shinde uses mobility and travel as a trope for enlightenment as well as to mildly disrupt the patriarchal social order of which Shashi is a part. Thus, when Shashi’s husband and children arrive in New York, Sateesh is perplexed to find a more self-possessed Shashi who is capable of going about and surviving in a foreign land. The climactic moment arrives when Shashi sneaks away to her classes, and her child suffers a minor injury while on a family outing. Sateesh’s ensuing outburst is not just because of his son’s injury, but more because Shashi was missing from the scene for a few hours. Her subsequent decision to quit her English classes is a classic example of women being made to feel guilty for neglecting their family duties. Molly Haskell points out that the central tenet of a woman’s film is the middle-classness, ‘not just as an economic status, but as a state of mind and a relatively rigid moral code…She is encouraged to follow the lead of her romantic dreams, but when they expire she is stuck’ (p. 22). Shashi’s denial or renunciation of feelings of attraction towards Laurent conforms to the ‘bourgeoisie virtues…of orderliness’ (Chatterjee 1989, p.  630). When her husband and children arrive in New York, Shashi wakes up to her reality and returns to the family fold. Shinde captures Shashi’s emotional conflict by placing her before double mirrors and looking at her image, as she ties her hair in a bun and puts back her bindi on. ‘I want to finish what I started long ago…and be a mother to my children’, she tells her niece Radha as decides to quit her language classes (and perhaps turn her back on her growing feelings of affection for Laurent). Rather than foregrounding her heroine’s ‘sexual and economic freedom’ (McDowell, p. 155), English Vinglish addresses Shashi’s quest for a slice of freedom and to reclaim her dignity. ‘I don’t need love, I need some respect’, she confesses to Radha. Shinde’s heroine may not espouse overt feminism and its causes, yet we can recognize Shashi’s cri de coeur, ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home’ (Friedan 1963, p. 20). At her niece’s wedding, Shashi, clad in a red sari gifted by her husband, gives a brief speech in English felicitating the young couple.

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Her new-found sense of self-worth helps her resolve her feelings towards Laurent. ‘Thank you for making me feel good about myself’ are her final words to him. Shinde, therefore, gives us a story of an ‘ordinary’ woman ‘who becomes extraordinary…[a] mistress of her fate’ (Haskell 1999, p. 23), at least to some extent. In her short film, Oh Man! (2007), screened at Berlin International Film Festival, Gauri Shinde probes into the nature of contemporary relationships. The film features a well-heeled young couple in throes of a passionate relationship. But when the woman tries on a succession of daring dresses and models for him, the man disapproves. The situation gradually gets violent; however, things get seemingly back to normalcy when the woman appears demure and fully covered up. The film ends with the couple blissfully walking down the streets of New York, when the man steals a glance at an attractive woman who walks past them. In one shot Shinde gestures towards the double standards and chauvinism that simmer at the bottom of even the most liberal societies and cosmopolitan cultures. The short film may appear rather amateurish, but Shinde’s preoccupation with gender equations and power dynamics is emphatically foregrounded. Shinde’s cinematic trajectory took a U-turn in the work that followed. From mapping the journey of a traditional homemaker in her first film, she delves into the mind of an uber unconventional protagonist in her next film. If the director denies a passionate romance to Shashi in English Vinglish, she allows her lead to follow her romantic dreams in Dear Zindagi. In an interview to critic Anupama Chopra’s YouTube channel Film Companion, Shinde mentions Annie Hall (Woody Allen 1977) as a film that has influenced her sensibilities (2017). Kaira (Alia Bhatt), the young heroine of Dear Zindagi mirrors Annie’s quirkiness, individuality and bohemian outlook. She is a promising cinematographer, living independently in Mumbai. She has supportive friends and an easy-going relationship with her help. Unlike Shashi Godbole, Kaira is independent, hangs out with girlfriends, and is a compulsive online shopper. At one level, Dear Zindagi is Shinde’s celebration of girl culture and girl power which ‘signifies a mode of female independence and empowerment that is grounded in a playful reappropriation of aspects of traditional femininity and girlishness’ (Munford 2015a, p. 131). Shinde’s screenplay is anchored by the representation of a contemporary, urban, career girl who is a study in contradictions. She is commitment phobic, but unable to take romantic rejection; anxious about her

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career, but mixes personal emotions with professional commitment; fiercely independent with a mind of her own, yet seeks constant validation; free from stultifying bonds of domesticity, yet hankers for a satisfying relationship. Through Kaira’s character, Shinde addresses the anxieties that face the current generation and how young people try to make some sense of their lives. Kaira may not suffer gendered injustices or social discriminations, and perhaps to categorize her as a product of Third/Fourth Wave feminism would be too reductive. However, as Amanda D. Lotz suggests, ‘the complexity of the diverse goals women and men now seek in gender politics and social justice, as well as the emergence of new social movements, take different formations and use different strategies’ (2007, p.  83). Shinde taps into this complexity in order to flesh out Kaira’s character. Dear Zindagi also plays with the trope of the philandering man. In the opening scene we find a young woman bickering with her partner over his various acts of infidelities. The location of the scene sets the mood. These are the spaces that are occupied by elitist and fashion-forward urban youth. The scene ends with the pair making up, and we realize that it was a film shoot, with Kaira as the cinematographer. Shinde introduces her heroine in full cinematographer’s gear, perched on a trolley crane, a complete professional. We are also informed that she wears glasses ‘with zero power’ to look mature enough to be taken seriously by the film industry. Shinde lends touch of self-referentiality when Kaira requests the director for a retake: the shot concludes with the young woman checking out another man, as she embraces her repentant boyfriend. This on-screen reference to ‘infidelity’ segues into the off-screen drama as well. Early on, Kaira confesses to Sid, her perfectly nice boyfriend, that she had slept with her colleague Raghu on a film set and acknowledges her inability to sustain a monogamous relationship. If Shashi had a ‘gustakh dil’ (audacious heart) in English Vinglish, a song that reprimands her for allowing herself to feel attracted towards Laurent; Kaira’s song ‘Just go to hell, dil’ (Go to hell, o heart) mirrors Generation Z’s blasé attitude towards love and relationships. Laxman Utekar’s use of shaky camera effect and jump-cuts further accentuates the feelings of self-doubt and anxiety that Kaira goes through after her break-up with Sid. In the section ‘Beautiful Boys’, Megan Christopher in her anthology She Found It at the Movies (2020), argues how in the times of Instagram and social media women are focusing their gaze on attractive men. Reverse gaze becomes a recurring motif in Kaira’s story and can be aligned with

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film producer Jill Soloway’s observation, ‘the Female Gaze is also using the camera to take on the very nuanced, occasionally impossible task of showing us how it feels to be THE OBJECT of the Gaze’ (n.p., 2016). By inverting several codes of Bollywood, Shinde creates a mosaic pattern that reevaluates the stereotypes of popular Hindi cinema. Subsequently Shinde bestows her protagonist with a gaze and an agency as she dates a series of eligible young men who make cameos in her life: the restaurateur Sid (Angad Bedi), the film director Raghu (Kunal Kapoor) and the rock star Rumi (Ali Zafar). Through Shinde/Kaira’s gaze, Dear Zindagi delights in objectifying young men who keep on surfacing in Kaira’s life. She likes her men tall and handsome, checks them out at pubs and has musical soirees with them on the beaches of Goa. She changes her boyfriends at the speed with which she changes their photographs pinned on her bulletin board. Nevertheless, Shinde avoids any moral judgement and places her confused heroine amidst a group of loving and accepting people, including her girlfriends Fatima or ‘Fatty’ (Ira Dubey) and Jackie (Yashaswini Dayama), along with her maid, Alka (Akanksha Gade). Gauri Shinde gives a non-judgemental spin to Kaira’s serial dating with an analogy of ‘chairs’, where chairs are a metaphor for men. ‘You choose a comfortable chair…likewise you choose a person you are comfortable with’, Kaira is told by her psychiatrist. This is a distinct departure from popular Hindi cinema’s age-old narrative strategy of burdening the female protagonists with the moral albatross and making them feel guilty for sexual experience. Also, worth noting is Hindi cinema’s predilection for assigning the women protagonists the role for caring for, nurturing, and eventually curing the mentally ‘ill’ hero. From Khamoshi (Sen 1970a) and Safar (Sen 1970b) to Khilona (Vohra 1970) women have carried the onus of curing the hero through ‘selfless’ care, often bringing ruin upon themselves, all the while bordering on self-abjection and masochism. Dear Zindagi, fortunately, avoids these stereotypes and takes a progressive look at mental health issues. For Kaira, apart from casual romantic relationships, online shopping is another route for escapism, to get away from uncomfortable predicaments. Shinde recognizes Generation Z’s alienation and rootlessness as we find Kaira compulsively shopping on eBay using her smartphone and then eagerly unwrapping the packages. In the absence of an emotional anchor, the seemingly meaningless activity of online shopping appears to wield a becalming influence on Kaira’s frayed nerves and gives her something to look forward to at the end of a day.

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Shinde further illustrates how, for young women like Kaira, ‘the discursive shift from the patriarchal “good girl” to the post-feminist “bad girl” is not so clearly demarcated’ (Munford 2007, p. 268). Shinde constantly gestures towards Kaira’s need for chaos and impatience with order, when she disarranges the décor of her apartment meticulously organized by her maid. While in an on-and-off with Raghu, she dances uninhibitedly with a stranger at a club, signifying her desire to claim the public space, express personal freedom and be defiant of the social order. When a snubbed Raghu goes back to his ex-girlfriend, Kaira’s passive-aggressive personality comes to the fore. She smashes the jars of ‘Ragu’ sauce at a supermarket, as the name of the brand reminds her of Raghu. At home as well as in her romantic relationships, Kaira is a disruptive figure. The Sturm und Drang that forms her personality is at display when she has a meltdown at her parents’ home in Goa. Shinde counterbalances Kaira’s every volatile outburst with a scene where the young woman is presented as a perfectly functional character, thus treating Kaira’s nervous breakdown with sensitivity, without letting it spiral down into clichés. That such complexities can interfere with a fulfilling life, and that depression can be treated professionally is particularly rare to represent in mainstream cinema. By portraying a seemingly functional and ‘normal’ person volunteering to seek counselling, Shinde unravels an unexplored theme in Bollywood. Dear Zindagi was released at a point when young, urban women started to feel the need to express themselves more openly, without the fear of social stigmas. Uncomfortable issues such as rape, sexual abuse and mental health. The last issue, of psychological health and depression, was particularly triggered off when Deepika Padukone, a major star, went on record to discuss her brush with depression and anxiety (NDTV 2015, n.p.). As a consequence of Deepika’s ‘outing’ mainstream media initiated regular conversations about the impact of modern life on the mental well-being of the younger generation, particularly young women. A major incident that shook the post-2012 Indian society was the harrowing Nirbhaya case where a young woman was brutally raped in Delhi. This, along with the ‘Me Too’ movement, ignited an interest in women’s causes, and commercial cinema responded to it with a spate of films. In patriarchal societies ‘A family can only be a patriarchal, heterosexual family’ (Menon 2012, p. 5), and Shinde demonstrates how middle-class women are subtly abused and are expected to live up to the traditional notions of ‘femininity’ and ‘womanhood’. Thus, Kaira’s uncle wonders if she is a ‘Lebanese’ (lesbian), and her parents, in many subtle ways, show

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their preference for the male child, Kaira’s younger brother, Kiddo (Rohit Suresh Saraf). Avoiding the heavy-handed approach, Shinde interrogates this conditioning and highlights the contemporary feminist concerns: disparity in wages and perks; gender prejudice about specific vocations; sexual choices; and psycho-social neuroses that lie at the core of contemporary society. Shinde points out that while her male counterpart travels Business Class, Kaira has to make do with the Economy Class. Another social concern that Shinde touches upon is the problem of accommodation for single women in Indian society. Although Mumbai is a cosmopolitan city, Kaira, who lives in a rented apartment, is given an eviction notice because of her unmarried status. As in Annie Hall, Shinde’s characters spend a lot of time talking, reflecting on life, career goals and relationships. Kaira’s friend circle is the mainstay of her support system and the director gives us a glimpse into the speech, attitudes and behaviour of the contemporary urban youth in India. They have live-in relationships, visit pubs, see shrinks and quote William Faulkner. They are almost always dressed in relaxed casuals (Dasgupta 2016) and are more interested in having a personal style rather than following trends. However, it is Kaira’s queasy relationship with her parents that is at the epicentre of her being. Circumstances lead Kaira back to her home town in Goa, while she is unhinged and still flailing about. When Kaira is given unsolicited advice to get a ‘real’ career and ‘settle down’ by her family, she decides to camp at a friend’s place. The notion of personal space and privacy forms an integral part of achieving a sense of equanimity for Kaira. Linda McDowell points out how ‘home is the key location in which a spiritual unity is found between humans and things’ (1999, p. 71). Kaira’s inability to communicate with her family further exacerbates her insecurities and complexes. In Goa, a chance meeting with Dr Jehangir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan, hereafter SRK) gets Kaira interested in getting an expert opinion on stress management. Shinde treads carefully on the sensitive subject of mental health and makes a distinction between ‘psychologist’ and ‘psychiatrist’, and reflects on the healing power of conversation. Kaira confesses to Dr Jehangir that she is sexually active and much of her self-abjection and self-­ deprecation is related to her fear of being morally judged. In a dream sequence perhaps referencing Belle de Jour (Bunuel 1967) the young woman experiences a fall from great heights, and into a slush-filled pit. As she struggles to get out of the pit, she is mocked by a group of newly married sari-clad women. Shinde shoots the scene in the surrealistic tradition

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that is dominated by bizarre and grotesque images of strange-looking construction workers. ‘I felt cheap, dirty, ugly, disgusting’, Kaira tells Dr Khan. Through a measured approach, Shinde calibrates gender roles in what should be a more liberal and open-minded society. She juxtaposes Kaira’s mercurial temperament with the cool attitude of Dr Jehangir Khan (‘Khan… from the epiglottis’, says Jackie as Shinde playfully nods at SRK’s stardom by referring to his iconic line from My Name Is Khan (Johar 2010)). At the same time, she debunks the Bollywood stereotype of a serious-minded doctor and makes the psychiatrist more endearing by according him several personal quirks and eccentricities. Jug, as Jehangir likes to be called, likes to repair cycles in his spare time, design funky glasses for the neighbourhood kids and play kabaddi (a kind of contact team sport) with sea waves. The mise en scene of Dr Jehangir’s consulting room is another pointer at Shinde’s accent on gentle masculinity. Instead of a man-cave of an alpha male, the doctor’s well-lit chamber is furnished with creaking but comfortable chairs, a brass bell to mark time, and an old stereo system. At the same time, Shinde acknowledges ‘a celebration of popular modes of femininity’ (Munford 2007, p.  268), in her portrayal of Kaira, who loves make-up, dressing up, and looking up her favourite childhood doll (who she had named Shyra). It is through her childhood associations, toys, the birth of her baby brother, her grandparents’ house in rural Goa, that Dr Jehangir Khan succeeds in tapping into her hidden neuroses and anxieties. ‘Don’t let the past blackmail your present’, he counsels Kaira. At the end of her therapy sessions, Kaira’s self-realization, acceptance of the past and her reconciliation with her parents form a part of her healing. Like Laurent teaches Shashi, Dr Khan too makes Kaira embrace and accept herself a little more. To show her heroine’s victory, Shinde uses the same visual imagery in Dear Zindagi that we became familiar with in English Vinglish. In ‘Love You Zindagi’ song Laxman Utekar’s camera frames Alia striding down the serene streets of Goa in a similar way as it does Shashi Godbole in English Vinglish confidently walking down the streets of New York, finally basking in her new-found self-esteem. Dear Zindagi finds closure as Shinde subverts patriarchy using the film-­ within-­film device. Helene Cixous muses, ‘It is necessary and sufficient that the best of herself be given to woman by another woman for her to be able to love herself’ (1975, p. 881). It is in this context that we consider how Shinde weaves in the narrative of Goa’s legendary woman warrior Dona Maria who, in a male disguise, fought against the forces of

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colonialism. Dona Maria finds love and a blissful union with her lover at the end, without making any compromises. Dona Maria’s story has a resonance for Kaira because it is a lesson for her to believe in her dreams, channel her inner adventuress and live an unfettered life. Through a nod at metacinema, Shinde provides us with an instance of a woman making film about a woman, who in turn makes a film about a woman, creating a bond of shared concerns and a feeling of sisterhood, and thereby creates ‘a response to dominant representations of patriarchal girlhood by forging spaces in which girls and young women are empowered to resist …to produce their own self-representations’ (Munford 2007, p. 269).

Conclusion Though she denies being a feminist or a women’s director (Ghose 2020), Shinde admits in an interview to Anupama Chopra that she would ‘look at men or women with a female gaze…it’s a point of view’ (Chopra 2020). Mainstream directors are constantly under pressure of making money for the financiers/distributors, and this constraint may often drive women filmmakers to make more commercial choices and take fewer risks. Within the parameters of Bollywood commercial cinema, Shinde invests her female characters with the much-needed agency and a female point of view. Another strand of Shinde’s work is her sketching of a sense of solidarity for women. In English Vinglish, Shashi’s mother-in-law, sister and niece are constant sources of support to her. Dear Zindagi too calls out for the need for sisterhood and female bonding, in the figures of colleagues, friends or with the maternal figure(s). One is reminded of Helene Cixous who speaks ‘of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses’ (1975, p. 875). As she does in English Vinglish, Shinde uses the travel motif to ideate freedom and personal growth in Dear Zindagi. Kaira shoots a feature film in Singapore, travels to Mumbai and is on the verge of international opportunity when She is offered a cinematographer’s position in New  York. The promise of travel, therefore, is aligned to exploring the world and exciting career opportunities. The promise of happiness after a long time of circling around it is centred on self-­awareness and self-orientation; the ability to choose and hope. Also, worth noting are Shinde’s attempts to explore the constriction of masculinity and male subjectivity. Her ‘heroes’ (or the men she wants us to like) are comfortable in their skins, represent non-hegemonic and non-patriarchal traditions

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and are in touch with the softer side of their personalities. Moreover, her homme ideal occupies non-threatening spaces, such as the kitchen (Laurent in English Vinglish) or a consulting chamber (Dr Jahangir in Dear Zindagi), and embodies traits of human vulnerability. Shinde’s characters are not Olympian, larger than life people. Instead, they are men and women next door, dealing with everyday problems. However, in true Bollywood tradition, these are stunningly good-looking people who occupy beautiful spaces. The roles of older mentors and philosophers are played by charismatic superstars like Bachchan and SRK, and not by avuncular character actors. Shinde also transports her ‘middle-class’ heroines to glamorous locations. English Vinglish offers a slice of Manhattan, with its skyscrapers, cafes, subways, and the Empire State Building; and in Dear Zindagi we are treated to the celebrated locations of Goa: the beaches, the enclaves, the boulevards and the byways, and the vintage villas. Among the current crop, Shinde is one of the most successful female directors, with considerable mainstream and critical success. As a director, Shinde reflects a sense of aesthetic coherence and a tendency for self-­ expression in her work. Both her films are produced by A-list production companies, including her husband R. Balki, Dharma Productions and Red Chilies Entertainment, providing her with the necessary cache. She also works with a regular set of collaborators: cinematographer Laxman Utekar; editor Hemanti Sarkar; and music director Amit Trivedi. Despite our nuanced understanding of the term ‘auteur’, and its several contradictions, with English Vinglish and Dear Zindagi Shinde emerges as an auteur with a strong feminist voice. There may be some criticism of her work: she is calmly ameliorative in her tone as well as ideologically ‘conformist’ (Bhatnagar 2021); her films represent middle/upper-class women from western India (Pune, Mumbai, Goa), and preclude the experiences of the minority and/or underprivileged women. So far, her cinematic universe portrays a spotlessly sanitized worldview that avoids uncomfortable themes, for example, acknowledgement of primal forces of sex, ‘MeToo’, rape and violence against women. Hence, Shashi’s kitchen is not as messy as in Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) and we may not find Shinde probing into the dark recesses of the female psyche in Dear Zindagi, the way Darren Aronofsky did in Black Swan (2010). As Christine Gledhill would put it, Shinde’s cinematic landscape is contained by our ‘patriarchal and bourgeois culture’ (2007, p. 322). Nevertheless, within the framework of commercial Hindi cinema, and skirting a moralizing tone, Shinde charts out a trajectory for marginalized

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characters, including queers, minorities and the socially disadvantaged. In both her films she makes a case for intersectionality, human vulnerability and inclusiveness. As she makes a case for tolerance, acceptance and the need to move on in life, her films stress on the importance of the articulations of travel, gender and sexuality within cinematic framework. Shinde’s ability to portray realistic and relatable characters is conspicuous while she cedes small victories to her heroines. At the end of English Vinglish, Shashi gains self-esteem and her family’s appreciation. Kaira screens her short film at the beach surrounded with family, friends and ex-­ boyfriends. What is more interesting is how both films end on a note of optimism with the female leads finding fulfilment through their respective interests—Shashi making her laddoos at her niece’s wedding and Kaira screening her short film—surrounded by their friends and families. Mapping a blueprint for female empowerment, Gauri Shinde emerges as a liberal voice among the contemporary mainstream women directors.

References Adajania, H. (2014). Finding Fanny. Maddock Films. Ali, I. (2014). Highway. Windowseat Films & Nadiadwala Grandson Entertainment. Allen, W. (1977). Annie Hall. A. Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Production. Allen, S. & Moses, A. (1977–1986). Mind Your Language. London Weekend Television, TRI & ITV. Aronofsky, D. (2010). Twentieth Century Fox France, Searchlight Pictures. Baby, J. (2021). The Great Indian Kitchen. Mankind Cinemas, Symmetry Cinemas; Cinema Cooks. Behl, V. (2013). Queen. Viacom 18 Motion Pictures & Phantom Films. Bhardwaj, V. (2011). Saat Khoon Maaf. UTV Spotboy & VB Pictures. Bhatnagar, S. (2021). ‘English Vinglish: A Confirmation of Conformity’. Film Companion. January 7. https://www.filmcompanion.in/readers-­articles/ english-­vinglish-­a-­confirmation-­of-­conformity-­sridevi-­gauri-­shinde/ Accessed on 4 August 2022. Brooks, R. (1954). The Last Time I Saw Paris. MGM. Bunuel, L. (1967). Belle de Jour. Paris Film Production et al. Burton, T. (1990). Edward Scissorhands. 20th Century Fox. Chatterjee, P. (1989). ‘Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women: The Contest in India’. American Ethnologist 16(4): 622–633. Chaubey, A. (2010). Ishqiya. Shemaroo Entertainment. ———. (2014). Dedh Ishqiya. VB Pictures and Shemaroo Entertainment.

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Chopra, A. (2017). My Choice. Film Companion. Jan 11. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=BBUn2g6-­Cuk . Accessed on 14 August 2021. ———. (2020). Perfect Strokes. Film Companion. Feb 11. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=HS9qj0wzKfQ . Accessed on 3 June 2021. Christopher, M. (2020). ‘I Pretended to like boys because of ‘High School Musical”. In: C. Newland (ed). She Found it at the Movies: Women Writers on Sex, Desire and Cinema. Red Press, Dorset, pp. 172–178. Cixous, H. (1975). The Laugh of the Medusa. Keith Cohen & Paula Cohen (trans.). Signs 1(4): 875–893. Dasgupta, P. (2016). ‘Toning down the Glamour Quotient’. The Hindu. November 23. https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/movies/Toning-­ down-­the-­glamour-­quotient/article16683573.ece. Accessed on 29 July 2022. Dreyer, E., & McDowall, E. (2012). ‘Imagining the flâneur as a Woman’. Communicatio 38(1): 30–44. Friedan, B. (1963; rpt. 2010). The Feminine Mystique. Penguin, London. Ghatage, R. (2019). ‘English Vinglish and the Logic of Globalization’. The English Languages: History, Diaspora, Culture 5: 34- 47. Ghose, A. (2020) ‘The Gauri Shinde View of the World’ Mint. July 18. https:// www.livemint.com/mint-­l ounge/features/the-­g auri-­s hinde-­v iew-­o f-­t he-­ world-­11594964981312.html Accessed on 25 May 2021. Ghosh, S. (2012). Kahaani. Viacom 18, Sujoy Ghosh, Pen India Ltd. & Boundscript Motion Pictures. Gledhill, C. (2007). ‘Melodrama’. In: P. Cook (ed) The Cinema Book. London, BFI, pp. 316–322. Johar, K. (2010). My Name is Khan. Fox Searchlight Pictures, Dharma Productions and Red Chillies Entertainment. Kadapa-Bose, S. (2012) ‘Living her dream.’ The Tribune. October 14. https:// www.tribuneindia.com/2012/20121014/spectrum/main8.htm. Accessed on 7 August 2022. Kumar, M. (1962). Anpadh. Kiron Productions. Kumar, O. (2014). Mary Kom. Bhansali Productions & Viacom 18 Motion Pictures. Haskell, M. (1999). ‘The Woman’s Film’. In: S. Thornham (ed). Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. New York University Press, New York, pp. 20–30. Jamkhandikar, S. (2012). ‘A Minute with Gauri Shinde on English Vinglish’. Bollywood News. September 13. https://www.reuters.com/article/gauri-­ shinde-­english-­vinglish-­idINDEE88B0EL20120912. Accessed on 1 June 2021. Luthria, M. (2011). The Dirty Picture. Balaji Motion Pictures. Lotz, A.D. (2007). ‘Theorising the Intermezzo: The Contributions of Postfeminism and Third Wave Feminism’. In: Gillis, S., Howie, G., Munford, R. (eds). Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 71–85.

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McDowell, L. (1999). Gender, Identity, Space. University of Minneapolis, Minneapolis. Menon, N. (2012). Seeing Like a Feminist. Penguin, New Delhi. Munford, R. (2015a). ‘Writing the F-Word: Girl Power, The Third Wave, and Postfeminism’. In: Eagleton, M., Parker, E. (eds). The History of British Women Writing, 1970s to Present. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 130–146. ———. (2015b). “‘Wake Up and Smell the Lipgloss’”: Gender, Generation and the (A) politics of Girl Power.’ In: Gillis, S., Howie, G., Munford, R. (eds). Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 266–282. Murphy, R. (2010). Eat Pray Love. Columbia Pictures. NDTV (2015). “I felt empty and directionless’. Deepika Padukone on her Battle with Depression.’ March 22. https://www.ndtv.com/india-­news/full-­ transcript-­lets-­talk-­depression-­deepika-­padukones-­story-­748527. Accessed on 2 June 2021. Neale, S. (2007). ‘Melodrama and the Woman’s Film since the 1990s’. In: P. Cook (ed). The Cinema Book. BFI, London, pp. 325–326. Onir (2010). I Am. Anticlock Films. Salles, W. & Thomas, D. (2016). Loin du 16e. In: Salles, W. & Thomas, D., Coen, J. & Coen, E. et al. Paris, je t’aime. Canal +, Victoires International. Sarkar, P. (2014). Mardaani. Yash Raj Films. Sen, A. (1970a). Khamoshi. Geetanjali Pictures. ———. (1970b). Safar. Mushir-Riaz Productions. Shinde, G. (2012). English Vinglish. Hope Productions. ———. (2016). Dear Zindagi. Red Chillies Entertainment & Dharma Productions. ———. (2001). Oh Man. Valentina Canigila & Gauri Shinde. Singh, N. (2014). NH10. Phantom Films & Clean Slate Filmz. Sircar, S. (2015). Piku. MSM Motion Pictures, Saraswati Entertainment Creations & Rising Sun Films. Soloway, J. ‘Jill Soloway, the Female Gaze 2016’. Art School Portal. https:// artschoolportal.com/2017/12/jill-­s oloway-­o n-­t he-­f emale-­g aze-­2 016/. Accessed on 12 June 2021. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014). ‘Feminist Perspectives on Globalization’. Rev. March 12, 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ feminism-­globalization/. Accessed on 5 June 2021. Tiwari, A.I. (2015). Nil Battey Sannata. JAR Pictures & Colour Yellow Productions. Vohra, C. (1970). Khilona. Prasad Productions. Wilson, E. & Harris, C. (2006). ‘Meaningful travel: Women, Independent Travel and the Search for Self and Meaning’. Tourism: An International Interdisciplinary Journal 54 (2): 161–172.

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———. (2007). ‘Women Travel and Empowerment’. In: A.  Pritchard (ed). Tourism and Gender: Embodiment, Sensuality and Experience. Cabi books, Oxfordshire, pp. 235–250. Williams, L. (1984). ‘Something else besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’. Cinema Journal 24(1): 2–27. Wright, N.S. (2017). Bollywood and Postmodernism: Popular Indian Cinema in the 21st Century. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

CHAPTER 3

Zoya Akhtar: Global Genres and Gendered Signatures Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta

Located right at the heart of the industry elite—as celebrated scriptwriters Javed Akhtar and Honey Irani’s daughter and Farhan Akhtar’s sister— Zoya Akhtar debuted with the nuanced Luck by Chance (2009), where she surveyed the internal workings of the film industry in which she had grown up. Initially accused of straying far from her father’s iconic working-class characters and only depicting the lives of the wealthy elite because of the success of her subsequent films, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (ZNMD; 2011) and Dil Dhadakne Do (DDD; 2015), Akhtar later proved that she could, with equal deftness, explore the lives, affects, and experiences of those who do not belong, of the misfits, and of the marginalized in such films and short films as Gully Boy (2019) and Lust Stories (2018). Key to her representation of both—the haves and the have-nots—is Akhtar’s critical sensibility, which is attentive to the nuances of relationships, the ensuing entanglements, and the ways in which structures impact identity. As

P. Gopinath (*) • M. Mehta Binghamton University, SUNY, Binghamton, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_3

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director, writer, and producer, she moves across genres and media to reveal and critique the normative structures of class, family, sexuality, and gender.

Dil Dhadakne Do While speaking to film journalist and reviewer, Anupama Chopra, Akhtar points to two distinctive and consistent features of her work. Firstly, she argues that her women characters always have well-developed “narrative arcs”; in other words, her female characters evolve in response to changing professional and personal circumstances (Film Companion, 2019). The narrative trajectories and cinematographic representations of Sona from Luck by Chance, Ayesha from Dil Dhadakne Do, Safeena from Gully Boy, and Sudha from Lust Stories are evidence of Akhtar’s commitment to representing the self-determining woman in Hindi film. Secondly, she points out, “I feel the need to put out the men I want to see in the world” (Film Companion, 2019). This too is evident across her films, Kabir and Sunny from DDD, Murad from GB and Imran, Kabir, and Arjun in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Indeed, both these aspects of her work are intertwined: she deliberately crafts autonomous women and sensitive men. As a result, female characters are finely etched and fully formed even in films where the narrative centers the hero’s journey, for example, GB—speaking to her attempt at a feminist shift in the heteronormative, classed gender scripts in mainstream cultural texts. In her films, short films, and television shows, she represents women as autonomous beings, charting their own paths and navigating selfhood through a hierarchical patriarchal society. They do not exist as complements to men, and their lives are not defined by men—still unusual in mainstream Hindi cinema. At the same time, she also denaturalizes the representation of men in Hindi films. She renders masculinity visible in ways that are novel for mainstream films, making obvious the ways in which masculinities are produced and shaped by socio-economic, cultural patriarchal structures. There is an admitted pedagogical impulse to her art, she “puts out” new types of men in her films. As she says, “heroes can be this also” (Film Companion, 2021). Moreover, these pointed explorations of gender and class are shaped by Akhtar’s play with genres: she thinks through and melds Hindi film forms with transnational, “global” genres. While she has been consistent in her engagement with class, gender, and form across all her films, we are going to use Dil Dhadakne Do and Gully Boy case studies to think through the specificities in her filmic

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oeuvre. As with her texts on streaming platforms, her films focus on familial and kinship relations, on the affects and perspectives that emerge from within warp and woof of relationships. DDD, Akhtar’s family film, reworks the beloved and popular Hindi film genre, of Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) through its subversive attack on the (North Indian) heteronormative family, so enthusiastically celebrated in the earlier films. The 1990s Hindi family film, iconized by Hum Aapke Hain Koun and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, according to Jyotika Virdi, “negotiate the fraught relationship between the individual/ couple’s romantic love and family/community interests—and wishfully preserve both” (2004, p. 204). In addition, critics, such as Patricia Uberoi (1998), Purnima Mankekar (1999), and Monika Mehta (2005), among others, have examined at length the ways in which the family films of the 1990s projected a new inclusive form of deterritorialized Indianness that relied on a sustained belief in and practice of patriarchal traditions and values. The resounding success of these films in a climate of right-wing resurgence represented the celebration of conservative values where the heteronormative family is indubitably seen as the final “bastion of stability and security” in a rapidly consumer-driven, neoliberal world (Virdi 2004, p. 193). The return to this genre, albeit with a critical gaze, at a time when neoliberal discourse and its attendant forms of subject formation create the hegemonic horizon of the Indian bourgeoisie, is significant. While the Mehras in this new Hindi family film continue to be fabulously wealthy, the elite Indian family now represents the “global” Indian family, encompassing both the diaspora and the nation. There is no need for an explicit reference to the NRI identity and lifestyle because it is embedded in the mise-en-scène. Akhtar’s mise-en-scène foregrounds the material realities of extreme wealth in a “globalized” world through the language of realism— invitation baskets crammed with luxury chocolates and champagne, branded designer wear, interior design that seems to be lifted from global architecture magazines, private planes, and luxury cruises. She situates the Mehra family in an elite, upper-caste, Punjabi Delhi business-class milieu. It’s a far cry from the removed fairy tale nowhereness of the rich in Sooraj Barjatya’s and Karan Johar’s films. The film also announces its differences from the earlier family films with its overt critique of patriarchal structures and its gender expectations. This occurs through the ethical narrator, an all-seeing dog (voiced by Aamir Khan), questioning patriarchal heteronormative rules with a voice-over that runs over the opening credits of the film.

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The genre, then, is necessarily retooled to represent neoliberal gendered subjectivity within an extant Hindi film form. While the film relies on the archetypes of the nuclear family familiar to the genre—the highhanded patriarch, the put-upon wife/mother, the spoilt son, and the married daughter—it nevertheless upends these archetypes within the increasingly fragmented nuclear family.1 The patriarch (Anil Kapoor) is an adulterous entrepreneur on the verge of failure; the put-upon wife (Shefali Shah) is a socialite suffering from an eating disorder because of deep unhappiness. Meanwhile, the son (Ranveer Singh) is a sensitive young man trapped by the classed masculine expectations of society and his family, while the daughter (Priyanka Chopra) is a successful entrepreneur trying to escape an unhappy marriage where her identity is consistently reduced to her reproductive and marital status. Ayesha Mehra’s journey to self-determination is one of the key arcs of the narrative. The film’s organizing conflict is her unhappiness at being reduced to the structural position of married wife and daughter. Ayesha, the married daughter, who, bringing to bear her professional expertise, organizes the massive all-expenses-paid luxury cruise. And yet, because she is no longer a “Mehra,” her name has been excluded from the invitation and sole credit is given to Kabir Mehra, the “heir,” who has contributed nothing. The logic for this is, as the observer-narrator makes explicit: “Yeh reet khas tor pe hamare mulk me hain ke shaadi ke baad, beti paraayi ho jati hai. Beta kitni bhi shaadiya kar le, apna hee rehta hai.” (It’s a tradition in our country that after marriage, a daughter belongs to another family. The son could have umpteen marriages, but he is still ours.) The film unpacks the patriarchal norm that dismisses Ayesha’s labor, professionalism, and individuality. Indeed, she’s the founder-owner of a growing online travel portal, launched with no help from her wealthy parents or husband. It is a business so successful that she is on the Forbes list of successful young entrepreneurs—a fact that nobody acknowledges except her brother. Her selfhood is bolstered by her corporate success. For her parents, however, she only exists as an object of exchange between her father and her husband. Repudiating the oppressive pressures of the heteropatriarchal, she finally presses for a divorce and persists despite repeated verbal and psychological abuse from her parents, her husband, and her mother-in-law. In critically engaging classed gender expectations and the normative practices of the elite business family, DDD explicitly takes on patriarchal masculine norms and expectations. Indeed, the film begins with overt

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mockery of the family patriarch Kamal Mehra as he engages in ludicrous, macho one-upmanship in his golf game with fellow businessmen. The narrator calls out Kamal’s vainglorious self-mythification. If Kamal Mehra represents the way men are and should not be, since they damage both themselves and everyone around them, Kabir and Sunny Gill represent the type of man Akhtar “would like to put out into the world.” An obvious shift in elite middle-class Punjabi masculinity is evident in Kabir. Kabir is an example of the damage wrought by Punjabi masculine norms on a sensitive young man. Running counter to Hindi film’s visual language of a hero’s spectacular introduction, the film introduces Kabir during a moment of failure: being shown up by his father and an antagonistic businessman at a boardroom meeting. The mis-en-scène establishes him as the antithesis of his father—sensitive, non-aggressive, and uncertain. He refuses to participate in the patriarchal entrepreneurial grammar of masculine one-upmanship and entitlement over women (Gopinath 2020). Having said that, the film, in the form of “fearless” Farah, nevertheless points to Kabir’s immense class and gender privilege, to which she, as a dancer on the cruise line he attends as a guest, can never access. Perhaps the film’s most obvious and even pedagogical example of feminist masculinity is Sunny Gill, an investigative journalist, whom another elite patriarchal abuser, Ayesha’s husband, dismisses as an “activist type.” He is the son of Kamal Mehra’s manager. The film positions him outside the circle of wealth and power, though he, along with the narrative voice, represents the film’s ethical center. It is not an accident that he is decidedly middle class, and it is he who repudiates the default expectations for men and women. The film’s most explicit feminist statement, and the instance of its most obvious staging of a feminist masculinity, occurs during a confrontation between Manav (Ayesha’s husband) and Sunny at an after-party gathering at a bar. It is significant that the film stages this in a public setting. Kabir and Sunny are positioned sitting outside the grouped circle of family members. Manav, while mocking Sunny’s articles on women’s safety in India as overdramatized activism, offers an example of progress in his own family: where he “allows” Ayesha to work. Sunny immediately picks up on the word and says “allow, matlab,” making explicit the dynamics of power that such a word invokes: “Does she need your permission to work?” Sunny asserts that just by the choice of his words, Manav has proved his point about how men still don’t see women as their equals. The film lingers on the tense mood that the calling out produces, foregrounding not only the rarity of such a moment in a family setting (and a family

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film) but also how normalized female subservience is to the happy family narrative. To bring it all home within the diegetic space, the young feminist teenager, Putlu, voices narrative approval for both Sunny’s words and his feminist masculinity, when she proclaims: “I love you.” In Akhtar’s family film, the non-patriarchal men are the obvious heroes; in fact, they are “heroes” precisely because they eschew the normative scripts and expectations for middle-class and elite upper-caste business-class Punjabi masculinities  and femininities. DDD points not to Sunny and Kabir as being “heroes also,” so much as only men like these are and should be heroes. At this point, it is relevant to speak of the star texts and industry practices that inform the cast and form of this film. Akhtar’s choice of stars and actors speaks to the ways in which she is attentive to the genealogy of the Hindi film industry as a star-driven industry, and how she uses it to shape it to her directorial will. Sunny is played by Farhan, Akhtar’s famous brother, who had already established himself as a new generation director.2 As the ultimate industry insider who also produced all her films until she established Tiger Baby Productions, Farhan, has frequently played the outsider in Akhtar’s film. In ZNMD about three men in their thirties on a bachelor road trip through Spain, Farhan as Imran (the only Muslim man among the three friends) is the middle-class advertising professional, obviously less wealthy than his friends. His Urdu poetry, working as an extra-­ diegetic voice-over, provides the contemplative counterpoint to the film’s neoliberal narrative of “work-life balance.”3 Similarly, in this film, Farhan’s Sunny is the middle-class outsider, who does not participate in or condone the heteropatriarchal barter of women. Akhtar’s choice to cast Farhan as an outsider in her mainstream films works particularly well, because that is how his directorial star text circulates in the industry—as a sophisticated and urbane man who upends the traditional and the archaic, who ushers in newness—both of which underwrite Sunny’s character in the film. Of course, acting in this sort of film also serves to layer Farhan’s star text as desirable precisely because he is the feminist lover. Likewise, 1990s Hindi film star, Anil Kapoor, plays Kamal Mehra. His reinvention in this film as the wealthy Punjabi businessman plays with his star text, which was built on the 1990s hypermasculine everyman hero. Kamal’s wealth and assurance are interleaved with Kapoor’s star text of someone who portrays the dramatic and the spectacular—indelible aspects of a “single-screen” Hindi film hero. Meanwhile, Ranveer Singh’s transformation into a sensitive, vulnerable, spoilt rich boy, Kabir, becomes a testament to both Akhtar’s

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directorial acumen and his malleability as an actor. Priyanka Chopra, possibly the biggest star in the film, fits seamlessly into the successful and sophisticated Ayesha. Chopra’s star text was and is predicated on driving ambition and an ability to overcome obstacles.

Gully Boy Women who assert the right to own their future are fundamental to Akhtar’s films. In Gully Boy, Akhtar’s 2019 film about the rise of Murad Ahmed or Gully Boy (Ranveer Singh), a Muslim rapper from Dharavi, Safeena Firdausi (Alia Bhatt), the young medical student and Murad’s girlfriend, is a force to be reckoned with, both within and without the diegetic space. Driven by the need for independence as well as an ambition to become a surgeon, she braves maternal anger and violence (and paternal disappointment) to fulfill her desires. Akhtar’s mise-en-scène pulls a bait-and-switch with audience expectations, in terms of the materialities of class and gender, as well as the romantic tropes of Hindi film, when she introduces Safeena as a character and Murad-Safeena as a couple. Accompanied by her mother as she boards the bus, Safeena looks like the dutiful and obedient Muslim daughter. When we see Murad staring fixedly at her from the back of the bus, the film baits (multiplex) audience expectation that as a lower-class slum dweller, he is just ogling a pretty girl on the bus. The switch occurs when she looks back at him several times and the mutual gaze becomes sexually charged. Here, the film clearly challenges the multiplex viewer’s assumptions about class and gender. If Murad and Safeena had confined themselves to mutual gazing that would have fit into the annals of romantic gazes and bus romances that are so deliciously thrilling in Hindi film romances. However, what is novel is that Safeena is not shy nor coy, which is standard to the genre; rather, she is forthright and unblinking in her own staring. It is Murad who looks away. Taking it one step further with another switch, once her mother gets off the bus, Safeena walks straight to him, sits down, takes out one of his earbuds and puts it in her own ear, and holds his hand. The visual grammar of Hindi film is key to this scene. A Hindi filmgoer would have certain expectations of this scene; Akhtar both builds on and disrupts those expectations to craft a feminist romance and moment. Safeena takes charge: she walks over and touches Murad—the film establishes her as an agentive and assertive Muslim woman, who will move her own life. In fact, the camera

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moves with her as she walks to the bus, and as such, the viewer identifies with her point of view and not his. There are several key moments where Akhtar, both in terms of the camera and the gendered, classed, and religious expectations of Hindi film, disrupts the audience’s easy assumptions. As they catch each other up on the events in their lives, in the reconciliatory aftermath of a bitter breakup, covertly conducted in the intimate space of Safeena’s bathroom, ­ Murad asks how they are going to deal with her parents’ obsessive desire to arrange her marriage. To which Safeena responds with casual, throwaway confidence, “Kuch nahi kar sakte; Main dekh loongi.” (They are not going to do anything; I’ll take care of it.) The forced arranged marriage in Hindi films is usually staged as a moment of helplessness, despair, and sometimes forced resignation—the lot of women in a heteropatriarchal society—from which the hero rescues the beloved damsel. Akhtar’s narrative turns this trope on its head, with Safeena indicating that she can and will handle the situation, and that Murad needn’t worry. In the same conversation, when Murad tells her that he wants to pursue his hip-hop dreams, Safeena tells him, “Tereko jo karna hai tu kar. Main surgeon jo bann jaoon. Apan mast jiyenge.” (Do what you want to do. I am going to be a surgeon. We will live well.) Safeena’s statement is the equivalent of “main hoon na” (I am here), a phrase that was routinely said by the hero (mostly by Shahrukh Khan), shorthand for no need to worry, the hero/ man will take care of it. Not only is Safeena confident that she will become a surgeon, but she also takes on the role of the reliable breadwinner whose financial and social capital will allow Murad to pursue his artistic dreams. As she did with DDD, Akhtar blends and plays with both Hindi film and global genres. The realist mise-en-scéne with its tight, enclosed, and crowded interiors, shot on location in Dharavi, foregrounds the situatedness of lower-class slum life and draws on the ethnographic documentary form. The film is mostly read (by English reviewers in India and by the international press) within the rock/rap biography, most obviously 8 Mile, the Eminem “biopic.” What has not been noted is that even a casual viewing of the film reveals its Hindi film roots. We have already delineated some of the conceits of Hindi film romances that the Murad-Safeena relationship invokes and disrupts. In addition, the use of space and place in general,4 and the romance in particular, echo Hindi film’s visual and aural vocabulary. Their romance is by necessity conducted in crowded public and/or open spaces: buses, bus stops, trains, train platforms, the bridge between his neighborhood and hers, upper-floor windows—familiar

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territory to anyone who has ever watched a Hindi film in their life. Moreover, the story of the underdog rising to success—though here it follows the specific journey of a young man from a “Muslim ghetto” in Dharavi, as he literally and figuratively finds his voice through hip-hop— is a Hindi film staple and a form through which stars were made, whether it is Amitabh Bachchan or Shahrukh Khan. Gully Boy hits all the familiar beats: the repressive father/family, the troubled romance, the poverty of circumstance, the external mentor and savior, and the final redemption. After all, the song “Apna Time Aayega,” the final hip-hop piece that ends the movie, did not become a rousing anthem, reverberating across cultural and social texts because it reminds everyone of 8 Mile, but because it resonates within the familiar contours of song sequences and the hero’s journey in the Hindi film. If Safeena disrupts the conventional effects of the female beloved in Hindi film romances, Murad as hero is also shaped by ideals that are distinctly different. Though this film is framed by a neoliberal narrative of individual ascent, Murad is very much in the mold of Akhtar’s heroes; sensitive, vulnerable, artistic, restrained, and critically aware of systemic gender, class, and religious injustices. In fact, that is what allows him to be the voice of the streets and become Gully Boy—the one who represents his neighborhood; his neighbors recognize that he is singing about their lives, when he gets YouTube comments saying “hum jaise log pe ek gaana banaya.” His sensitivity attunes him to his mother’s suffering in structural terms. While the mother-son relationship is central to Hindi film traditions with its emphasis on maternal self-sacrifice, here the mother-son bond is predicated on mutual awareness of patriarchal repressiveness and assault on female selfhood. On leaving for a new home in the aftermath of his father violently assaulting his mother, Murad tells his paternal grandmother who feels abandoned by them, and who had defended his father’s behavior: “Sahi kiya haina tumhare ladke ne, sab sahi sikhaya hai tumhare ladke ko.” It is an explicit judgment and repudiation of masculine entitlement. In the same vein, while Hindi film heroes routinely beat up anyone who so much as looked at their female beloved, in this film, it is Safeena who is the “Danger Aapa,” or “Danger Big Sister/Lady” and Murad who makes her promise against violence, upending the heteronormative expectations of masculine violence and territoriality and disrupting the trope of woman as object. Having said all this, like in the case of Kabir, Akhtar’s narrative reveals that Murad too inhabits masculine privilege and entitlement, when he cheats on Safeena. Finally, it is significant that GB centers

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a realist, situated representation of a lower-class Muslim man, his family, and the bond between his group of friends—a rarity in mainstream Hindi cinema, where Muslim representation has been confined to the “Muslim social,” the nowhere land of aristocratic “Islamicate” (Bhaskar and Allen 2009) culture, or more recently the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim dichotomy. Importantly, it is a bond that is inclusive of women, one that is touchingly tender, one that doesn’t police emotions (there are many criers in the group), and most importantly, one that is the antithesis of machismo. GB, for all its appropriative faults, offers progressive, layered, and nuanced relationships and subjectivities that have been absent in  recent mainstream cinema.

Streaming Content Gender, genealogy, and female homosociality propel Akhtar’s career in streaming as they do in her filmic output. The rise of streaming platforms in India enables Akhtar to both find new audiences for her filmic oeuvre and expand her skills as writer, director, and producer as she participates in the making of three anthology films as well as a web series. The three well-­ known anthology films—Bombay Talkies, Lust Stories, and Ghost Stories— are collaborative projects where Akhtar along with well-known male filmmakers (Karan Johar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee) showcases her work. In this format, each director crafts a 30–35-min feature film, which engages with the anthology’s theme. The format encourages comparative discussion and reflection on how each director reworks or repeats their style in the short feature. Thus, the anthology format itself confers and indeed reworks auteurial prestige that is further accentuated by the fact that each director here has a recognizably distinct style. Given the dearth of female commercial film directors, Akhtar’s participation in these anthology films has further significance because it cements her status as a key female Bombay film director. Akhtar claims and emphasizes a feminist female authorship, even as she disrupts patriarchal and masculinist discourses of auteurship by consistently foregrounding the various networks and forms of labor that produce a film. Akhtar’s process and filmmaking offer a feminist critique of gendered notions of auteurship that elevate a male director as the sole origin, creator, and focal point of a film by pointing to the multiple processes and professions within filmmaking.5 Here, it is important to point out that social, industrial, and kinship networks (in

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other words, connections) pave Akhtar’s entry into this exclusive group of filmmakers. In 2015, building on their long-term industrial association and partnership, Reema Katgi and Zoya Akhtar founded Tiger Baby Films. The notable Gully Boy (2019) was their first film production and Made in Heaven (2019) was their debut web series. With Made in Heaven Akhtar enters new creative and collaborative territory. The structure of the series enables joint authorship as each director leads two episodes of the show. Like the anthology films, Made in Heaven is a collaborative directorial effort, but this time helmed by four female directors. In a promotional interview, the female directors of Made in Heaven present themselves as professionals and as colleagues (Srivastava 2020). There is no attempt at constructing a sisterhood or talking about the Bombay industry as a family a la Karan Johar. Instead, the interview highlights how they worked together to make a show about families and weddings. What do we make of this decision to avoid a language of family and kinship which is critical to how Bombay cinema constructs itself? We argue that the female directors understand that narratives of family, kinship, or even romantic love in the industrial context result in unpaid or hidden labor. Their professional demeanor seeks to emphasize their identities as working women. Made in Heaven, at the narrative level, also stresses that the two protagonists are business partners and friends, not lovers, or pseudo-siblings. Thus, what we witness at the streaming site are novel content and a different industrial configuration. Moving away from her film oeuvre which centers adult, male protagonists and their narratives Akhtar’s streaming output zooms in on the lives of female, queer, and child characters, drawing our attention to new perspectives and alliances. What remains consistent in the streaming and filmic works are Akhtar’s finely etched characters enmeshed in a web of relations. The shift in perspective in the web series and anthology films draws our attention to what these relations look and feel like from different vantage points and how they generate discourses about age, class, gender, and sexuality. Thus, the domestic servant in Lust Stories (2019) is coupled with an upper-middle-class man who is willing to bed her, and to benefit from her house chores, but is unwilling to entertain a public relationship with her (Mehta 2019). Our understanding of her humiliation and marginalized status depends upon seeing and hearing the upper-­ middle world from her perspective. Akhtar’s use of a realistic aesthetic forces her middle and upper-middle-class viewers to recognize themselves,

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their family members, and friends in the characters and mise-en-scène that Akhtar builds. Similarly Made in Heaven shows how class combined with gender places Tara Khanna (Sobhita Dhulipala) on a lower rung compared to her husband. The flashbacks in Made in Heaven reveal that Tara is required to erase her lower-middle-class background and learn upper-­ class etiquette to attract her husband and blend into his wealthy family. The stain of class, however, never goes away and continues to shape the dynamic between her husband and his family. Class distinction and taste also figure prominently in Made in Heaven’s opulent mise-en-scène which reflects the wedding planners, Tara and Karan Mehra’s (Arjun Mathur) affluent Delhi clientele. The coupling of this eye-catching mis-en-scène with knotty stories of dowry, religious rituals, and forced marriages (to name a few) confirms Katgi’s insightful point that heterosexual marriages are not a sign of normalcy; these unions show the workings of a more complex institution. These extravagant heterosexual weddings serve as a counterpoint to Karan’s furtive sexual encounters with men, which mostly take place in dark, shadowy places. Through representations of Karan’s dealings with the police, his family, his landlord, and his school buddies as well as the final damage to the business, the series’ foregrounds the violence against homosexuality and the difficulties of having a “normal” relationship.

Ghost Stories In her short film Ghost Stories, Akhtar pressures Hindi cinema’s representations of class, family, and gender via her experiments with horror, which in the Indian context is mainly found in B-films.6 According to reviewers, her film, despite including the requisite elements of the genre—a ghost, shadowy lighting, an eerie soundtrack—fails to fulfill the genre’s promise to induce spectacular fear. Contrary to these reviews, we argue that familiar elements of horror are wedded to a realist narrative which enables Akhtar to craft a gendered tale about elder care in neoliberal India. The disintegration of multigenerational households with adult children often living away from home creates a vacuum in elder care. In this scenario, attendants emerge as a new professional class providing homecare. The attendants, as we find out from Sameera’s (Jahnvi Kapoor) story, don’t come from middle-class or upper-class backgrounds; they are recruited from the lower classes. The film reveals the drudgery and loneliness of this occupation through scenes of Sameera going about her tasks—recording

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her patient, Ms. Malik’s (Surekha Sikri) vital signs, bathing and feeding her, and cleaning her pee and poop. In both Ghost Stories and Lust Stories, eldercare, and domestic work, respectively, are gendered tasks carried out by lower-class women. Akhtar eschews horror’s casting of women as blood thirsty vampires or scary ghosts seeking to undo masculinity. Instead, she knits horror in a realist pattern and presents “ordinary women.” In doing so, she both reshapes horror as a global genre and women’s place in this genre. Akhtar also masterfully plays with the tropes of horror. For example, the soundtrack along with the shadowy mise-en-scène function as bait-and-­ switch, suggesting a familiar interpretative direction. The viewer is baited to anticipate the ghost as the expected unfamiliar figure with unkempt hair and dark eyes, who enters from the outside or a character we will encounter later. However, the switch is, she is a decrepit old woman who we encounter immediately when we enter the home with Sameera. What would we make of this strategy? We suggest that by making the ghost both familiar and present, Akhtar shows that patriarchy is intergenerational. The mis-en-scéne establishes parallels between the older and younger woman when Sameera enters and explores Ms. Malik’s bedroom. The camera follows Sameera as she caresses the fine sheets and then moves to the vanity table which displays its owner’s make-up and jewelry. Perched above the vanity are portraits of a young and beautiful Ms. Malik; these portraits observe Sameera as she fiddles with her hair and jewelry, choosing a pin to wear. This congruence between Ms. Malik and Sameera made at the level of mise-en-scène is later bolstered by Ms. Malik’s comment that once she too possessed a pin like the one Sameera is wearing. Similarities between the two women do not only focus on the image or the shared love for feminized objects such as jewelry, cosmetics, or sheets. They are also audible in Ms. Malik’s memories about her son as much in Sameera’s conversations with her lover. Here, it’s important to recall two key tenets of Bombay cinema: first, the mother as an archetype figure who serves as a symbol of sacrifice, maternal love, and endurance; second, the importance of the mother and son relationship which often rivals or is equal to the relationship between the heterosexual couple. Ms. Malik’s memories about parties for her son and his friends narrate a tale of maternal care, which we presume would be reciprocated later by the son, and if not him, then equally devoted and loving substitutes a la Baghban/ Gardener (2002). Instead, we get an absent and casually neglectful son. He never phones or shows up; we don’t even see a photograph of him.

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Sameera’s circumstances further cement that the men in this story are both selfish and negligent. We first hear her married lover Guddu (Vijay Varma) as placatory sound trying to convince her to wait for him; later, he appears in person for a quickie but leaves at the first sign of trouble. While Ms. Malik and Sameera are bound to the domestic space by disability and profession, both Ms. Malik’s son and Guddu can come and go or even be absent. After hearing Sameera’s argument with Guddu, Ms. Malik advises her, “If I could run, I would have done so; I wouldn’t have waited.” Both Sameera and the viewers will realize the full import of this advice later. At the time, Sameera is annoyed and frustrated by her patient’s demands and sees no parallels between this wealthy woman’s life and her own downtrodden one. Sameera’s presence in Ms. Malik’s home underscores the lack of familial love and care. Close attention to Sameera’s tasks and her demeanor establish that she is here to work. This aligns with the professional stance in Made in Heaven’s promotional interview and narrative. Interestingly, Akhtar never represents Sameera as substitute daughter, side-stepping a favored representational idiom in Bombay cinema both at the level of narrative and star text. Jahnvi Kapoor who plays Sameera is the daughter of the renowned film actress, Sridevi, who was celebrated for her dancing, melodramatic sequences, and comic timing. Curiously, Kapoor’s role as Sameera does not require her to showcase any skills which would have provided an occasion for comparison with her mother. Instead, she’s charged with correctly delivering dialogue in Bombaiya Hindi; something her mother never had to do. Thus, at the level of star text, the film establishes Kapoor as a professional actor as opposed to Sridevi’s daughter. That said, we stress that it matters that Kapoor is Sridevi and Boney Kapoor’s daughter, Anil Kapoor’s (a la Dil Dhadakne Do) niece, Sonam Kapoor’s cousin and in a more complicated vein, Arjun Kapoor’s half-sister. This genealogy serves as meaty publicity material, generating audience interest. These kinship relations also make industrial connections possible. In other words, while they may not be the only reason that Kapoor was cast in this short film, they would have put Kapoor on Akhtar’s radar. Therefore, unlike Sameera, Kapoor is not an orphan who has had to make it on her own. Within the context of the contemporary Bombay film industry, charges of nepotism can adversely impact a star’s career, Kapoor does have to prove that she can act and is not simply riding on the coattails of her filmi family.

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The film’s climactic scene takes place after a heated exchange where Ms. Malik insists that Sameera check the kitchen for her missing son, Sameera angrily storms off—and to her and to our horror finds Ms. Malik’s dead body. Later when the medical team arrives, they figure out that when Ms. Malik’s son had not shown up to take care of her for two days, Ms. Malik had dragged herself to the kitchen to get some food. Thus, Akhtar’s coupling of horror with the realist narrative makes an everyday and commonplace narrative about elder care spectacular and it delivers a feminist lesson about women’s agency.

Bombay Talkies Like Ghost Stories, Zoya Akhtar’s Sheila Ki Jawani (Sheila’s youth) one of the four short films in Bombay Talkies (2013), spotlights the question of gender. The film was released on May 3, 2013, coinciding with, and celebrating the 100th year of Indian cinema. Its title is taken from an eponymous song sequence from Tees Maar Khan (2010). Sung by Sunidhi Chauhan and Vishal Dadlani featuring Katrina Kaif along with Akshay Kumar, the song, unlike the film in which it featured, became a gigantic hit. Farah Khan, Akhtar’s cousin, both directed the film and choreographed the dance moves. The song, “Sheila Ki Jawani,” serves as catalyst for staging 12-year-old Vicky’s (Naman Jain) desires and interests in all things feminine. In Bombay films, children’s subjectivity and desires have been rarely explored. Taare Zameen Par (2007) and Stanley Ka Dabba (2011) which precede Akhtar’s film were unusual for those reasons. The former showed that painting was equally praiseworthy as success at sports or subjects like math, science, and language; the latter tracked a lower-­ class tea seller who secretly goes to school. What is unusual about Vicky’s desires is that they cross gender boundaries. This generates novel moments in the film that jostle familiar-looking practices. For example, at various junctures in the film, the camera shows an enthralled Vicky as he watches young girls practice kathak, his mother dress-up, and the Bombay star Katrina Kaif perform “Sheila Ki Jawani.” Later, as a sign of admiration, Vicky pastes Kaif’s poster on his bedroom wall. Neither voyeurism nor surveillance explains his desires and the related looking practices. Vicky’s yearning to emulate feminine practices positions the girls and women as role models as opposed to (sex) objects. His authoritarian father, however, pushes him toward a gender-appropriate activity, football, and rebukes him for idolizing Kaif.

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If in Ghost Stories, a gendered mise-en-scene becomes a mechanism for both foregrounding pleasure and generating parallels between a younger and older woman, then in Bombay Talkies, it serves as a site of desire and transformation. When Vicky’s parents are away, he goes to his mother’s vanity table and excitedly puts on her jewelry, cosmetics, and clothes, delighting in his makeover. Subsequently, he performs “Sheila Ki Jawani” in front of his appreciative older sister. His performance not only of the song but of gender is violently interrupted by his father, who shouts at him for wearing girls’ clothes and for dancing like a girl. Vicky’s mother (Swati Das), unfortunately, remains silent, clearly cowed by her husband’s anger. A disheartened Vicky is soon rescued and emboldened by television which transmits an inspirational interview with Kaif. On the small screen, Kaif emerges as star, role model, life coach—and fairy godmother. Dressed in a white gown and wings, Kaif comes out of the television screen and advises Vicky to follow his dreams even if they challenge social conventions. How does one read Akhtar’s decision to use this song and cast Kaif as role model and coach for Vicky? At an industrial level, the use of both the song and Kaif are strategic directorial decisions to attract fans of one or both. A consequence of this strategy is that it positions Akhtar as a part of Bombay cinema’s kinship network given that Khan is her cousin. This genealogical connection to Farah Khan likely helped in navigating copyright concerns and gaining access to this blockbuster song. In structuring her film around this song, Akhtar also plays homage to and highlights the work of a female director and choreographer in Bombay cinema. In discourses of auteurship and cinephilia, male directors regularly cite other male directors thereby, constructing cinema as a paternal industry, a process that Akhtar disrupts and critiques with feminist intent in her citation of industry professionals beyond the male director. Her move here foregrounds the role of female directors, choreographers, and actors in the Bombay film industry. Unlike Khan or Akhtar, Kaif, in Bombay cinema’s parlance, is an “outsider.” This status not only refers to the fact that she doesn’t have any family in the business, but also that she is a “Muslim British Indian.” When Kaif entered the industry and even now, film reviewers often panned her acting skills, dismissing her as a pretty face. These persistent detractors, however, have not prevented Kaif from continuing her career in Bombay cinema. In the narrative, Kaif thus serves as an apt role model for Vicky since she has made her career via “hard work” rather than genealogy. In promotional interviews, Farah Khan said that

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she gave Kaif DVDs of Madhuri Dixit’s movies so that she could learn from Dixit’s stunning performances. During the publicity of Tees Maar Khan, Kaif repeated multiple times how she practiced diligently and for many hours to nail the choreography. Not only for this particular film, but also more generally, Kaif is characterized as a “hard-working” actor; this is a key aspect of her star image. Akhtar’s industrial dealings show how an astute and gendered blending of “family” and “outsiders,” genealogy, and hard work propel her professional life. While “Sheila Ki Jawani” focuses on Vicky’s story, Akhtar also shows the consequences of gender policing on Vicky’s sister who is unable to attend a history class trip because their father deems it more important to spend money on improving Vicky’s football skills. Cognizant of these consequences, Vicky empties his piggy bank to help his sister; however, their combined monies are short of the required amount. To earn money, Vicky devises a plan where he would perform “Sheila ki Jawani” for their neighbors and friends while his sister would advertise and sell tickets for his performance. While both the sister and the brother have individual desires, fulfilling them requires the siblings to collaborate. This plan reconfigures the brother-sister relationship, which is sacrosanct in Bombay cinema. Within the representational idiom of Bombay cinema, the brother generally protects his sister from rape, sexual harassment, evil in-laws and facilitates her happy marital life. Vicky’s strategy wrenches both brother and sister out of a representational straitjacket framed by and within a discourse of heteropatriarchy. Recasting the terms of this relationship, the plan does not position Vicky as his sister’s protector. Rather, Vicky facilitates an equitable relationship between the siblings by assisting in fulfilling her dream to go on an educational school trip. This dream is also non-­ normative given that girls generally are supposed to desire love, marriage, or family within Bombay cinema. Notably, Vicky’s song and dance performance as opposed to a masculinized action sequence where a brother might beat up his sister’s assailants makes possible his sister’s desire. The performance simultaneously fulfills his desire to dance like Katrina Kaif. Thus, the song and dance sequence doubles as both spectacle and narrative goal. It enables Akhtar’s characters to sacrifice neither their kinship relations nor their desires. The film’s final sequence stages Vicky’s performance, which begins shakily as he struggles with stage-fright, picks up speed after his sister’s encouragement. At first, the on-screen audience, which consists of neighbors, school friends, and football buddies, is surprised and confused when

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Vicky appears on stage; there is some smirking and tittering from the football buddies. However, once Vicky begins to skillfully replicate Kaif’s moves, the audience (including the football buddies) enthusiastically claps and encourages his efforts. The film comes full circle with its non-­ normative take on gender as the camera foregrounds a little girl sitting in her mother’s lap admiring Vicky’s moves much the same way that he admired Kaif’s dancing skills.

Conclusion To conclude, Zoya Akhtar is committed to critiquing heteropatriarchy both on and off screen. Her partnership as a writer and producer with fellow writer and director, Reema Katgi, signals two new industrial configurations in Bombay cinema. First, it shows women’s off-screen participation in the film industry. Second and in a related vein, it foregrounds the possibility of female homosociality within the workplace. While we have offered a generous reading of Akhtar’s oeuvre—an unpacking of her critique of the heteronormative status quo and class hierarchies, it would be remiss of us if we did not point to her own extraordinary genealogy and privilege even as she interrogates them in her work. This privilege is evident in her participation in prestige projects like the anthology genre, which cements her status as a significant female filmmaker in the industry. While this status is certainly due to her hard work and innovative filmmaking, it is also enabled by kinship and industrial connections. Similarly, GB, with its careful representations of class, poverty, and space, is nevertheless far removed from her own classed experiences of the city. Her positionality as part of the wealthy upper-class film industry elite renders an appropriative (Kulkarni 2020) and ethnographic aspect to the film. Her location within the kinship networks of the industry—Javed Akhtar and Honey Irani’s daughter, Farhan Akhtar’s sister, Karan Johar’s childhood friend—not only grants her the freedom to make the films, short films, and television shows that she wants to make, and enables her to cast A-list stars, but also accords her the industrial and cultural capital that comes with lineage.

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Notes 1. Like the earlier family films, Akhtar represents an upper-caste, upper-class North Indian, in this case, Punjabi, family. Akhtar’s interrogation of gender, class, sexuality, and location does not extend to caste structures. In this, her films align with much of mainstream Hindi cinema (Yengde 2018); if she thinks about caste at all, it is only in terms of differences between different upper-caste/savarna identities rather than a generational hierarchical oppressive apparatus. 2. His first film, Dil Chahta Hai, is credited as ushering in a new aesthetic in Hindi cinema. 3. For more on the neoliberal structure of the film, see Kamble (2015). 4. There is a great deal to be said about her aesthetics of place and space, which I cannot do here. However, Akhtar’s use of close-up and wide shots to depict affect, emotion, and circumstance, and their relationship to enclosed rooms, interiors of cars, wide open spaces, corridors, and streets reveals a nuanced engagement with the politics of class, gender, and religion. 5. For more on feminism, auteurship, and authorship, see Hollinger (2012), Jaikumar (2016), Rabinowitz (1990), and Ramanathan (2006). 6. For analysis of horror in the context of Bombay cinema, see Sen (2017).

References Akhtar, Z. (2011). Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Excel Entertainment. Akhtar, Z., Banerjee, D., Kashyap, A., & Johar, K. (2013). Bombay Talkies. Flying Unicorn Entertainment. ——— Lust Stories. RSVP Movies & Flying Unicorn Entertainment. ——— (2020). Ghost stories. RSVP Movies. Akhtar, Z. (2019). Gully Boy. Tiger Baby Production & Amazon Prime. Akhtar, Z. (2015). Dil Dhadakne Do. Excel Entertainment. Akhtar, Z. (2009). Luck by Chance. Excel Entertainment. Akhtar, Z., & Katgi, R. (2019). Made in Heaven. Excel Entertainment & Tiger Baby Films. Akhtar, F. (2001). Dil Chahta Hai. Excel Entertainment. Barjatya, S. (1994). Hum Aapke Hain Koun. Rajshri Productions. Bhaskar, I., & Allen, R. (Eds.). (2009). Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema. Tulika Books, New Delhi. Chopra, A. (2019). ‘Interview with Zoya Akhtar’. February 7. https://www.filmcompanion.in/interviews/bollywood-­interview/zoya-­akhtar-­on-­how-­a-­javed-­ akhtar-­and-­divine-­collaboration-­led-­to-­apna-­time-­aayega/. Accessed on 10 September 2021.

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Gopinath, P. (2020). ‘“Don’t Hold Back”: Ranveer Singh, Masculinity, and New Media Ecology’. In: Viswamohan, A.I., Wilkinson, C.M. (eds). Stardom in Contemporary Hindi Cinema: Celebrity and Fame in Globalized Times. Springer Nature Pte, Singapore, pp. 45–58. Hollinger, K. (2012). “‘The Woman Auteur’.” In: Feminist Film Studies. Routledge, London. Jaikumar, P. (2016). “‘Feminist and Non-western Interrogations of Film Authorship’.” In: Hole, K., Jelaca, D., Kaplan, E., Petro, P. (eds). The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender. Routledge, London, pp. 225–234. Johar, K. (2001). Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham’ Dharma Productions. Khan, A. (2007). Taare Zameen Par. Aamir Khan Productions. Khan, F. (2010). Tees Maar Khan. Hari Om Entertainment, Three’s Company, & UTV Motion Pictures. Kamble, J. (2015). ‘All work or all play? Consumption, Leisure, and Ethics under Globalization in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’. South Asian Popular Culture 13(1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2015.1024592. Kulkarni, D. R. (2020). ‘Appropriation and Articulate: Mapping Movements in Gully Boy’. Cinergie17:87–96. Mankekar, P. (1999). ‘Brides Who Travel: Gender, Transnationalism, and Nationalism in Hindi Film’. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 7(3):731–762. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-­7-­3-­731. Mehta, M. (2005). ‘Globalizing Bombay Cinema’. Cultural Dynamics 17(2): 135–154. https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374005058583. Mehta, M. (2019). ‘Lust Stories: A Dossier’. Film Quarterly. April 15. https://filmquarterly.org/2019/04/15/lust-­stories-­a-­dossier/. Accessed on 28 May 2022. Pal, C. (2015). ‘The Zoya Akhtar Interview: Are my Movies About Rich People? What Does That Mean?’ June 1. https://scroll.in/article/731293/the-­zoya-­ akhtar-­i nterview-­a re-­m y-­m ovies-­a bout-­r ich-­p eople-­w hat-­d oes-­t hat-­m ean. Accessed on 12 June 2022. Rabinowitz, P. (1990). “‘Seeing through the Gendered I: Feminist Film Theory’.” Feminist Studies 16 (1): 151–169. Ramanathan, G. (2006). Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Film. Wallflower, London. Sen, M. (2017). Haunting Bollywood: Gender, genre, and the supernatural in Hindi commercial cinema. University of Texas Press, Austin. Srivastava, S. (2020). ‘Made In Heaven review’. https://www.hindustantimes. com/tv/made-­in-­heaven-­r eview-­zoya-­akhtar-­does-­it-­again-­gives-­amazon-­ prime-­its-­best-­desi-­original-­yet/story-­YONq0QxcOSwHiLx7ftJb2J.html. Accessed on 25 May 2022.

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Uberoi, P. (1998). ‘The Diaspora Comes Home: Disciplining Desire in DDLJ’. Contributions to Indian Sociology 32(2): 305–336. Virdi, J. (2004). The cinematic imagiNation : Indian popular films as social history. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Yengde, S. (2018). ‘Dalit Cinema’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41(3):503–518. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2018.1471848.

CHAPTER 4

Revisioning Family Drama: The Global Spaces of Romance and Science Fiction in Honey Irani’s Stories Madhavi Biswas

In the notoriously chaotic, culturally undervalued, and male-dominated world of pre-liberalization Hindi cinema, Honey Irani created a space and a second career for herself by fleshing out the story of Lamhe/Moments (1991) for Yash Chopra, a leading film director and producer at the time, whose production company now plays a key role in distributing and defining Hindi cinema on the global stage. After a successful stint with the Chopras, including films such as Lamhe, Darr/Fear (Yash Chopra 1993a, b), and Aaina/Mirror (Sareen 1993), Irani moved on to an unsuccessful direction bid with Armaan/Desire (2003) and then collaborated, very successfully again, with another prestigious director, Rakesh Roshan. Their first collaboration resulted in a blockbuster film, Kaho Na Pyar Hai/Say It…You Are in Love (2000, henceforth, KNPH), which was the debut film of his son Hrithik Roshan. Their next venture stretched over ten years (2003–2013), in which Honey Irani, together with a team of

M. Biswas (*) Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_4

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other writers, scripted three of Roshan’s most famous films, loosely known as the Krrish trilogy. Irani’s scripts have been commercially successful and have received critical recognition from the film industry. Apart from being acknowledged as one of the rare female scriptwriters in commercial Hindi films in the past three decades, she has also won three Filmfare awards for “best scriptwriter.” She is the proud parent of two very promising scriptwriters and directors of Hindi cinema in the new millennium, thus literally forging a bridge between the golden years of Hindi cinema of the 1950s and the very different global Indian cinema of the new millennium. Viewed from this perspective, Honey Irani’s life story reads like the story of a Bollywood insider. She and her older sister Daisy Irani were very popular child actors in the Hindi films of the 1950s and 1960s. She married Javed Akhtar, who has an impeccable literary pedigree and was the most sought-after screenwriter of the 1970s. Moreover, her career as a scriptwriter after her divorce began under Yashraj Films (henceforth, YRF), one of the most prestigious film production houses of Hindi cinema. Behind what seems like two successful careers, both in front of the camera and behind it, lies the grit of a talented artist whose trajectory provides a rare window into the careers of women artists as they transitioned from the pre-liberalization Indian film industry into a more global economy and culture. As a scriptwriter, in her early “Yash Chopra” phase, Irani carved a space for herself as a transition figure in the Industry which was responding to the first throes of liberalization, with a rapidly growing middle-class audience anticipating a future involving changes that for them was laced with the promise of choices, mobility, and an upgraded lifestyle. Irani’s stories that target this audience do not disrupt the status quo but register newer desires and choices for all her characters, both male and female. Their trajectories are propelled, not as much by genes or fate as by choices, introducing a kind of romantic realism consistent with the individualism that pushed the boundaries of the giant monolith that was the dominant genre of family melodrama. In her later Krrish films, she experimented with the genre of science fiction, which has had very little success in Indian cinema, by wisely creating a space for the genre within the boundaries of family melodrama, that was central to the film’s success. The genre of “family melodrama” has shown a protean ability over the years to absorb other genres—such as comedy, romance, and action within it. Irani’s films show an uncanny ability to reflect the contemporary moment by incorporating new genres such as pulp romance, science

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fiction, and superhero themes within this older genre and yet achieve recognition as representative films of specific genres. If Lamhe is identified as the definitive “romantic” film to have come out of the Yash Chopra camp, the Krrish trilogy stands as the first and sole representative of a successful Hindi superhero film in the last 15 years since Krrish 2 was released. Honey Irani was propelled to stardom by an erratic and ambitious mother, who did not want to relinquish the profitable position of being the guardian of two star-daughters, nor her privilege of “play[ing] rummy with Dilip Sahab” (Menka Khan cited in Bhattacharya 2016, p. 15). Irani, who had been thrust into the world of Hindi cinema at the age of three, did not have the time to complete a formal education beyond the fifth grade. Struggling to continue her film career past her puberty, she met Javed Akhtar in 1972 on the sets of Seeta aur Geeta (Sippy 1972) and got married at the age of 17. Akhtar went on to become one of the most celebrated and successful scriptwriters of Hindi films as part of the “Salim-­ Javed” duo churning out blockbusters such as Zanjeer/Chain (Mehra 1973), Deewar/Wall (Chopra 1975), and Sholay/Flames (Sippy 1975). But the marriage did not last long—the couple separated in 1978, and Honey Irani took charge of bringing up her children under conditions that were not without financial constraints. In her various interviews, Irani, despite her easy candor, maintains a certain guardedness which perhaps reveals the struggles she has undergone and the fine balancing act that she has had to maintain to survive in the Industry. She has been asked in several interviews about her experiences as a child star, and she exhibits fond nostalgia for those times talking about the informal work environment and the big stars sharing their “tiffins” with each other. She recalls how “[i]t was all so friendly and so beautiful,” and of being “in awe” of the famous stars like Balraj Sahni, Ashok Kumar, and Meena Kumari. Yet she also recounts crying as a three-year-­ old when she was routed to the studio gates instead of the ice-cream outing that she was often promised to persuade her to go for the shoots. Her stories invariably include her gradual reconciliation to her career because of the bond she forged with the star Meena Kumari who became a surrogate mother figure for both her and her elder sister (Chaudhuri 2019). These memories have a much darker tone when one remembers that her elder sister, the famous child star, Daisy Irani, revealed in 2018, more than 60 years after the event, that she had been raped and beaten with a belt by her guardian, “Nazar Uncle,” when she was six years old and then had to return the next day for the shoot “as if nothing had happened” (Mohamad

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2018). Sexual as well as economic exploitation of female artists was and still is common in the film industry that was formally recognized as a legitimate industry only in the late 1990s. It is salutary to remember that the film industry in the 1940s and 1950s for women was not as much a glamor business but an economic necessity and child artists as well many female artists were often coerced by their families into the profession without having much control over the money they generated. Apart from being vulnerable to such obvious exploitation, the female artist had fewer opportunities in the patriarchal, family-driven informal business model that was, and still is, largely followed by the Indian film industry. Family connections and male camaraderie opened gates for male artists and technicians that female artists did not have access to. Honey Irani often mentions her hesitation about using her husband’s connections to enter the business of scriptwriting. Even though Javed Akhtar encouraged her writing skills when he came upon some stories written by her, she entered the Chopra camp through her friendship with Pam Chopra, who was Yash Chopra’s wife. Irani’s recollections about her work with the Chopras are similarly filled with nostalgia about late-night informal sessions and group meals that they shared at the Chopra house, and she often acknowledges her gratitude to them. Her oft-repeated story of how she was in tears upon Yash Chopra’s lack of response to her elaboration of her story for Lamhe/Moments reflects the arbitrariness as well as the immediacy of the contracts she got at YRF. While this anecdote ends on a happy note for Irani with Chopra’s enthusiastic appreciation of her effort, the flip side of this story is evidenced in the breakup of her long friendship with Pam Chopra over sharing the story credits for the blockbuster Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge/The Braveheart Will Take the Bride (Aditya Chopra 1994, henceforth, DDLJ) with Aditya Chopra. The pitfalls of such emotional negotiations, especially for artists who are not in any position to assert their rights, perhaps do not outweigh the advantages that Irani so clearly highlights in her partnership with the Chopras. Nonetheless, they provide a window into the uncertainties that an artist with little negotiating power faces under such conditions. YRF has a well-established reputation for professionalism, and it distinguished itself from other productions by providing bound scripts to the stars, which was not the norm in pre-globalized Indian cinema. Amitabh Bachchan readily acknowledges that his iconic roles in the 1970s were painstakingly charted out by the Salim-Javed duo who worked closely with Yash Chopra and were known for their bound scripts: “All Salim-Javed

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scripts are so meticulously written, and all the credit goes to them, as no one had a bound script back then” (Awasthi 2017). However, female artists faced a very different reality in the Industry where films are produced and promoted primarily based on the star value of the male lead and the production houses. Juhi Chawla, who starred in Aaina/Mirror and Darr/ Fear in the 1990s, recalls her surprise when she was provided the detailed storylines of both films: “[I]t was under the banner of Yash ji and for Aaina/Mirror, that was the first time that anybody had ever…Honey ji (Irani) had called me over to her house and told me the entire story of Aaina, scene-wise” (Shetty 2017). Honey Irani deserves credit for making this professionalism available to the female stars in the Industry. The well-deserved recognition she has received for being a rare female story writer in the 1990s, and a very successful one at that, needs to be supplemented by acknowledging her contribution to creating spaces for the other female artists in the Industry. Her first directorial venture, Armaan/ Desire (2003), which is now only remembered as a box-office disappointment, was also, as noted once again by Amitabh Bachchan, one of the first films to employ a predominantly female crew—still a rarity in Indian cinema in the first decade of this millennium: “There were so many young ladies working on the sets. Just watching them work in such a professional atmosphere was a wonderful experience. Honey’s production unit is exemplary” (Jha 2003). Despite being hailed as thoroughly professional in running an efficient production unit and having written very successful screenplays, Honey Irani has not yet managed a second chance to prove her worth as a director in this competitive industry, which, ironically, is now much more open to female artists and technicians. Honey Irani’s strength lies in her ability to survive in an industry and effect subtle changes that were not immediately palpable but made a gradual mark over time. Her female characters are not all conscious feminists, and neither are her male characters particularly enlightened. However, they are often shown as changing over the course of the story, which is a remarkably different way of elaborating character in a commercial Hindi film screenplay that regularly depicted characters and relationships in broad brushstrokes, depending on immediately recognizable “type” figurations to move the story forward. Irani’s storylines subtly changed the trajectory of female representation—creating unexpected female spaces on the screen without disrupting the genre or the status quo of audience expectations. The key to Honey Irani’s success was her ability to not steer too far away from mainstream expectations.

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The Yash Chopra Phase: Romance, Realism, and Globalization Honey Irani wrote four screenplays for Yash Chopra, Lamhe/Moments, Aaina/Mirror, Darr/Fear, and Parampara/Tradition, out of which two, Aaina/Mirror and Darr/Fear, were instant hits. Parampara/Tradition was an outright flop, while Lamhe/Moments did not do very well initially but has gained recognition over the years as one of the best films to come out of the Chopra camp. Irani’s collaboration with Yash Chopra began in the early 1990s when Chopra was just recovering from a low phase of unsuccessful ventures with Chandni (1989), which had transformed Sridevi into a female superstar. Both Chopra and Irani were aware that Lamhe’s plot, about a girl who falls in love with a much older man, who was earlier in love with her deceased mother, was a new storyline and a risky one for Indian commercial cinema. With Chandni, too, Chopra had taken the risk of focusing on the female character and her romance. Still, those risks were somewhat mitigated by his inclusion of two bankable male stars and a plot closer to a conventional love triangle. In Lamhe (1991), Yash Chopra took several risks by focusing on a female-oriented, atypical romantic story, depending solely on Sridevi’s star appeal and acting prowess to carry the film through. Lamhe is the story of a young man, Viren (Anil Kapoor), who returns to India from London and falls in love with an older woman, Pallavi (Sridevi), who loves another man. She marries her lover, and they have a child. However, the couple dies in a car accident, and their child Pooja (Sridevi in a double role) is brought up by Viren’s nurse, Dhaija. Viren is Pooja’s absent guardian, and when Daija and Pooja visit London to meet Viren, Pooja falls in love with Viren. The film ends with Viren’s dilemma over whether to get over his inhibitions and his final decision to accept Pooja’s love. Yash Chopra and Honey Irani were aware of the problem the Indian audience would have with the romantic ending and the final pairing of an older Viren and a young Pooja. Still, they went ahead with it after having shot three different conclusions for the film. The film, even though it did well in some metro areas, flopped in India. However, it did very well in the overseas market, especially in the UK and the US among the diasporic audience. For the domestic audience, the film was controversial because of its supposedly “incest” theme. While the idea of the ward falling for the guardian is a staple of many English pulp romances (the story of Lamhe was also loosely inspired by Jean Webster’s 1912 American novel Daddy Long

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Legs), it was rejected by the domestic Indian audience. This much-­ discussed ending is in sync with the larger logic of the story that chooses to focus on female desire and choice. The elder Sridevi chooses to marry her boyfriend Siddhartha, and a conversation between the married couple highlights that choice as central to the equality in their relationship. It is later corroborated by her daughter when she proudly insists that Viren might be embarrassed about her infatuation with him, but her mother chose Siddhartha and not Viren as her husband. Such negotiations between the romantic couple are unusual in Hindi films where the “happy ending” often involves a reconciliation between obstructing parents or, in the case of a love triangle, a “sacrifice” by one of the lovers. While Sridevi’s stardom and the centrality of the female consciousness in the romance genre enabled Irani’s script to add nuances to Pooja’s character, giving her agency and emphasizing her vitality, the script also provides nuances to the other two females in the film—Daija and Anita. Daija, enacted by veteran actress Waheeda Rehman, is Viren’s nurse, but she is given a position of authority in Viren’s life and house that is beyond her social class. The strong bond between Daija and Viren is a nurturing one that thrives on both respect and a deep love for each other. Viren’s fiancé Anita is similarly given a dignity not usually afforded to the “other woman” in films or even pulp romantic novels. She is presented as cold and distant, but she is neither sexually provocative (a common way of identifying “vampish” behavior in Hindi films) nor does she enact the expected plot moves to jeopardize the romance between the central couple. The scenes in which she confronts Viren or Pooja are realistic and rational, emerging out of her justified outrage at how she finds her own relationship with Viren pushed to the background in the face of Pooja’s exuberance and open adoration for Viren even as the audience is impressed by Pooja’s ability to stand her ground and confidently respond to her questions. As characters, neither Pallavi nor Pooja is particularly career-oriented or feminist in any conscious way. But in their everyday dealings with other characters, such as Pallavi’s conversations with her husband or Pooja’s scenes with Daija and Anita, there is an attempt at realism which adds nuance and logic to their personalities that strikes a different tone from the stock scenes of contemporaneous dramas. Romances are certainly not uncommon in Hindi cinema in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but they were usually incorporated within the family drama as one of the elements together with comic or action sequences or were developed along the lines

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of the young couple facing parental, familial, or social opposition. Irani’s script introduces the idea of conflict as emerging from within the romantic couple itself—with the resolution requiring them to change over the development of the plot—a realist plot movement that was not common in contemporary Indian films at the time. Honey Irani was writing in the wake of the powerful parallel cinema movement that had reached its peak in the late 1970s and had provided, among others, two enormously talented parallel cinema female stars, Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil, who had portrayed complex female characters in films such as Ankur/Seedling (Benegal 1974), Bhumika/Role (Benegal 1977), and Mirch Masala/Hot Spice (Mehta 1987). Their particular brand of realism is obviously different from the realism of Irani’s scripts. Similarly, the middle-of-the-road cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee, Sai Paranjpye, and Gulzar that targeted the more urban, educated middle-class audience had also offered alternative “realistic” portraits of women in rural or urban settings in Guddi (Mukherjee 1971), Rajnigandha/Tuberose (Chatterjee 1974), Aandhi/Storm (Gulzar 1975a, b), Khushboo/Fragrance (Gulzar 1975a, b), and Katha/Story (Paranjape 1982) that was distinct from the world of commercial Hindi cinema. Big budgets, stars, diverse audiences, high failure rates, and risky financing of commercial Hindi films encouraged very little experimentation. It is within these constraints that Irani, in the early phase of her scriptwriting career, developed a particular brand of glamor, realism, and romance that she merged particularly well with the recognizable/traditional tropes of Hindi cinema. Irani’s stories do not directly upset the norms of commercial cinema, but provide space for the characters, both male and female, to articulate an emergent sensibility and individualism that was responding to a new consumerism as well as new opportunities that were particularly felt among a rapidly expanding and upwardly-mobile urban middle class. The female characters, speaking the new language of choice in Lamhe/Moments, Darr/Fear, and Aaina/Mirror, represent this particular moment in history where urban, upper-middle-class Indians had mobility and the means and leisure to indulge in newer desires in a changing India. In her 2002 book on Yash Chopra, Rachel Dwyer discusses the “diasporic hero” of Lamhe as the first of the male characters in Hindi cinema who epitomizes the “Indian” values of the hero while residing away from India. She points out how both the female protagonists still live in India, becoming the repository of the “Indian” values that the male protagonist will learn from in his journey toward becoming the ideal Indian

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representative male. While the fully diasporic male and female protagonist who carry their mobile “Indianness” found their complete realization in the lead pair of DDLJ, Irani’s Lamhe/Moments is the first sketch of such a possibility. The Indian film industry, responding to the opening of the Indian economy in the 1990s, turned its attention to the diasporic Indian audience, which was fast becoming an important constituency of Hindi film viewers for it. Honey Irani’s transatlantic romance between the British resident Viren and the Indian Pallavi and Pooja was a big overseas success where the transatlantic audience saw the beginnings of its representation in Indian cinema that it consumed avidly. Globalization had made Indian films easily accessible to them and the consumerist lifestyle and global mobility of Yash Chopra’s protagonists enabled the diasporic audience to identify with the characters. Honey Irani’s blend of western and Indian romance and the modern sensibility of her heroines without being too disruptive of Indian values are perfectly sensitive to this transitional moment in Indian cinema when the older models of romance in mainstream Indian cinema were ripe for an overhaul and was ambitiously realized in Lamhe. In contrast to the glamorous realism of Lamhe, Parampara takes place in a space unmoored by reality. It is peopled by old-world Thakurs and gypsies in a story that spans two generations. The central character of the story is the patriarchal Thakur Bhavani Singh, whose rigid adherence to tradition ruins his son’s life and nearly manages to destroy the lives of his grandsons before he realizes his mistake and gives up his life to save the next generation. The film is tedious, including too many characters and far too many formulaic dialogues. However, it becomes an interesting film if viewed as the precursor that contains the germ of the generational conflict centering on rigid patriarchal figures that were glamorously repackaged and reprised by YRF and Dharma Productions for a post-liberalization global audience in DDLJ and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham/Sometimes Love Sometimes Sadness (Johar 2001, henceforth, K3G). The generational conflict in Parampara is focused on an inflexible Thakur and his son, and later his grandsons, but it is negotiated by the family’s traditional daughter-­ in-­law, Rajeshwari (enacted by Ashwini Bhave), who manages to win her husband’s love as well as her father-in-law’s respect. It is also worth noting that in Irani’s version of the tradition versus modernity conflict, the havoc tradition wreaks on the first generation and its threat to the second generation is severe and can only be overcome by the removal of the patriarchal figure. In contrast, DDLJ and K3G are far more conservative about

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female agency and ultimately underplay the threat of tradition closely associated with the patriarchal figure, finally absorbing the patriarch back into the familial fold. Honey Irani had started writing the Aaina/Mirror script before Lamhe and it was a much bigger success at the time than Lamhe. The film’s story revolves around two sisters in love with the same man. Ravi Saxena (Jackie Shroff), a wealthy industrialist, falls in love with the glamorous sister Roma (Amrita Singh), who leaves him on their wedding day for a role in a film. The shy and retiring younger sister, Reema (Juhi Chawla), gets married to Ravi and they gradually fall in love with each other. However, Roma returns and decides that she wants Ravi back. The rest of the story is about how Reema fights back to keep her husband. The film is a wily blend of a typical Mills and Boon romance (which would be new to the domestic Indian audience) and a trusted and tried Bollywood formula in which the mangalsutra, a necklace signifying a woman’s marital status, triumphs over a variety of adversities ranging from sexually alluring ex-girlfriends and vamps to ghosts with supernatural powers that threaten marital bliss. Aaina takes very few risks, ensuring the traditional, self-sacrificing sister wins her husband’s love from the more modern, “westernized,” and selfish sister. The winner in this conflict is Reema who seemingly upholds traditional values as opposed to Roma who represents modernity as selfish, individualistic, self-obsessed, and ultimately destructive. The film holds up marriage as the end goal of the romance, delegitimizing Roma’s desire for a career as selfish. On the other hand, it glamorizes marriage by allowing Juhi Chawla to transform from an ugly duckling into a sexually alluring wife, ensuring that Chawla’s sexuality remains contained within the sartorial bounds of traditional saris, ghagra cholis, and ethnic jewelry. Despite some cringe-worthy moments in the film when Reema avows or sings about the power of the traditional mangalsutra ostensibly shunning Roma’s brand of modernity, there nestle a few quietly inserted scenes between the newly married couple in which they negotiate their sexual relationship in “non-traditional” terms. Reema decides that she wants to wait to consummate the marriage, a decision accepted by her husband. Similarly, the decision to declare her love and consummate the marriage also clearly rests with Reema. The decision to not consummate a marriage is also a common plot device in pulp romances, which invariably becomes a set-up for the couple’s anticipated sexual consummation that unfortunately often confirms male sexual dominance. However, the wife signaling

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her sexual consent without coercion is not as common in either romances or Hindi films. The “traditional” Reema gently incorporates these “modern” moves, and as she develops in the course of the film, her “selflessness” that distinguishes her personality from Roma’s is viewed as a weakness that needs to be overcome. At one point in the film, Reema blames her loving yet unassertive parents for not teaching her to assert herself. Irani intermingles many of the tropes of pulp romance and Hindi films to explore issues of sexual consent without questioning the institution of marriage. While Reema shores up the institution of marriage, negotiating for changes within it, the more confident and vocal Roma challenges it directly. Despite being selfish and the loser in the battle between the sisters, Roma is fleshed out in as much detail as Reema. Her sense of entitlement and confidence in her beauty is unattractive only when she is pitted against Reema or actively harms Reema’s cause. In her early scenes with Ravi, her wit and conversation are attractive to Ravi and the audience. Moreover, the sisters are given extensive scenes when they discuss Roma’s desire for a job in which her protest against the institution of marriage does not sound unreasonable. Her fear about being limited to being “Mrs. Ravi Saxena” or her anxiety about being rushed into marriage are articulated as legitimate concerns that Reema seems to blow off too quickly. Though the sisters have distinctly contrasting personalities, viewing Roma as Reema’s alter ego opens up interesting possibilities about interrogating the institution of marriage using the genre of romance along the lines of Jane Eyre (1947). Roma, though she comes close to threatening Reema’s life at the end with a lethal mirror shard, however, does not suffer Rochester’s wife’s violent demise. The threatened violence of this ending is unaccountably switched to a reconciliation scene with her sister. In the last scene, Roma oddly seems to take on Reema’s deglamorized personality that Reema has taken such pains to shed off in the course of the film. That said, it would be a stretch to deem Aaina’s end ironic. Aaina remains the most conservative of Irani’s storylines but contains within it ruptures as well as negotiations and conversations between tradition and modernity. The film’s simultaneous romanticization and questioning of marriage is similar to its attitude toward consumerism. The entire romance between Roma and Ravi is shown as a bidding competition over expensive items set against glitzy backdrops that feeds into the audience’s desire to view glamorous lifestyles. Though Reema gently teases her sister for her careless spending, she is in awe of Ravi Saxena and his glamorous lifestyle. Her

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post-marital glamorization is actively encouraged by her brother-in-law, who encourages her to wear jewelry and trendy saris as an assertion of her personality. While Lamhe and Aaina are identifiable as romances, Irani’s following script for YRF was Darr/Fear (1993) that introduced, as the voiceover in the film claims, the element of fear in love. Advertised by the company as “a violent love story,” it was part of an emergent group of films promoted as “thrillers” or “psychological thrillers” in the 1990s. They included hits such as Sadak (Road, Bhatt 1991), Khalnayak (Anti-hero, Ghai 1993), and Baazigar (Gambler, Abbas-Mastaan 1993), which offered more genre-focused storylines and characters to the standard, mixed fare provided in family dramas. Honey Irani’s venture into the psychological thriller genre proved to be a big boost to Shahrukh Khan’s fledgling career. Khan plays Rahul, a social misfit obsessively in love with his ex-­ college mate Kiran. Kiran is unaware of his existence and is in love with Sunil, an officer in the Indian Navy. Sunny Deol plays Sunil, the romantic lead, and his masculinity is in full focus in the opening and closing scenes of the film. However, it is the slender-framed Shahrukh Khan with his compulsive stutter and his obsessive stalking of Kiran that holds the audience’s attention. Signature lines such as “I love you K-k-k-k Kiran” and an over-the-top performance by Shahrukh Khan got him all the attention and the accolades in the film. While Shahrukh’s character is certainly the most dramatic in the film, Irani’s story individualizes both the male protagonists. Moreover, it is not just the differences between the men but also the similarities between them that make the film memorable. Viewed from Kiran’s perspective, which the audience often shares, there is a constant slippage between the men’s identities, whether in the opening song sequence of the film when it is Rahul, not Sunil who is serenading her or in the tense swimming pool sequence when she thinks Rahul is trying to drown her. Obsession becomes the harrowing flip side of romantic love which, as Rahul’s ironically popular song affirms, is not particularly interested in what Kiran wants: “Tu haan kar yaa na kar/Tu hai meri Kiran” (whether you agree or disagree, you are my Kiran). The film’s opening sequence highlights the hidden and unwanted male gaze when Kiran, taking off her rain-drenched clothes, is watched by Rahul as she dreams about Sunil’s romantic letter. Kiran’s role, which tends to get lost in discussions over which male figure stole the show in the film, is nuanced and psychologically consistent. Apart from looking pretty and being photographed against scenic backdrops as most

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of Yash Chopra’s heroines are, Juhi Chawla as Kiran undergoes a transformation from a young, carefree girl in love to a woman who nearly loses her mind as she is terrorized by the stalker who haunts her. This adds a strong dose of realism into the “romantic” ched-chaad (teasing) of the female by the male leads presented in countless Hindi films as the prelude to undying love. Despite Darr’s commercial imperatives—such as the lushly realized song sequences that romanticize Rahul’s obsession—the story attempts to highlight the trauma that the woman undergoes when she becomes the focus of the unwanted male gaze. Honey Irani’s scripts for YRF in the 1990s reflect the anxieties and desires of an affluent and mobile upper-middle class that was the first to register the impact of globalization. While Parampara deals with generational conflict in markedly different ways than the later, more conservative YRF family dramas, Irani’s romances focusing on the couples’ marital negotiations register globalization’s impact on gender relations. These affluent, mobile women might not have to contend with career anxieties or the drudgeries of housework, but as they shop in malls, dine out with their spouses, and take vacations in foreign locales, they grapple with anxieties, express their desires, and exercise choices regarding their marital partner within the slowly shifting nuclear family unit. Lamhe upholds the women’s choices regarding marital partners, Aaina provides space to the woman within the marital bond to exercise sexual choice, while Darr registers the terror the woman experiences when the right to choose her marital partner is wrested away from her and located in the man who desires her. After Irani’s collaboration with Yash Chopra broke up on account of her insistence that she get some credit for the story of DDLJ, she continued working in the Industry with movies such as Suhaag/Marriage (Kohli 1994), …Aur Pyaar Ho Gaya/And Love Happened (Rawail 1997, henceforth APHG), Jab Pyar Kisise Hota Hai/When One Falls in Love (Sareen 1998, henceforth JPKHH), Laawaaris/Unacknowledged (Sharma 1999) and Kya Kehna/Superb (Shah 2000) that involved big stars and directors. They performed fairly well at the box office, with Suhaag/Marriage and Kya Kehna/Superb being declared big hits. It is an unusual success rate in an industry that is known for its high rate of box-office failures. Apart from Suhaag and Lawaaris, which were action-melodramas, the others were mostly romances with a difference. JPKSHH, starring Salman Khan and Twinkle Khanna, is the story of a rich playboy who is confronted with an illegitimate son in the middle of the film. To portray a young and very popular Salman Khan as the father of a ten-year-old was considered a risky

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move at the time. The tone of the film changes from a light-hearted romance to a more serious drama where both Salman Khan and Twinkle Khanna are thrown off-keel with the inconvenient introduction of a young boy in their lives. Khanna’s decision to speak out strongly on behalf of her lover, at the end of the film when her family criticizes him, allows her some screen time to articulate something beyond the romantic cliches she was required to express in her usual roles—a fact she acknowledged when referring to JPKSHH as her best film “script-wise” (Lehrein Retro 2020). Irani’s ability to add a sliver of realism in mainstream cinema, in the form of real issues that her characters, especially her female characters, confront, is central to Kya Kehna (or Superb), which was a surprise hit at the time of its release. It is not a particularly slick film with innumerable awkward and melodramatic scenes, but the central plot, which concerns a young woman’s decision to bear an illegitimate child despite the humiliation she suffers within her family and her community, deserves credit for its brave script that addresses both female sexuality and choice. While parallel cinema with its limited audience could tackle such issues, even the “middle-of-the-road” cinema that tackled social issues and aspired toward a much larger audience stayed away from female sexuality. Kya Kehna/ Superb ends with the girl’s decision to choose not her repentant lover but her long-time admirer and supporter as her husband and the father of her child. It garnered Honey Irani her second-best scriptwriter Filmfare award. Honey Irani got her third best scriptwriter award for KNPH which was the biggest hit of 2000 and made Hrithik Roshan into an overnight sensation. The story, inspired by a Kannada movie, Ratha Sapthami (Sun Festival Rajashekhar 1986), was part romance and part thriller with Roshan in a double role as Rohit and Raj. Rohit is a middle-class boy in love with an heiress, Sonia. In a stunning twist in a romance, Rohit gets killed mysteriously in the first half of the film. While the audience and his girlfriend are still grappling with the shock of his death, his lookalike Raj emerges in Australia, where Sonia has been sent to come to terms with her grief. The second half of the film is about how Raj and Sonia travel to India to solve the mystery of Rohit’s death. The pace of the film, the music, and Hrithik Roshan’s screen presence and dancing skills ensured that the film was a huge hit. Irani’s story skillfully distinguishes between the two characters and ensures that the audience, like Sonia, falls in love with both Rohit and Raj.

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Directing Armaan (Desire, 2003) In an interview the screenwriter and director explained, “My script, the story, suited the medical profession the best. Besides, it has been a long time since a film was set in a hospital. You have the regular industrialists’ families and business tycoons and I didn’t want that in my film” (Honey Irani, Rediff Movies 2002, n.p.). Honey Irani’s aspirational venture into direction through the aptly titled Armaan/Desire did not fare well at the box office. Armaan/Desire was a big-budget film with names such as Amitabh Bachchan, Anil Kapoor, Preity Zinta, and Gracey Singh (fresh from her debut in Lagaan). Zinta had starred in three of the biggest grossers of that year, Kal Ho Na Ho/Tomorrow May Never Come (Advani 2003, hereafter, KHNH), Koi Mil Gaya/I Found Someone (Roshan 2003, hereafter, KMG), The Hero: Love Story of a Spy (Sharma 2003). Armaan aimed to be a different kind of generational family drama that instead of focusing on wealthy business families concerned an idealistic doctor, his adopted son, and their dream of building a hospital for the community. The son gives up his girlfriend, who works in the same hospital, and marries a rich man’s spoilt daughter in order to maintain ownership of the hospital. Irani’s attempt to give a different spin to the idea of “desire” as social commitment at a time when Indian versions of affluence and glamor were being celebrated and welcomed in the global circuit of commercial cinema was rejected by the domestic as well as the diasporic audience. Unfortunately, the aspirational aspect of the project and the praise that Irani earned for her excellent female production unit could not save Armaan from being a slow-paced film bogged down by predictable characters, situations, and over-explanatory dialogues. Honey Irani is no stranger to adaptations and has acknowledged that her story shares similarities with Dil Apna Aur Preet Parayi/My Heart Is Mine, My Love Belongs to Someone Else (Sahu 1960, hereafter, DAAPP) but does not consider it an inspiration for Armaan. However, the basic plot in the film is strikingly similar if Amitabh’s character is left out of Armaan. DAAPP is the story of a tentative attraction between a doctor (Raj Kumar) and a nurse (Meena Kumari) that is nipped in the bud when Raj Kumar is forced to marry a rich girl, Nadira, whose father had financed his medical studies. The headstrong and suspicious Nadira senses the unspoken attraction between Raj Kumar and Meena Kumari and provokes ugly confrontations that do not stem the hapless attraction between them. DAAPP, despite setting up melodramatic contrasts between a callous Nadira and a

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selfless Meena Kumari, manages to convey the complexity of the attraction between the protagonists. Armaan/Desire flounders because instead of focusing on the relationships themselves, it seeks to intensify the nobility of its principal characters and creates predictable scenes to justify their virtue. Thus, these characters remain “realistic” in terms of their dialogue and comportment but stagger under the burden of their exaggerated ideals. The learning curve, an intrinsic part of Honey Irani’s realism that rescues many of her characters, is missing in this film. That said, if Irani’s film had been a success, Amitabh Bachchan as the aging, idealistic patriarch harking back to a progressive tradition of social commitment would have provided an interesting contrast to his contemporaneous portrayal as the rigid, narrowly focused business tycoon upholding family tradition in the influential YRF release, K3G.

Krrish and the Indianization of the Superhero Genre Irani’s collaboration with Yash Chopra in the 1990s resulted in films that explored the tension between tradition and modernity as India was poised to enter a broader global stage culturally and economically. In her later collaborations with Rakesh Roshan, her scripts, in tune with an even more dispersed audience, experiment with newer, more globally recognizable genres such as thrillers, science fiction, and superhero films. She started the new millennium with the blockbuster KNPH, a romance that morphs into a thriller in the second half. The succeeding Krrish trilogy that extended over ten years from 2003 to 2013 was an even bigger success. Irani’s scripts, which in her early phase were individual efforts or written with a partner, have, with the Krrish franchise, become part of a more expanded team of scriptwriters. The Krrish project became an ambitious project as each successive film became a bigger hit than the previous one. The Krrish project has kept pace with a contemporary audience familiar with popular global genres such as science fiction and superhero films, by incorporating special-effects experts from Hong Kong and Hollywood and an international star cast, albeit a very small one, as its story moved across countries and continents. Irani’s stories accordingly function in an expanded universe and look toward an unstable future as the series has progressed over ten years, with a new breed of protagonists and

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antagonists fighting grand battles between good and evil and looking to position themselves in a mutable world. KMG, the first of the series, was released in 2003 and it puts forward an unusual premise—a mentally and physically challenged protagonist. Rohit, who is a childlike young man protected by his mother, meets and falls in love with a young, attractive woman. Like KNPH, the first half of the film is a romance, in this case, an unusual, childlike friendship filmed against the backdrop of secluded, lush mountains. The second half introduces the science fiction element in the story when an alien spaceship lands in their town and leaves an alien (Jadoo) behind, who is befriended by Rohit and his young friends. The development of the second half of the film is a combination of Daniel Keyes’ 1959 short story, “Flowers for Algernon,” which records the tragedy of the protagonist’s awareness of his waning special powers, and Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) that provides a child’s perspective on an adult world that threatens any deviation from conformity. With Jadoo’s help, Rohit overcomes his disability and gradually becomes “super” intelligent. He is able to romance Sonia and send Jadoo back but gradually loses his powers. The film’s risk-averse ending has Rohit regaining his lost capacities, but its strength is its focus on the protagonist’s vulnerability and innocence. The link between the first and the second half of the film is the similarity between Rohit and the alien, Jadoo. They are both positioned as outsiders who are threatened by the adult world. Despite the various plot holes and the technical flaws in the film, it works because like all good science fiction films it reminds us of human vulnerability and strength. In India, where films rarely ever venture into the genre of science fiction, KMG wisely remained close to its family drama roots even as it introduced aliens and spaceships amid a blend of comedy, romance, and melodrama. KMG’s remarkable success did not encourage a spate of science fiction Hindi films, but it did spawn two sequels that smoothly push the series into the franchise realm of superhero films, which is another global genre that has not had much success in India. In the first sequel, Krrish (Roshan 2006), retroactively titled Krrish 2, Rohit and Sonia die in an accident leaving behind a son, Krishna, who inherits his father’s super-intelligence and strength. His grandmother, afraid that the child will be exploited, brings him up in an even more remote place where he grows up befriending animals, unaware of his true potential. A young girl Priya notices his unusual powers and lures him into following her to Singapore, where she eventually falls in love with him. Sworn by his grandmother to not reveal

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his special powers, he eventually dons a mask and transforms into Krrish, and is able to help those in need. The twist in the second half of the film has Rohit return from a deep sleep induced by the supervillain Dr. Arya and ends with a thrilling encounter between Krrish and Dr. Arya. The next film, Krrish 3 (Roshan 2013), has the newly married couple Krrish and Priya helping out people in need under the tutelage of an aging Rohit. The supervillain, Kaal, is a handicapped telekinetic who breeds mutants called maanvars in his quest to fix his handicap. He dreams of extinguishing the earth of humans and funds his evil experiments by spreading viruses and then selling antidotes for them. Kaal sends one of the female mutants, Kaya, who is a shapeshifter, to replace a pregnant Priya in Krrish’s household and Kaya falls in love with Krrish. The twist in the film reveals Kaal to be Rohit’s son. The film ends with Rohit’s death as he revives his son Krrish enabling him to fight Kaal and Priya gives birth to a son they name Rohit. The distinct plot twists in the second half of the Krrish films might very well be a strategy favored by Rakesh Roshan, the director who is also part of the screenwriting team. However, at the core of the films is the strong nurturing bond between matriarchal characters and protagonists that have been a feature of all of Honey Irani’s scripts. In Lamhe, Daija (Waheeda Rehman) is the maternal substitute for both Viren and Pooja, and though she is socially inferior to both of them, she wields power in the household. She is an important agent in bringing about the reconciliation between tradition and modernity, providing lessons about tradition to Viren at the beginning of the film and then helping his transition toward modernity and Pooja at the end of the film. Similarly, in Parampara, Rajeshwari, despite being the very traditional daughter-in-law of the household, holds much more power over her obdurate father-in-law than his own son. She is respected by both her son and her stepson and is the voice of reason that brings an end to the bitter war between the two. In Darr, a dead mother holds sway over her psychologically disturbed son, who draws emotional support from talking to her over the phone in a terrible parody of the mother-son relationship in Hindi films. In Aaina, Reema’s parents fail her by not teaching her to stand up for her rights, but her widowed grandmother provides her emotional support and encourages her not to give in to her sister’s demands. In KNPH, in a much smaller role, Farida Jalal, who is their kind-hearted and generous landlady, strives to stand in as the mother for the orphaned brothers, Rohit and Amit.

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In the Krrish trilogy, the matriarch is a prominent figure in the first two installments of the series who, once again, provides the link between the past and the present. Rekha’s presence dominates the first two Krrish films. As Rohit’s mother in KMG, she is fiercely protective of her son and is his moral touchstone. In the second film, she is still as protective about her grandson, but in tune with the transnational roots of the superman story—this becomes a source of tension between the two as the superhero needs to grow up and shed his dependencies. In Hindi cinema, the Oedipal bond between the mother and son is hardly ever snapped. In Krrish 2, Rekha does not make this a source of conflict but gracefully enables the young superman to transition toward maturity. In Krrish 3, it is the gentle Rohit who is the guardian of the young couple. Shy and compassionate, and subsumed in the scientific experiments that he believes will benefit humanity, he is a very different image of masculinity that stands at the moral core of the Krrish trilogy. Rohit also belongs to the same breed as the guardian angel figure of the dead Amitabh Bachchan in Armaan. In keeping with the futuristic theme of the series, gender has been reimagined in the guardian figures. The conflict in these films has shifted beyond the family unit into the world where the supervillains aspire to control humanity. Humans are much more vulnerable in the Krrish universe, and Rohit’s role in the trilogy highlights that. His helplessness is underscored in all three films: in KMG, Rohit and Jadoo are outsiders, lost in a hostile world that seeks to exploit them; in the second series, Rohit is imprisoned by Dr. Arya, and remains suspended between life and death for many years; in Krrish 3, his bone marrow is siphoned off by Kaal as he lays trapped in a wheelchair. In keeping with its genre requirements and its futuristic universe, characters in Krrish are imagined differently and gender distinctions become more fluid. Symbolic representations of character and action replace the glamorous realism of Irani’s earlier scripts. Images of hybridity, spillage, doubling, and merging dominate the Krrish universe. Krrish handles this science fiction trope with ease by leaning back into its Bollywood roots where doubling is concerned—double roles are a favorite plot device of Hindi cinema and the series takes the idea of doubling to dizzying extremes. Thus, Hrithik Roshan plays both Rohit and Krishna, and Krishna is split between Krishna and Krrish in Krrish 2 and Krrish 3. Character, in the futuristic world of the Krrish trilogy, is no longer viewed simply in terms of individualized personalities. It is slippery and capable of moving between bodies or becomes symbolic and idealized. In KMG, Jadoo

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transfers his magic to Rohit’s body; in Krrish 3, Kaal emerges from Rohit’s DNA, and at the end of the film, Rohit transfers his energies into Krishna’s body. The maanvars are hybrid creatures made from animal DNA mixed with Kaal’s. Kaya, the hybrid female, is the most prominent maanvar who also slips in and out of male and female bodies at will, even as she doubles up as Priya in large sections of the film. Thus, the Krrish universe is both vastly expanded and more threatening to a vulnerable humanity, but it identifies the possibility of resistance in those vulnerable humans themselves. This homegrown philosophy of the atman (soul) as a manifestation of the paramatman (godhead) is rather conveniently merged with the superhero theme and espoused by Priya when she declares that there is a “little Krrish” in all of them, insisting that Krrish is not just a person but an idea that is latent in everybody. The forces of evil may threaten the core of superhero’s family but it manages to humanize even a maanvar like Kaya. Krrish 3 has been criticized for its tacky visuals, its obvious plagiarism of Hollywood superhero movie sequences and characters, and its blatant product placements, while its plot of supervillains releasing deadly viruses can hardly be considered original. Nonetheless, its incredible success lies in its recognition that the Indian superhero needs to balance his global identity within the frame of the family drama that does not allow him the luxury of solitary brooding. He has grandparents, parents, a wife, a child, and, as it turns out, a supervillain sibling. Krrish’s plot turns this constraint into a strength when it prioritizes the familial space within the vast canvas of science fiction and its sweeping concerns about the extinction of humanity.

Conclusion Honey Irani’s engagement with family dramas made the genre open to various other genres such as romances, thrillers, and science fiction that have a greater global currency. Her collaboration with YRF in the 1990s and her prescient conceptualization of diasporic protagonists and intergenerational conflicts between tradition and modernity are undeniably intrinsic to the company’s later blockbusters such as DDLJ and K3G (distributed by YRF). They enabled YRF to capture the imagination of its domestic and diasporic audience at the turn of the century and hence expand its global reach and influence. While these films offer much more conservative formulations of the familial space, Irani’s definitive romances

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in the 1990s opened up the marital and familial space for interrogation through her manipulation of the genre of romance. Her choice of a female crew for her sole directorial venture Armaan/Desire highlights her conscious effort to promote female participation within the industry. Her later, very successful collaboration with Rakesh Roshan in the millennium resulted in tremendously successful films such as KNPH and the Krrish trilogy. She deserves credit for popularizing the two major global genres of science fiction and superhero films that have, unaccountably, never had much success in Hindi films. She has contributed to defining the Indian superhero genre by both idealizing and feminizing the familial space that she previously interrogated in her romances. With her deep knowledge of commercial Hindi cinema and her ability to effortlessly hybridize genres, Honey Irani has undoubtedly contributed toward providing family dramas a global profile and in this era of transnational exchange, it will serve her reputation well.

References Abbas-Mustan. (1993). Baazigar. Ganesh Jain, Champak Jain. Advani, N. (2003). Kal Ho Na Ho. Dharma Productions. Awasthi, K. (2017). ‘Deewaar was the perfect script: Amitabh Bachchan on 42 years of the cult film.’ Hindustan Times. January 30. https://www.hindustantimes.com/bollywood/deewaar-­was-­the-­perfect-­script-­amitabh-­bachchan-­ on-­4 2-­y ears-­o f-­t he-­c ult-­f ilm/stor y-­x 2hy87zQ0ebVlsVMV59U2I.html. Accessed on 1 October 2021. Benegal, S. (1974). Ankur. Lalit Bijlani, Freni Variava, Blaze Film Enterprises. ———. (1977). Bhumika. Lalit M. Bijlani, Freni Variava. Bhatt, M. Sadak (1991). Mukesh Bhatt & Vishesh Films. Bhattacharya, S. (2016). ‘Honey Irani’ In: Jerry Pinto (ed) Lives of the Women, Vol III. SCMSophia Student Publication, pp.1–35. https://scmsophia.s3.eu-­west-­2. amazonaws.com/livesofwomen/Lives+of+the+Women+Volume+III.pdf. Chatterjee, B. (1974). Rajnigandha. Suresh Jindal. Chopra, A. (1995). Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Yash Raj Films. Chopra, Y. (1975). Deewar. Gulshan Rai. ———. (1976). Kabhi Kabhi. Yash Raj Films. ———. (1979). Kala Patthar. Yash Chopra. ———. (1981). Silsila. Yash Raj Films ———. (1989). Chandni. Yash Raj Films. ———. (1991). Lamhe. Yash Chopra Productions ———. (1993a). Parampara. Firoz A. Nadiadwala

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———. (1993b). Darr. Yash Chopra Productions. Chaudhuri, M. (2019). ‘Honey Irani on Spending over 60 Years In The Movies, Feeling Out of Place With the New Generation, And Her Advice To Her Kids.’ Film Companion. March 12. https://www.filmcompanion.in/interviews/ bollywood-­interview/honey-­irani-­on-­spending-­over-­60-­years-­in-­the-­movies-­ feeling-­out-­of-­place-­with-­the-­new-­generation-­and-­her-­advice-­to-­her-­kids/. Accessed on 30 October 2021. Dwyer, R. (2002). Yash Chopra: Fifty Years in Indian Cinema. Lotus Collection/ Roli Books, New Delhi. Ghai, S. (1993). Khal Nayak. Subhash Ghai. Gulzar. (1975a). Aandhi. J. Om Prakash, Gulzar. ———. (1975b). Khushboo. Prasan Kapoor, Jeetendra. Irani, H. (2003). Armaan. Dinesh Gandhi. Jha, S. (2003). ‘Armaan is a Gracious Film.’ Rediff.com. May 15. https://www. rediff.com/movies/2003/may/15armaan.html. Accessed on 31 July 2021 Johar, K. (2001). Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham. Dharma Productions Kohli, K. (1994). Suhaag. Balraj Irani. Lehrein Retro. (2020). Twinkle Khanna’s Exclusive Interview On Joru Ka Ghulam | Flashback Video. YouTube. January 11. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cmK-­lRGL-­jQ. Accessed on 3 December 2021 Mohamad, K. (2018). ‘Daisy Irani, star of iconic films like Naya Daur, Dhool ka Phool reveals she was raped when she was six-years-old.’ Mumbai Mirror. March 23. https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/mumbai/cover-­story/the-­secret-­ in-­her-­eyes/articleshow/63420165.cms. Accessed on 14 October 2021 Mehra, P. (1973). Zanjeer. Prakash Mehra Productions. Mehta, K. (1987). Mirch Masala. NFDC. Mukherjee, H. (1971). Guddi. Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Paranjpye, S. (1982). Katha. Suresh Jindal. India. Rajashekar, M.S. (1986). Ratha Sapthami. S. A. Govindaraj. Rawail, R. (1997). Aur Pyar Ho Gaya. Sohail Maklai. Rediff Movies. (2002) ‘A Woman’s Voice: Writer-director Honey Irani on what makes Armaan special.’ https://www.rediff.com/movies/2002/ oct/21honey.htm. Accessed on 4 January 2022. Roshan, R. (2000). Kaho Na… Pyar Hai. Filmkraft Productions. ———. (2003). Koi…Mil Gaya. Filmkraft Productions. ———. (2006). Krrish. Filmkraft Productions. ———. (2013). Krrish 3. Filmkraft Productions. Sahu, K. (1960). Dil Apna Aur Preet Parayi. Mahal Pictures. Sareen, D. (1993). Aaina. Pamela Chopra, Yash Chopra. ———. (1998). Jab Pyar Kisi Se Hota Hai. Tips Industries. Shah, K. (2000). Kya Kehna. Tips Music Films.

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Sharma, A. (2003). The Hero: Love Story of a Spy. Dhirajlal Shah, Hasmukh Shah, Pravin Shah. Sharma, S. (1999). Laawaris. Lawrence Manohar Pandya. Shetty, K. (2017). ‘Exclusive: Juhi Chawla on Yash Chopra – He used to say no matter what, a Heroine must always look beautiful.’ Pinkvilla. September 8. https://www.pinkvilla.com/entertainment/exclusives/exclusive-­juhi-­chawla-­ yash-­c hopra-­h e-­u sed-­s ay-­n o-­m atter-­w hat-­h eroine-­m ust-­a lways-­l ook-­ beautiful-­387979. Accessed on 2 December 2021. Sippy, R. (1972). Seeta aur Geeta. G. P. Sippy. ———. (1975). Sholay. G. P. Sippy. Spielberg, S. (1982). E.T. Universal Pictures, Amblin Pictures.

CHAPTER 5

Women (Not) Telling Women’s Stories: Tanuja Chandra’s Directorial Journey from Action-Thriller to Romance and Beyond Shreyosi Mukherjee

Steve Neale defines genre as “a multi-faceted phenomenon. Genres can be approached from the point of view of the industry and its infrastructure, from the point of view of their aesthetic traditions, from the point of view of the broader socio-cultural environment upon which they draw and into which they feed, and from the point of view audience understanding and response” (2002, p. 2). Tanuja Chandra, as a film director, uses genre as a deeply symbolic socio-cinematic and immediate response to the historic/ political times she is making films in. Film genres, in Chandra’s body of works, become both motif and (social) movement that allows her to situate her politics vis-à-vis her films. She leverages the semiotic fluidity of film genres and its relational dynamic with social and political mores to reverse and rework popular notions of patriarchy and machismo in her early

S. Mukherjee (*) Austin, TX, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_5

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directorial ventures. The action-thriller is one of the most dominant film genres of the late 1990s to narrativize the trials and triumphs of the Hindi film hero. Through repeated acts of exhibitionist male valor that included elements of feudal ownership of land and women, safeguarding the honor and sanctity of both, the hero fights all adversaries to emerge victorious. Chandra uses the mode of “classic adaptation” (Hollinger 2008) of film genre and reconfigures the action-thriller as a mode of narrativizing the valor of the female hero where the male leads are not only relegated as sidekicks, but also physically incapacitated to participate in the “action.” In her more recent works, Chandra’s use of identifiable genres is more complex and ambiguous. Her latest works Silvat (Crease; first released in 2016, subsequently in 2018) and Qarib Qarib Singlle (Almost Single 2017) lack the generic vigor of her early films. These are more personal and self-reflexive musings of Chandra as a storyteller. The creative investment is on the narrative; the intricate web of emotions that is at once personal, as it is social and political. Apart from moving away from distinguishable genres in her recent works as a filmmaker, she has also steered away from what is commonly termed as mainstream Bollywood. The focus has been on more niche, non-mainstream, multiplex, and OTT audiences. Most of the recent films that she has directed in the last three years have not had major theatrical releases. This distinct departure in the adaption and adoption of genre in the filmmaker’s directorial exercises is not just a progression of her filmmaking approach and style but is embedded within the fabric of the times she (has) made/making the films. This essay proposes to unpack this shift of genres as her simultaneous response and proactiveness as an important participant in the feminist filmmaking movement in India. Though Chandra has not provided the proverbial Bollywood blockbuster, her use of film genres and casting male and female stars (especially in her early films) make her a pioneer and key actor in the arrival and emergence of distinguishable female directors in the 1990s Hindi language cinema. More than documenting her trajectory as a film director, this chapter is invested in understanding the implicit and explicit effects of Chandra’s works in the historiography of women’s films in India. By taking the route of genre studies to examine the director’s process, the essay wants to underscore how she reconfigures traditional genres to tell stories that foreground the women and her hero-like abilities: “Since selfhoods are narratively constructed, mass circulation can allow genres’ manipulators—in this case women—to rewrite social scripts” (Harrod and Paszkiewicz

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2019, p.  5). What is crucial in this case is Chandra’s arrival during the heyday of the 1990s potboiler, when the nation was caught in a simultaneous process of national mythmaking on one side, reinforcing institutions like the joint family and elaborate Hindu arranged marriages, and a nation that was liberalizing its economy, ushering in the rise of the Indian middle-­ class and its idiosyncratic fascination of pitting the traditional and the modern. Upon her entry in the 1990s Bollywood, Chandra outrightly refuses the prototype of the “female-oriented” film or the chick flick. Her significance as a director lies in her refusal to be the tokenized woman filmmaker, who uses elaborate melodrama to talk about patriarchal injustices and oppression. Instead, Chandra wants to narrate the woman’s story using the hallmark techniques of masochistic storytelling and filmmaking. This technique of reinterpreting genres opens up her work to be read as pastiches of the contemporary Hindi cinema blockbusters and their embedded notions of masculinity, male heroism, and valor. The next section is an exploration of Chandra’s two early films Dushman (1998) and Sangharsh (1999) and the director’s breaking into the mainstream Bollywood action-thriller. The section will critically evaluate her use of film genres to concomitantly critique social structures and the production-­ consumption culture of Bollywood as a movie industry.

Situating Chandra in the 1990s Bollywood Milieu For Rick Altman, genre is a structure and the conduit through which material flows from producers to directors and the from the industry to the distributors, exhibitors, audiences and their friends. (2019, p.  15). Hindi cinema of the 1990s is embroiled in the same dichotomies as the nation. The newfound economic liberalism that replaced the existing Nehruvian socialism threw the socio-cultural mores of a “new” India in ideological disarray. While the Indian consumer markets saw the greatest influx of foreign material goods, the country’s moral fabric juggled between an attitude of protectionism toward existing moral traditions and a strong urge to move to a more westernized, modern, and flexible value system. Responding to this imminent cultural anxiety the Hindi film industry was quick to adapt to the looming duality in cultural forces by reconfiguring it as a series of binaries on the lines of tradition/modernity and family values/individualism. Commercial Hindi cinema became the site that big-budget filmmakers utilized as a “creative” space to vigorously

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practice this protectionism of traditional moral structures. While the economic affluence allowed the makers to invest in technically and cinematographically glitzier productions, the subjects and narratives became much strongly embedded in a black-and-white moral world. Caught in the crossfires of this black-and-white moral world of 1990s cinema, the questions of gender and sexuality also returned to a more conservative worldview. Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora in their discussion of the “Bollywood New Woman” who emerged in the 1990s Hindi cinema remark: “The new Indian woman has been discursivized, at once, as a marker of modernity, but also as the last vestige of India’s commitment to traditional values. She is also simultaneously the icon of a ‘new India’, as well as the addressee of new patriarchal structures, that, in keeping with liberalization’s imperatives, have tenaciously reinvented themselves” (2021, p. 1). The liberalization of the economy and free flowing of designer labels from the West definitely presented a more modernized and slicker version of the “Indian woman” in the films in terms of sartorial choices but the representation of their moral universe returned to an almost mythical quest of purity and chasteness. Tanuja Chandra’s first noteworthy work in Hindi cinema is not as a director, but as a screenplay writer for the 1997 rom-com blockbuster Dil to Pagal Hai (DTPH) (Chopra 1997). DTPH is the quintessential 1990s new-age mainstream Hindi cinema. The film has superstars Shahrukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit, and Karisma Kapoor embroiled in a love triangle. But additionally, and perhaps more importantly, it has foreign locales where song sequences are shot, smart, and branded athleisure apparel that the lead actors wear, and there is fanfare surrounding newly introduced events like Valentine’s Day. Chandra’s narrative introduces the tradition and modernity binary within the scope and structure of the romance, especially in the depictions of the two central female characters. By pitting the old world, nuanced romance between Maya (played by Dixit) and Rahul (played by Khan) against the more tempestuous and temperamental one-sided love and longing of Nisha (played by Kapoor), the film tries to introduce conflict into the moral world of the male protagonist. It is almost a foregone conclusion that the film will end with Rahul choosing the more traditional Maya over the overtly modern (in dress and demeanor) Nisha. Despite subscribing to the newly devised moral framework of the cinema of the times, Chandra introduces subtle deviations that surface upon closer analysis. By staying within the tried and tested formula of a romance,

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she introduces complexity and creative dissonance in the film by making it a love triangle with two leading women characters. The hero’s character and his fate are continually tied to the choices that the women make in the film, although the last and final choice is that of the hero. There is also another interesting and problematic layer and difference in these two portrayed relationships. While the Maya-Rahul relationship is one of heteronormative (near-platonic) love, the relationship between Rahul and Nisha is that of a man-woman friendship, with heightened sexual and emotional tension. The idea of a woman being a man’s friend introduces an emotional equality between the sexes, and was comparatively novel, even in urban India, some two decades ago. In DTPH Chandra therefore exemplifies the strategy where the: “[…] older schematizations of womanhood are reconfigured, the new intensifications and compulsions they produce, and the fates they conjure yet another iteration of Indian womanhood” (Anwer & Arora 2021, p. 11). The next section offers a close reading of Chandra’s two early films as a director and how she simultaneously adheres, molds, and breaks rules of popular Indian cinema to carve a niche that is neither mainstream nor indie. Chandra is remarkable as a director in the not-very long list of Indian women directors because of two primary reasons: first, because the moment in history when she forays into mainstream Bollywood cinema as a director is also a time of a new wave of chauvinism and patriarchal stronghold taking over the Hindi movie-making business. Second, right from the outset she betrays any expectations about the stories she wants to tell, and they are neither novel nor pathbreaking, but seeing these themes of violence, action, and heroism from a fresh lens of a woman is refreshing. Chandra’s freshness and directorial prowess also come from how she foregrounds a heroism that is atypical—that is feminine, and at once embedded in vulnerability as much as it is mixed with heavy doses of melodrama. The crucial evaluation that the next section will conduct is how effective she is in pushing envelope of new this new heroism.

Chandra’s “Heroes”: Re-enacting and Reconfiguring the Hero It has been noticed that “[u]nlike femininity, which is construed as natural, masculinity is seen as the proud product of a prolonged struggle. Conversely, while real men keep working on their manhood, losers are

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losers not because they experience an effeminate, powerless state, but because they remain stuck in it” (Kord & Krimmer 2011, p. 5). In her initial directorial ventures Tanuja Chandra was intentionally trying to break down and almost viscerally replace this prolonged masculine struggle with a female one. By using identical tropes of the 1990s Hindi cinema’s masculine hero and the familiar genre of action-thriller where the protagonist is locked in a fierce conflict of good versus evil, she artfully constructs her female hero. To understand the efficacy of Chandra’s use or rather nuanced reconstruction of film genres, it is important to unpack the dense weight of glorified machismo and patriarchal overtures of the 1990s commercial Hindi language films. While attempting an analogy of the complex terrain of the 1990s Hindi language cinematic landscape, Anustup Basu, refers to it as an “assemblage,” which he further describes as “an adroit mixture of home-grown and foreign generic prototypes: the action-adventure, the mythological, the spaghetti western, and the family melodrama” (2012, p.  4). Interestingly, Chandra’s films simultaneously meet and break these generic prototypes. The assemblages that Basu describes are further fragmented and problematized in her films. Chandra adds layers of complexity in the narrative and her genre of choice. This allows her to make the films fall within the larger popular and identifiable genres at play in erstwhile Bollywood, but the complexity also allows Chandra’s films to bypass any easy genre classification. There is a certain in-betweenness of generic formulations that she uses to make her films receive wider legitimacy as mainstream and popular for audiences, yet (partially) steer away from its associated patriarchal value system. In the first phase of her career as a mainstream Hindi film director, Chandra is intentional about the cinema she wants to engage with and make. She makes it amply clear that she is not interested in being tokenized as an art-house, critically acclaimed, festival-going woman filmmaker who wants to engage with the feminine in an esoteric way. Her narratives in this phase are gritty, men-like, strong and do not cringe away from violence. Reading and analyzing the films of this phase of her career through the route of genre allows a close and critical examination of how her strategies are new and robust, but not at the same time creating enough dissonance to shatter the glass ceiling. The way Chandra uses genres makes them fresh formulations of existing ones but not individual or persuasive enough to make them strong statements of upsetting the gendered status quo of the 1990s movie-making business.

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Chandra tries to pick carefully and prudently in a generic buffet that is at disposal to maintain the precarious balance between familiarity and creating a buzz as an incoming woman director. This approach to genre selection “[…] demands a rethinking of the stereotypes of Bollywood genericity, challenging a myth associating Indian cinema exclusively with mythological, historical, social and musical genres. But rather than reinventing any specific formats, these filmmakers have expanded the repertoire of Bollywood by recombining and restoring to prominence the genres already present in early era B and C circuit films, namely, stunt-led action films, fantasies and thrillers” (Harrod and Paszkiewicz 2019, p. 17). She understands and acknowledges the immediacy that a familiar genre can create in the process of garnering business as a film. The other strategy that Chandra adapts is leveraging the financial and pop-culture power of the Hindi film superstar. Both her early films have proverbial superstars, but they are not cast in their proverbial larger-than-life superstar roles. She seems to be constantly calibrating the risks and detours that she is willing and allowed to take as a newcomer director and they are intricately tied to the business of filmmaking and the determination of success at the box office. Tanuja Chandra’s first film Dushman has Kajol in a double role, alongside Sanjay Dutt in the lead. The director mainly situates this rape-revenge film within the generic structure of an action-thriller. Kajol plays the role of twin sisters Sonia and Naina, in which the former is brutally raped and murdered by Gokul Pandit (played by Ashutosh Rana). The demure Naina is out to avenge the death of the extroverted Naina with the help of a visually challenged retired army officer Suraj Singh Rathod (played by Dutt). The film charts the trials and tribulations of Naina as she seeks revenge for her sister; including a situation when she herself comes close to being Gokul’s next victim. The rape-revenge film, the prototype against which Dushman can be read had become a popular genre in the late 1980s. Alexander Heller-­ Nicholas who studies the rape-revenge film in Indian cinema observes: “The representation of women as a ‘social issue’ to be ‘solved’ can be traced back to the early days of Indian popular cinema, and in the 1980s in particular the figure of the tragic/romantic began to be visibly overtaken by the popularity of a female equivalent of the angry male ‘anti-­ hero’—these women are provoked (often by rape) to take violent action” (2021, p. 129). But in Chandra’s film though Naina’s actions/reactions are “provoked by rape,” the motivation does not arise from victimhood,

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but from a silent and resolved heroism. True, the heroism needs the crutches of melodrama and male assistance, but it is a form of heroism so far unseen in popular Hindi cinema. The hero, the male lead is incapacitated and pushed to the periphery, both physically and at the level of the narrative for most of the film. Where the newness however ends is the clear good/bad, black/white binaries in the moral landscape of Chandra’s film. There is little emotional or psychological complexity introduced in this area. In her next film Sangharsh, Chandra explores the genre of the action-­ thriller further and tries to introduce some degree of moral complexity by investing more in the backstory and a consolidated character arc of the female lead. Sangharsh is a potboiler psychological thriller with Preity Zinta and Akshay Kumar in the main roles. Reet (played by Zinta) is a young investigative officer with the baggage of childhood trauma. Reet is put in charge of investigating a series of child abductions and murders. The prime suspect is psychic and religious fanatic Lajja Shankar Pandey (played by Ashutosh Rana). Pandey’s character is seeking immortality by sacrificing children and his gender identity verges on the uncertain and ambiguous during key climactic scenes of the film as he cross-dresses as a trans-woman. Reet, is troubled both by the patriarchal overbearingness of the institution that she is part of and the traumas of her past. She seeks refuge and remedy in the (wrongfully) incarcerated Professor Aman Verma (played by Kumar). Verma heals Reet and re-instills confidence though he is missing in actual action during a significant duration of the film. In the climax, however, Verma is instrumental in bringing the villain (Pandey) to justice despite himself succumbing to death in the process. Like Dushman, in Sangharsh too Chandra introduces vulnerability, fear, doubt, and inhibition in the female character that they eventually have to overcome to become heroes. In both films, the male leads are facilitators of emotional healing and confidence building of the female hero. They abstain from direct action, to make way for the woman to confront the adversary. This is particularly remarkable in the case of Sangharsh, where the male lead, Akshay Kumar was one of the foremost action superstars of the nation. Chandra positions the male hero as an ally who makes way for the woman to take on violent criminals to cleanse the personal and private spaces. Neha Singh in her evaluation of both films comment on the “[…] intense sexual violence against woman by serial killers, they provide rather simplified views of the psychological motives behind these crimes, and the focus is on the perspective of the victim/investigator […] Sangharsh

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pushed the boundaries of psychological analysis in mainstream cinema but stayed faithful to the good hero/bad criminal divide” (2021, p. 159). While I concur with Singh’s critique of Chandra’s early works as perpetuating the stereotypes and binaries, at the same time I think it is an intentional directorial choice she makes to garner relevance and audience in mainstream Bollywood. The nuances that she introduces to the overarching genres and the conscious undercutting of the male heroes’ physical abilities are noteworthy. Chandra introduces commercial aspirations in her approach to filmmaking that is more commonly referred to as “counter-­cinema” (Kuhn 1990, p. 253) in feminist film theory. Dushman and Sangharsh are produced by a commercial production house (Vishesh Films) and received large theatrical releases owing to the utilization of star power. Chandra’s arrival in commercial Bollywood threw into relief the absence of women directors in these big-banner Bollywood projects that are marketed to mass audiences. Her works can be interpreted as “[…] provocative act of recuperation, reinscribing women within genre histories from which they have been typically excluded” (Harrod & Paszkiewicz 2019, p. 19). The conscious decision to use the vocabulary of popular cinema to create an active dialogue on female selfhood and its (violent) negotiations within an unfriendly socio-cultural landscape is perhaps the defining highlight of Chandra’s first two films. Chandra’s own personality as a soft-­ spoken but firm woman in the social arena further contributes to the persona of these films, where the quiet resolve of her female characters is the highest form of heroism and courage. Unlike the “complex redefinitions of gender roles …[that] valorizes the inscription of active female subjectivity and desire in culture, and arguably finds a place for precisely the kind of ‘in-your-face’ qualities that typify mainstream genre, in lieu of the values of demureness and passivity associated with more traditional versions of normative femininity” (Harrod and Paszkiewicz 2019, p. 23). And, this is precisely from where most of the criticism of Chandra’s early work has emerged that they are not conceived as buzzworthy rule breakers. The moral universe is still largely sanitized, and any perceivable threat of violence and non-normativity are clinically removed through violence. But I would argue and reiterate that Chandra is merely using the widely circulated vocabulary of popular filmmaking to address the lack of other vehicles of storytelling. Her works point to various kinds of absences for the female filmmaker who is consolidating efforts to make an economically viable film.

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In her 2018 monograph, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz takes a close look at Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 Oscar win for The Hurt Locker (2008) and the “uneasiness” that feminist film criticism has associated with Bigelow’s oeuvre as Hollywood director. Paszkiewicz is of the opinion that this unease and uncertainty about Bigelow’s feminist affiliations primarily originates, “[…] because of the ‘male’ genres she chooses to engage with her filmmaking, for some scholars, this choice confirms her transgressive credentials, while others see it as solid evidence of sexism throughout the industry, which unfairly elevates Bigelow over other women filmmakers who engage in genres culturally codified as female” (2018, p. 3). Though not identical, much of the criticism surrounding Chandra’s two initial works as a director are pivoted on the inability of the critics to pin her down to a gender-identifiable genre. Like Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Chandra’s Dushman and Sangharsh were viewed as betrayals of the women’s cause, not because of the stories they were telling but their generic modus operandi. Chandra was not viewed as transgressive enough because she refused the neat gender-to-genre identifications and instead chose to disrupt the water-tight segregations of genre. The next section of the essay investigates the motivations behind the sharp departure in Chandra’s filmmaking process and choices, with reference to two films: Qarib Qarib Singlle and Silvat. This second phase in her career is also marked by some sweeping changes in the overall approaches to filmmaking, content, and genres, and the emergence of many more women directors who make movies for popular cinema audiences. Chandra completely overhauls her narrative structure and storytelling techniques and reinforces a greater focus on the inner and private lives of people in general and women in particular. This in a way gives her legitimacy as a woman director, because she is finally conforming to genre conventions and expectations of the commercial Hindi cinema marketplace. Chandra’s films in the phase engage with marginalized and disenfranchised voices and their struggles to be heard by the mainstream. It is almost a creative compromise that she makes to authenticate her identity as a “woman filmmaker.”

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A Case of Genre Agnosticism: Analyzing Chandra’s Later Films Between 1999 and 2016 Chandra directed several mainstream and indie projects in Hindi and English languages, but none had the impact of her earlier films. The director had almost made a conscious choice to move away from codified male genres to experiment with more complex reworkings of melodrama that deal with ideas of selfhood and identity in films like Yeh Zindagi ka Safar (2001) and Sur—The Melody of Life (2002). In the above-mentioned films Chandra seemed to be unsure as to how her oeuvre was to develop and persist. In the early 2000s, the country was in the throes of a sudden and intense “globalization” with the increasing incursion of the internet and digital technologies in day-to-day middle-­ class, urban lives. If the 1990s were the advent of economic liberalization, the early 2000s was a period of grappling with economic affluence, rise of a remittance culture through the IT boom that saw the influx of foreign wealth at a micro-economic level in modest Indian homes. In the essay, “Metafiguring Bollywood: Brecht After Om Shanti Om” (2013), Bhaskar Sarkar describes this globalization as a period of intense reflexivity. The “industrial reflexivity” at once allowed Bollywood to more to a corporatized economy of global studios like Disney and UTV and at the same time created unchartered spaces for explorations of marginal identities in smaller budget films targeted at urban, multiplex audiences: “This multi-faceted reflexivity, that is rendering the media world as genre unto itself, is linked to several other emergences, including a yuppie class with substantial disposable income and access to consumer credit, and with greater mobility than ever before, obsessing over its identity; an increasingly tolerant disposition toward marginalized social groups and non-conformist lifestyles; […] a bullish unapologetic urbanism ready to move on with scant regard for the rural hinterland […]” (2013, p. 208). Chandra’s films in the early 2000s do not map quite neatly into this kind of reflexivity. Though choosing an unabashed urbanism in her locales in films like Zindaggi Rocks (2006), Chandra’s generic affinities are still tangled in a slightly dated exploration of violent secrets, crimes with a newfound interest in exploring the inner worlds of women, their emotional turbulences as they navigate an increasingly unfamiliar and unfriendly globalized world order. But as a director she seems maladjusted in this new Bollywood economy, her unique stance in the 1990s where Chandra reinvents and

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bends genres, the private and the public, all seem too familiar and a tad boring. It wasn’t until her short film with the then upcoming star Kartik Aryan, Silvat, that her name began to circulate back in the popular media. With Silvat, Chandra is recalibrating her strategies as a director and in a way tracing a few steps back to forge a feminist filmmaker identity that she had earlier willfully obstructed and refused to accept. Silvat narrates the story of a young Muslim woman, Noor (played by Meher Mistry) who has been left behind in 1990s Mumbai by her husband to pursue financial success in the Middle East. Noor is lonely and seeks emotional refuge in the neighborhood tailor, Anwar (played Aryan). Silvat which can literally translate as a “crease” explores the creases of pain, emotional and sexual longing of a woman who is grappling with intense loneliness. The monotony and loneliness of her world is broken with the interruptions of Anwar, who stalks Noor as she walks through the night bazar or visits the local dargah. Discursivizing and narrativizing the loneliness of women has been a favorite subject of female filmmakers: “Even women who are among people may be lonely, and it is this existential loneliness, persisting in the intimate corners deep below the façade, that female film-makers have done so much to explore” (Iordanova 2003, p. 134). In Chandra’s Silvat the emotional loneliness is intensified by the youth and sexual loneliness of the female protagonist. The motif of Noor’s moral conflict between remaining faithful to the absent husband and choosing comfort and happiness in the company of Anwar becomes her obsessive act of removing creases from her bedspread—one where she sleeps, sits, and drinks tea with Anwar and bitterly deliberates on her loneliness every night. There is no clear identifiable genre in Silvat, it is as much noir, as it is melodrama, as it is introspective storytelling. What comes across clear is Chandra’s effort in establishing herself as a serious filmmaker. In terms of budget and production values, Silvat pans out more like an art-­ house/parallel cinema contrary to her earlier big-budget commercial ventures. Though one can argue that Chandra still believes in the star value of lead male actors like Kartik Aryan, it is important to point out Aryan acted in this project when he was not a well-known Bollywood name. In fact, it is only after the OTT release of the film in 2018 that audiences and critics took note of the film and appraised it. I would argue in Silvat, Chandra shifts significantly from all her previous works. Chandra is decidedly more political in her films, as she is in bringing to the fore the disenfranchised, forgotten, and marginalized

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identities. In Silvat she tries to address the issue of the absence of Muslim women in the explorations of the new womanhood that circulates in popular Bollywood. The exclusion of the Muslim womanhood, as Anwer and Arora argue, is not “attributed to straightforward continuation of past elisions, it is neither innocuous nor incidental” (2021, p. 17). Chandra’s choice of adopting a deeply political undertone is a response to an Indian political climate that is increasingly tilting toward the right-wing with a renewed sense of discrimination along religious lines. Though one might question Chandra’s authenticity and commitment to this politics as she does not show any long-term investment on the theme, and in the very next film she completely transforms as a director and explores the urban genre of rom-com. Qarib Qarib Singlle (QQS) is Chandra’s first venture into the genre of romantic comedy. Though there are several nuanced alterations that she introduces to the narrative structure of the romantic comedy in QQS, it still has identifiable markers of the genre. QQS is Chandra’s last major film to receive a theatrical release starring Irrfan and Malayalam actress Parvathy Thiruvothu. QQS is the director’s most direct engagement with a codified female genre, but one that she gradually reshapes to best meet her thematic needs. Yes, romance is the prime motivation of the two lead characters, it is a heteronormative romance. But Chandra confronts the issue of age, widowhood, regionalism, and many other small thematic interventions within the fabric of the rom-com. The gendering of the romantic comedy is steeped in the ideological presumption and preconditioning that they are intellectually shallow, there is no serious moral strife that the characters must overcome to reach a pleasant denouement: “First, its audience is enduringly presumed to be predominantly female and ‘chick flicks’ in all their incarnations are frequently critically constructed as inherently trite or lightweight. Second, romantic fiction generally thought to be essentially calculating in its execution; cynically manipulating an emotional and sentimental response from the viewer […]” (Jermyn & Abbott 2009, p. 2). In QQS, Chandra uses the romantic comedy to critique and question the social norms of romance and heteronormative love. The characters are not the typical college-going young adults in a tempestuous romance portrayed by glamorous Bollywood stars. The casting of Irrfan and Parvathy in the leading roles endows the film with a cinematic weight that is not usually associated with romantic comedies. Irrfan’s status as a transnational star who is

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“serious actor” and Parvathy’s outspoken feminist identity as an actor allows Chandra to probe beyond the superficial in this genre. Jaya (Parvathy) is a widow who actively seeks romantic love on a dating site. She is urban, independent, and working, who meets Yogi (played by Irrfan) on an online dating site. Yogi is middle-aged, wealthy, and perhaps without a vocation. They embark on a journey of meeting Yogi’s three love interests in the past. Each journey is marked by some kind of disaster orchestrated by Yogi’s bumbling manners and follies. But the journey(s) becomes one of self-discovery for Jaya where she realizes her self-worth and the fact that she is caught in the past of her marital relationship that is long over. Yogi is instrumental in this self-discovery, and like Chandra’s other films, the woman is still the active agent of her fate and choices. What is refreshing in the director’s take on the romantic comedy is that the narrative never once dwells on the age of the characters or Jaya’s widowhood. By refusing to pay creative attention to these Chandra is breaking down and renegotiating the taboo that widowed women are not allowed the license of romantic and sexual love. Paszkiewicz has commented on how “the gendering of genres is an ideologically loaded issue […] the divisions are never neutral, as they are embedded within a much longer history of taste formation, in which hierarchies of values are constructed along the lines of gender (as well as other power relations, such as those associated with sexuality, age, race and class)” (2018, p. 24). The strict codification of genre has enabled patriarchal structures to dominate in film and literary theory criticism, relegating works of women as secondary or of inferior quality. By attaching the visible weight of the public personalities and celebrities like Irrfan and Parvathy, Chandra reinforces the cinematic and social depth of QQS. And by restructuring the thematic priorities and focus of the genre of the romantic comedy she introduces an emotional heft that rescues it from generic frivolities. Both Silvat and QQS mark Chandra’s journey toward a personal that she had not explored before in her films. This personal is earmarked by the collusion of the social and the political and the choices one must make as a woman and as a filmmaker. The films hint at a maturing, but not mellowing of Chandra’s intent to make films. The move from a genre strictness to a more versatile approach to genre can be read either as creative compromise or as a timely evolution to remain relevant to audiences. But there is little doubt that the audiences of Chandra’s films have definitely changed from those of her initial films. They are the new, young, urban audiences

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who understand and appreciate the nuances that she brings to her fictional worlds and the new emotional depth of the characters that she is keen to explore.

Conclusion In the latest phase of her career Chandra is increasingly moving to a self-­ reflexive approach to filmmaking where she is showing awareness of a changing socio-political climate in the nation. Chandra is also more aware of the dominant political ideologies of the time though her engagement with these ideologies is not consistent. She is attempting to be socially relevant, though she is not yet committed to being the feminist filmmaker. Her interest still seems to be in the agency to make films and be able to circulate them in the globalized Bollywood marketplace. Unlike Silvat, QQS is economically viable and critically sound not as romantic comedy but as a parody of the popular genre: “The potential for humor, parody and irony is already embedded in the very genericity of language as cultural sources of social reinvention and aesthetic reflexivity” (Harrod and Paszkiewicz 2019, p. 3). Chandra’s last project is a documentary titled Aunty Sudha and Aunty Radha (ASAR) (2019), where she returns to her provincial paternal village to document the merry lives of her 86-year-old and 93-year-old aunts. In ASAR she moves closest to the spaces of the personal and the self-­ reflexive as she chats with her spirited, aged aunts about life, happiness, losses, and sisterhood. ASAR is a showcase of a further progression of Chandra’s evolution as a filmmaker. In recent years she has also started extensively writing fiction and newspaper columns. There is concerted effort in evolving as a cultural celebrity with an acute awareness of a changing socio-political climate of the nation. Chandra’s personal social media handles also highlight this urgency to address the polarization and radicalization of the nation by the hardliners. Throughout her career, Chandra has shown an eagerness to interact and interpret genres to create narratives that are distinct from her male counterparts. The economy of filmmaking is still not equitable for women directors, and it is Chandra’s persistence in this inequitable landscape to make films and give voice to women and other marginal identities in her work that makes her a significant contributor in the film history of contemporary India. Her graduation and relegation to the indie and art house spaces is emblematic of the financial struggle and challenges even

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established women directors face to make films and reach their audiences. Chandra is deeply aware of not only being the pioneer, but also the privilege of her situation, where she can make movies, while also being vocal about the lack of more directors like her in popular Hindi language cinema. As she herself points out: “At least half of our directors need to be female, otherwise you can’t call this an equal playing field. When I started out, there were four five female directors and now the number is in double digits, but it needs to be more” (The Telegraph 2017, p. 5).

References Altman, R. (2019). Film/Genre. Bloomsbury, London. Anwer, M. & Arora, A. (2021). Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation and Contested Bodies. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick. Basu, A. (2012). Bollywood in the Age of New Media. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Bigelow, K. (2008). The Hurt Locker. Voltage Pictures. Chandra, T. (1998). Dushman. Vishesh Films. ———. (1999). Sangharsh. Vishesh Films. ———. (2001). Yeh Zindagi ka Safar. Vishesh Films. ———. (2002). Sur – The Melody of Life. Pritish Nandy Communications. ———. (2006). Zindaggi Rocks. Anuradha Prasad. ———. (2016). Silvat. Zee5. ———. (2017). Qarib Qarib Singlle. Zee Studios & Jar Pictures. ———. (2019). Aunty Sudha Aunty Radha. Anupama Mandloi. Chopra, Y. (1997). Dil to Pagal Hai. Yash Raj Films. Harrod, M. & Paskiewicz, K. (2019). Women Do Genre in Film and Television. Routledge, London. Heller-Nicholas, A. (2021). Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study. McFarland & Company Inc., Jefferson. Hollinger, K. (2008). ‘Afterword: Once I got passed the name chick flick’. In: Ferriss, S., Young, M. (eds.). Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies. Routledge, Oxon, pp. 221–236. Interview with Tanuja Chandra. (2017). The Telegraph, T2, Screen. November 1. Kolkata, p. 5. Iordanova, D. (2003). Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. Wallflower, London and New York. Jermyn, D. & Abbott, S. (2009). Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema. Bloomsbury Academic, London. Kord, S., & Krimmer, E. (2011). Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities: Gender, Genre, and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

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Kuhn, A. (1990). ‘Textual Politics’. In P.  Erens (ed). Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, pp. 250–261. Neale, S. (2002). Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. Bloomsbury, London. Paszkiewicz, K. (2018). Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Sarkar, B. (2013). ‘Metafiguring Bollywood: Brecht after Om Shanti Om’. In: Sen, M., Basu, A. (eds). Figurations in Indian Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Edinburgh, pp. 205–235. Singh, N. (2021). ‘The Popular “Dexter”: Its Heirs and Impact on Indian Media’. In: Srivastava, P.K., Singh, M. (eds). Indian Popular Fiction: New Genres, Novel Spaces. Routledge, Oxon, pp. 152–179.

CHAPTER 6

Reema Kagti and the Ethics of Surprise Ulka Anjaria

The first noticeable thing about Reema Kagti’s relatively small oeuvre is its eclecticism; it is something she is asked about in almost every media interview. She has directed three films that not only cover a range of genres, but seem to have little in common, aesthetically, stylistically, or thematically. She defends her eclecticism in her responses to critics’ questions by refusing to be put into a box: There are people who keep doing the same genres but I am not like that. I don’t know what idea is going to grab me. Wherever the idea leads me, I go with that. Good, bad, or ugly, Gold is me. I’d write a Dil Dhadakne Do, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Gully Boy. I am all of these things. They are completely different films. I jump genres, concepts and ideas. (Singh 2018, n.p.)

Statements such as these are important correctives to auteur-based studies of cinema that overemphasize a director’s essential vision over what might be better seen as multiple and wide-ranging experiments with form,

U. Anjaria (*) Brandeis University, Waltham/Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_6

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medium, and story. But Kagti’s seeming desire to surprise has an even more specific significance in the study of twenty-first-century Hindi popular cinema, plagued as that field is with commentaries on its one-way “gentrification” (Ganti 2012), “globalization” (Khdair 2013, p.  180), and/or decline. Scholars and reviewers tend to note that Bollywood has transitioned from a cinema for the masses to a cinema for the middle class, that the stories, along with the cinema halls, have become gentrified, and that films are increasingly embracing more Hollywood-like features such as shorter running times, more realistic plots, fewer (or no) song-and-­dance sequences, and so on. These are then further used to generalize a story about the popular cinema’s decline that mirrors the unfurling of neoliberalism in India. Reema Kagti’s case suggests otherwise; rather than a linear trajectory from popular and mass-oriented to gentrified and bourgeois, Kagti’s eclectic oeuvre suggests something more experimental and openended that is happening in contemporary Hindi cinema. Attention to open-endedness becomes particularly important when considering women filmmakers; since the presence of women in the highest echelons of Bollywood creativity is relatively recent (Kripalani 2014, p. 216), linking that rise with a unidirectional narrative of gentrification makes women at best unwilling participants in a narrative initiated by others. This robs contemporary women filmmakers of the ability to shape the present and future of Bollywood cinema. In this chapter I focus on Kagti’s eclecticism and her surprising trajectory from hatke to mainstream filmmaking, to show how female directors are actively charting out new courses for the future of the popular cinema in ways that might well elude critics’ predictions.

The Ethics of Surprise Reema Kagti began her career as assistant director on Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan (2001) and then on Farhan Akhtar’s Lakshya (2004). Her directorial debut was the offbeat film Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd (2007) and she has since directed two more features, Talaash (2012) and Gold (2018). Meanwhile, she has co-authored several successful screenplays, including Bombay Talkies (2013), Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), and Made in Heaven (2019), in addition to Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) and Gully Boy (2019) with Zoya Akhtar. Her offbeat vision is apparent in many of these films, which fuse traditional Bollywood characters, aesthetics, and style with contemporary stories. However, many of these films also gained mass appeal and performed well at the box

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office. Her work on Made in Heaven, an Amazon original series, also suggests a transmedium aesthetic. Her creativity is thus emblematic for this transitional moment in Bollywood history. Kagti’s partnership with Zoya Akhtar has been particularly fruitful, and the two credit their success to the fact that they bring different backgrounds and life experiences to a similar worldview. Kagti grew up in Assam, a state marginal to the film world and, in many ways, to India itself, whereas Akhtar, the daughter of Javed Akhtar and Honey Irani, was raised right in the center of Bollywood (Sharma 2019, n.p.). This diversity of background allows them to reach a range of audiences and collaborate outside both of their immediate comfort zones. Thus, surprise functions in multiple ways in Kagti’s work. In her first two films, elements of the supernatural appear in otherwise quite realistic stories and plots. Especially in her first film, the supernatural has no allegorical or psychological explanation and thus refuses, like many Bollywood films before it, some of the rigid distinctions between reason and the spiritual that lie at the heart of modernity. In the second film, we have a plot twist and an “‘ambush’ endings [sic] that takes the viewer completely by surprise” (Khdair 2013, p. 182). But surprise is also a term that characterizes Kagti’s oeuvre as a whole, which refuses to be plotted along a linear or deterministic arc, whether as an independent filmmaker, a millennial filmmaker, or a woman. I suggest that there is an ethics to this element of surprise—an ethics that comes from refusing comfortable, dominant, or already legible political positions and instead charting one’s own course, building one’s own artistic and political vocabulary from the ground up, as it were. Seeing Kagti’s work in this light allows for a broader and more open-ended vision of both artistic and political futures in India.

Hatke Beginnings Kagti’s directorial debut was Honeymoon Travels, Pvt. Ltd in 2007. The film is set on a bus on which six couples are traveling to Goa on their honeymoons. Some of the action takes place on the bus itself and some in Goa when they arrive. In this multi-couple story (Gopal 2011, p. 127) with an ensemble cast instead of a sole male or female superstar, the film democratically shows different kinds of love with all their imperfections and foibles. While the film can clearly be characterized as hatke, Kagti utilizes several Bollywood conventions to link this film to that longer tradition

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rather than insistently assert its originality or difference. As we will see, this affection for Bollywood anticipates the direction her oeuvre later takes. From the beginning, it is clear that Honeymoon Travels is a hatke film, defined by Rachel Dwyer as being more realistic, “more focused,” and targeted to small middle-class audiences in Indian cities, among other characteristics (Dwyer 2011, p. 198). The story begins in medias res rather than having an epic feel. It was made on the modest budget of ₹9 crore. It is mostly more realistic in its depiction of love than standard Bollywood films; each couple is unique, including Bunty who comes out as gay, Oscar and Naheed, an older interfaith couple who married later in life, and Hitesh and Shilpa who have a terrible relationship that abruptly ends when Shilpa runs away with her lover Jignesh, leading Hitesh to abandon the honeymoon trip. The fact that Hitesh and Shilpa separate and never reunite is the film’s attempt to show that every love story need not have a happy ending. Vicky is another unique character for popular Hindi cinema, as he finds himself attracted to Bunty and at first thinks that means he’s gay, but he is also attracted to his wife, and thus although it is not named, ends up being presented as bisexual. In addition to these progressive themes, the film is dialogue-heavy rather than plot-driven, the settings are realistic, and physical intimacy is displayed. The songs serve more as background, as in other hatke films, and are not lip-synched as in traditional Bollywood. Nevertheless, there are a few features of Honeymoon Travels that invoke a mainstream Bollywood style; it is not interested in breaking all ties to that genre. For one, in introducing families from different parts of India, the bus replicates the nation in its diversity, something that—as we’ll see below—perhaps anticipates Kagti’s most recent film Gold. Deftly navigating the border between representing difference and simply stereotyping, Kagti invests particular energy into the various accents and sounds of India’s bhashas, which adds a deeper texture to the film’s representation of Indian diversity. For instance, Naheed teaches her husband Oscar how to pronounce Urdu words which he butchers with his Goan accent; she insists that he pronounce “Ghalib” with the guttural “gh” sound rather than the hard “g” incorrectly used by many Hindi speakers. The film also affectionately pokes fun at Pinky’s Punjabified English, in phrases such as “Kitne so very cute hain, na?” and “Kitne made for each other hain, na?” The film also invokes mainstream Bollywood through its generous use of intertextuality and cinephilia, which is so common a mode in Bollywood films that it might be considered a generic quality (Anjaria 2021, p. 117).

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We see this in the various faux-flashbacks that Kagti uses to relate some of the characters’ pasts, and there are numerous references to old Bollywood love songs. There is a contrast between those idealized representations of love and the more realistic negotiations around relationships that take place in this film, but I read this less as a critique of Bollywood than as a registering of how it creates both expectations and also a dominant aesthetic for representing love in contemporary India. Pinky is particularly prone to cinephilia, in her over-the-top dreams shot in Bollywood style. In one scene she tells her husband Vicky to “Salman jaise pose karo na, thik hai Hrithik ki tarah [pose like Salman Khan or, fine, like Hrithik Roshan]” so that she can get a good picture, in another she asks Naheed to tell her story, anticipating that “it’ll be like 1942 A Love Story,” and in yet another she describes Vicky as “always like that, kabhi khushi, kabhi gham [sometimes happy, sometimes sad, but also referencing the title of the 2001 Bollywood film Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham].” The whole film is saturated with such references; when Hitesh leaves the trip, the tour guide says, “Apne poore career mein pehli baar maine aisa dekha. Kisi film ke climax se kum nahin tha [I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole career. It was no less than some film’s climax],” again cinephilically using Bollywood as an idiom in which to describe strange occurrences in real life. Another Bollywood quality to this hatke film is that when gender inequalities are referenced, they are presented with a light and humorous touch, rather than with an earnestly political desire to expose inequalities. For instance, Mili feels trapped in her marriage to Partho because of his conservative personality, which contrasts with her desire to enjoy life. Outwardly, she comes off as somewhat conservative as well, for instance wearing saris even on the beach, something that is made fun of by Madhu. When Mili wants to go parasailing, she is at first not allowed to because she is wearing a sari rather than shorts or jeans. The tour guide ultimately relents, but when Mili gets up in the air, her sari begins to unravel. Kagti plays with our assumptions of what this means for Mili; at first, she presents it from the perspective of the onlookers as a humiliation, and Madhu says, “She’ll be so traumatized!” However, the camera then cuts to Mili’s perspective where she is shouting with joy and thoroughly enjoying herself, unraveled sari notwithstanding. This element of surprise refuses liberal assumptions of women’s abjection. Moreover, by foregrounding feminist resistance not in easy symbols like western clothes but in joy and mazaa (Anjaria and Anjaria 2020), the film suggests an alternative to a

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realist politics of exposure that sheds light on oppression with a direct and unflinching gaze. Honeymoon Travels’s female characters are also generally more sexually forward than the men, overturning stereotypes of married women in particular in Bollywood. This is true of Pinky as well as Madhu, who keeps initiating sex with Bunty even as he repels her advances, accusing her of being too forward and claiming, “My uncle told me that Hindustani ladki bahut sharmili aur laajwanti hoti hain [My uncle told me that Indian girls are very timid and shy].” When he finally admits that the reason he doesn’t want to have sex with her is that he’s gay, she rightly calls him out for his cowardice in marrying her anyway: “Now I get it. Tum isi liye India aaye the, na? Taki kisi sharmili bewaqoof Indian ladki se shaadi kar lo, taki kisi ko na pata chale that you’re gay! [Now I get it. This is why you came to India, isn’t it? To marry some shy and stupid Indian girl so that no one would figure out that you’re gay!]” She thus exposes Bunty’s stereotype of married women’s lack of sex drive, which he had been hoping would allow him to remain married without having to have sex with a woman. These very realistic takes on marriage, sexuality, and gender situate Honeymoon Travels within the new genre of “multiplex” cinema which broaches progressive themes in original ways (Gopal 2011, p. 148); however, the film continues to surprise beyond these themes. In the film’s central twist, we discover that the perfect couple, Aspi and Zara, who had met as children and who claim to never fight or argue, are in fact both superheroes masquerading as regular people. This subplot is surprising, but also walks back the film’s realistic representation of romantic relationships, presenting one couple out there who is actually perfectly happy. This plot twist might also be an homage to Bollywood’s lack of realism; before the revelation we see Zara perform some miraculous feats, including flying through the air while dancing to a song, something which happens unrealistically in many Bollywood films. Here, by discovering that Zara is in fact a “real” superhero, the film plays with expectations both for Bollywood and art cinema, reflecting realistic love stories while also relishing Bollywood’s impossibility. At the end of the film, superheroes Aspi and Zara save the day when Shilpa’s father sends goons after her and Jignesh. In this ending, the film celebrates love whether it corresponds with marriage or not; the fact that Shilpa and Jignesh get a back story, even though Shilpa is married to Hitesh, confirms this. In a playful Bollywood twist, Shilpa prays for divine

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aid to help her evade the goons and right then the very honeymoon bus they had earlier abandoned arrives to save them, including the two superheroes. As we now learn, supporting the film’s investment in surprises: “Kabhi kabhi happy endings mil bhi jati hain [Sometimes you do get a happy ending after all].”

Ghosts and Hauntings Kagti’s second film, Talaash, might also be characterized as hatke but in a substantially different way than Honeymoon Travels. Talaash employs some recognizably standard features of Bollywood cinema, including a superstar cast (Aamir Khan, Rani Mukerji, and Kareena Kapoor), a police protagonist and a much bigger budget, of ₹75 crore. However, its realistic settings, both interior and exterior, its lack of songs, its pared-down visual aesthetic, and its psychological plot render it slightly distinct from the Bollywood mainstream (Khdair 2013, p. 180). Although Talaash begins as a typical cop film, with a mysterious death that the well-respected Inspector Suri Shekhawat is called on to solve, very quickly we learn that the case cannot be separated from the tragedy that has recently befallen the inspector and his wife Roshni: the death of their young son in a boating accident. This tragedy and Suri’s insistence on blaming himself have left him depressed and disengaged from his wife, and it is only when he meets a sex worker, Rosie, who gives him tips on the case as well as the human connection that he has lost at home (Sen 2017, p. 134) that he begins to recover. His interactions with Rosie help him understand the importance of grieving and ultimately allow him to return to the love of his wife. This story, too, has a surprise: at the end we discover that Rosie was a ghost of a murdered sex worker, whom only Suri could see. This supernatural twist links this film to a longer history of Bollywood ghost stories (Mishra 2017, pp. 186–187), which have underlined the tension between reason and faith evident in Bollywood as early as the 1949 Mahal, where the question of belief, even if that belief is ultimately proven false, is central to the plot of the film. In Talaash as well, when a neighbor tells Roshni that she can help her communicate with her dead child, Suri violently resists, refusing to believe in anything religious or supernatural, and only after he discovers the truth about Rosie can he begin to open his heart toward faith and, ultimately, healing. The film cleverly presents many alternatives for mourning, from the modern practices of therapy and medication to faith-based practices invoking spirits and ghosts. While not advocating one kind of mourning over the other,

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the film disrupts modern reason by suggesting that they might all work to heal the trauma of a devastating loss. This uncharacteristic story of trauma and healing is set within a cop story that is also formulaic and in line with other Bollywood crime films (Mazumdar 2007, p. 151). As with the underworld films of the 1990s, the inside of Suri and Roshni’s modest, middle-class flat is presented realistically, and the various street scenes capture a very real urban landscape that avoids the artificial sets often used to represent Mumbai. At the same time, the film has no problem showing a constable threatening prisoners by bragging that Suri is an “encounter specialist” or showing the police acting with impunity to civilians as well as hospital staff. These more standard conventions for representing police heroism might surprise a viewer expecting a more progressive version of the cop story, but in Kagti’s eclectic imaginary, the two versions of Suri, sensitive and violent, exist together unproblematically.

A Return to the Mainstream? Kagti’s third film, Gold, at first look seems to take an entirely different path altogether from that established by her first two. The film has a primarily male cast, headed by “bankable” (Farzeen 2018, n.p.) superstar Akshay Kumar, and tells a fictionalized version of the Indian hockey team’s victory over England to win the Olympic gold in 1948. This story is layered onto the violent history of the Partition, an event that threatened the team’s aspirations. The story follows the team as they are scattered by Independence and Partition and as they ultimately find unity amongst themselves, leading to victory over the erstwhile colonial rulers. Like many mainstream Bollywood films, the story generates patriotism and affective connection with the team, culminating in the playing of the entire national anthem in the film while the Indian team receives the eponymous gold. Despite the criticism Kagti received for this patriotic plot, Gold is part of a recent sub-genre of nationalist Bollywood films that actually expand the idea of nationalism for progressive ends (Anjaria 2021, pp.  151–158). Sports films have been an important site of this progressive nationalist impulse, as evident in Lagaan (2001) and Chak De India! (2007). In these films, a ragtag group of players must overcome differences of language, religion, ethnicity, class, and caste to come together as a team. Conversely, a strong and successful Indian team requires that it contain qualities from all

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of India’s subdivisions. The clear allegorical significance of these films is captured in a lyric from Lagaan’s song “Chale Chalo”: “Toot gayi jo ungli utthi/Paanchon mili toh ban gayi mutthi [One finger alone that can easily break/When put together as five becomes a fist].” These films are nationalistic in the sense that they express a love for India, but the version of India presented in all of them is one made stronger by differences rather than presupposing homogeneity. Thus, in a way they cut through the very heart of the nationalist project, which is unity over difference. Gold clearly fits into this sub-genre. It begins with the Indian hockey team winning a gold medal at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but under the nationality “British India,” meaning that at the medal ceremony, “God Save the Queen” is playing as the team’s national anthem. This misfit between team and country inspires in the team manager, Tapan Das, a desire to one day celebrate victory under India’s own flag. However, the next two Olympic games are canceled due to the war, and by 1946 when the 1948 Olympics is finally announced, India’s independence is on the horizon but so is the Partition. Thus, although Das chooses star player Imtiaz Shah to be the team captain, Shah’s house is burned down and he and his family are driven out of Amritsar to Lahore. Many of the other Muslim players follow him, leaving the team drastically incomplete. Tapan Das is devastated by these losses. He says, “Azaadi toh aa gayi. Lekin uske saath-saath barbaadi bhi aa gayi. Hum jo team banaya tha, desh ke saath-­ saath uska bhi tukda ho gaya… Dekhte hi dekhte hum jo sapna dekha tha, woh toot gaya [We did achieve Independence, but along with that was also destruction… The dream we had envisioned broke apart while we just stood watching].” To make matters worse, when Das tries to assemble another team with the players who remain, he finds that team members are socializing only with people from their own language and region and have little sense of a larger team affiliation. Gold makes a few additional significant moves with this Partition story in service of its progressive nationalism. First of all, Kagti emphasizes that Partition served British interests to weaken the subcontinent; in planning the Olympics, the head of the British hockey federation gleefully tells his colleagues, “I have good news. The Indian team has been struck down the middle… I can’t take credit for it; Lord Mountbatten is the one we should thank. The Partition has divided the team. Half the players are in Pakistan, and half in India.” As in Lagaan, the message here is that a country is weaker when it lets its differences divide it.

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Secondly, even though the film is critical of Partition, it offers a model of forgiveness. In the final segment that takes place at the 1948 London Olympics, the Indian and Pakistani teams meet for the first time since Partition and they are all thrilled to see their former teammates once again. At first, the Olympic hockey federation, worried about the strength of both teams against England, puts India and Pakistan in the same group, ensuring that only one of them will advance to the semi-finals. Tapan Das and the Pakistani team manager unite to protest that grouping, leading to a rearrangement. Later, when Imtiaz Shah, now captain of the Pakistani team, is asked by a reporter why he wants to beat England, he responds using Tapan Das’s words from earlier in the film: “Hum sirf khelne nahin aaye. Hum yahan apne do sau baras ki ghulami ka hisaab karne aaye hain [We’re not just here to play. We’re here to avenge two hundred years of servitude].” Das overhears Shah and when the reporter turns to him for India’s perspective, he merely says, “Ditto.” While seemingly simple, this idea that India and Pakistan share the same relationship to the colonial past is an important corrective to Indian exceptionalism. The legitimacy of Pakistani sovereignty comes up again later when Pakistan plays the Netherlands in the semi-finals. Before the game, Tapan goes to the locker room to wish the team good luck, and the Indian players cheer Pakistan from the stands throughout the whole game. This is reciprocated when India is playing in the finals and the Pakistani team is shown cheering them on. This reframing of lines of solidarity and allegiance away from the chauvinistic India-Pakistan divide to a possible anti-colonial internationalism asserts an alternative version of nationalism, one still founded in love of country but that is simultaneously able to accept the legitimacy of the other.1 A final instance of Kagti’s progressive nationalism might be found in the film’s ending, a dramatic Olympic finals match between England and India, during which it starts pouring rain, giving the English players, with their spiked cleats and their familiarity with English mud, an advantage. As the Indian players slip and slide across the field, Tapan Das remembers when back in India his tonga had gotten stuck in the mud and his wife had advised him to take off his shoes before getting down to push the cart so that he could gain firmer traction on the slippery ground. Das quickly advises his team to take off their shoes, which gives them the edge they need to beat the English team. Although not expressly nationalistic, this speaks to a kind of homegrown, desi scrappiness that is able to compete with the expensive gear of first-world players, a move that re-signifies India’s apparent non-modernity into an advantage rather than a liability.

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Conclusion When asked by reporters why she chose to make such a patriotic film in an era of ramped-up Hindu nationalism, Kagti is clear about the differences between anti-colonial nationalism and contemporary chauvinism, and she refuses to be labeled “fascist” just because she “chokes up” when she hears the Indian national anthem (Jamkhandikar 2018, n.p.). This stated support of public displays of patriotism counters the dominant liberal viewpoint that nationalism and anything associated with it are to be firmly rejected. Moreover, one suspects that Kagti gets so many of these questions precisely because she made two hatke films before Gold, and the decision to make a film with some mainstream, mass-oriented sentiments surprises critics and reviewers who have standard expectations for what filmmakers will do next. Indeed, Reema Kagti’s movement from multiplex hatke cinema to a more mainstream, big-budget national allegory contradicts the linear path scholars and reviewers tend to assume for contemporary Indian filmmakers. In a recent book, I discuss similar assumptions about superstar Aamir Khan, whose recent interest in low-budget and quirkier films has led many to assume that he is moving away from Bollywood aesthetics. But, as I show, Khan’s trajectory is hardly linear; he continues to make masala films like Dhoom 3 and Dangal even as he experiments with other types of projects (Anjaria 2019, pp. 121–127). Thinking about the work of any filmmaker as a series of experiments with the possibilities for representation is, to my mind, a much more interesting way of understanding cultural production and leads to more surprises than simply tracking a career along a narrative of progress or decline established in advance. This is especially the case for women, queer, and Dalit directors whose decisions have to be understood as artistic assertions of their own visions rather than merely reflections of dominant trends. Kagti’s own pronouncements of genre-­ mixing and her refusal to be constrained by any one style or mode of filmmaking serve as a call to critics to think broadly about how we understand the politics of contemporary cultural production in India and beyond.

Note 1. The Bollywood film Main Hoon Na (2004) similarly reframes the question of Pakistani betrayal to offer a new nationalism founded on acceptance rather than long-standing grudges (Anjaria 2021, p. 158).

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References Acharya, V.K. (2013). Dhoom 3. Yash Raj Films. Akhtar, F. (2004). Lakshya. Excel Entertainment. Akhtar, Z. (2011). Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Excel Entertainment. ———. (2015). Dil Dhadakne Do. Excel Entertainment. ———. (2019). Gully Boy. Excel Entertainment. Akhtar, Z., & Katgi, R. (2019). Made in Heaven. Excel Entertainment & Tiger Baby Films. Amin, S. (2007). Chak De India! Yash Raj Films. Amrohi, K. (1949). Mahal. Bombay Talkies. Anjaria, J.S. & Anjaria, U. (2020). ‘Mazaa: Rethinking Fun, Pleasure and Play in South Asia’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 43(2): 232–242. Anjaria, U. (2019). Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture. Temple University Press, Philadelphia. ———. (2021). Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema. Routledge, London. Chopra, V.V. (1994). 1942 A Love Story. Vinod Chopra Productions. Dwyer, R. (2011). ‘Zara Hatke (“Somewhat Different”): The New Middle Classes and the Changing Forms of Hindi Cinema’. In: H. Donner (ed). Being Middle-­ Class in India: A Way of Life. Routledge, London, pp. 184–208. Farzeen, S. (2018). ‘Director Reema Kagti on Gold’s success: Love and gratitude to the entire team for making it happen’. Indian Express. August 25. https:// indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/gold-­director-­reema-­ kagti-­on-­akshay-­kumar-­film-­success-­5322693/. Accessed on 29 June 2021. Ganti, T. (2012). Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Duke University Press, Durham. Gopal, S. (2011). Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gowariker, A. (2001). Lagaan. Aamir Khan Productions. Jamkhandikar, S. (2018). ‘Q & A: Reema Kagti on “Gold” and nationalism in films’. Reuters. August 30. https://www.reuters.com/article/interview-­ reema-­k agti-­g old/qa-­r eema-­k agti-­o n-­g old-­a nd-­n ationalism-­i n-­f ilms-­ idINKCN1LF0WZ. Accessed on 29 June 2021. Johar, K. (2001). Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. Dharma Productions. Johar, K. et al. (2013). Bombay Talkies. Flying Unicorn Entertainment. Kagti, R. (2007). Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd. Excel Entertainment. ———. (2012). Talaash. Excel Entertainment. ———.(2018). Gold. Excel Entertainment. Khdair, D. (2013). ‘Piecing together the puzzle: Kahaani, Talaash and the complex narrative in popular Hindi cinema’. Studies in South Asian Film and Media 5(2): 179–194.

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Kripalani, C. (2014). ‘“Why are you making such a big deal just because I’m a woman?”: Women directors of popular Indian cinema’. In: Gabrielle, K. & Robson, C. (eds). Celluloid Ceiling: Women Directors Breaking Through. Supernova Books, Twickenham, pp. 210–232. Mazumdar, R. (2007). Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Mishra, V. (2017). ‘Afterdeath and the Bollywood gothic’. In: C.M. Davison (ed). The Gothic and Death. Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 174–188. Sen, S. (2017). ‘Breaking the boundaries of Bollywood: Women in a “man’s industry.”’ In: Harrod, M. & Paszkiewicz, K. (eds). Women do Genre in Film and Television. Routledge, London, pp. 121–137. Sharma, D. (2019). ‘Reema Kagti on bringing an outsider’s gaze to her films, and co-writing with Zoya Akhtar’. Firstpost. September 13. https://www.firstpost. com/entertainment/reema-­kagti-­on-­bringing-­an-­outsiders-­gaze-­to-­her-­films-­ and-­co-­writing-­with-­zoya-­akhtar-­7295961.html. Accessed on 30 June 2021. Singh, S. (2018). ‘Gold director Reema Kagti: Both Aamir and Akshay are disciplined actors’. India Today. August 28. https://www.indiatoday.in/movies/ celebrities/story/gold-­d irector-­r eema-­k agti-­b oth-­a amir-­a nd-­a kshay-­a re-­ disciplined-­actors-­1325555-­2018-­08-­28. Accessed on 29 June 2021. Tiwari, N. (2016). Dangal. Aamir Khan Productions, Walt Disney Pictures India

CHAPTER 7

Farah Khan: Cinephilia, Nostalgia and Melancholia Sunny Singh

Across the world, the woman-directed, big-budget blockbuster film intended for general audiences remains a rare beast. Of the 46 Hollywood movies that have made at least a billion dollars, only three have been directed by women. Of the top ten of these films, five are animated, three are part of blockbuster franchises and two are women focused (Travis 2020). The blockbuster directed by a woman is even rarer in commercial Hindi which despite a long trajectory of women directors can claim only two commercially successful women directors (Ganti 2012). Of these, Farah Khan is the first and more commercially successful. Her four feature films (so far) also stand out for being not only big budget (for India), big grossing, big star films, but also actively and explicitly creating filmic texts that harness narratives, styles and aesthetics that have long marked the quintessential “Bollywood” film. Moreover, box office success of her films, with even her least successful venture making more than double its

S. Singh (*) London Metropolitan University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_7

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budget, marks her out as an exception amongst blockbuster directors, regardless of gender. Khan’s debut film Main Hoon Na (2004, hereafter MHN) was the second highest-grossing film of 2004 and an early success in the coveted overseas market. Her second feature Om Shanti Om (2007, hereafter OSO) went head-to-head with for the coveted Diwali release in 2007 with Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya, which was co-produced with Sony Pictures Entertainment and the first Hindi film to receive a North American screen release with a Hollywood studio, and came out on top as the highest-grossing Hindi film of the year. Tees Maar Khan (2010, hereafter TMK), her third film, is a departure from her established filmmaking form in multiple ways and is also her least commercially successful film. Although it posted one of the highest first weekend profits for the industry and made more than double its budget, ticket sales tapered off quickly and significantly enough for the film to be considered a disappointment. However, her fourth and last (as of now) feature film offering, Happy New Year (2014, hereafter HNY) was not only released simultaneously in dubbed Tamil and Telugu versions but also posted the largest opening box office receipts for a Hindi film till that year and became the second highest-grossing film of the year. While Khan has not made or even announced a feature film in the past seven years, she continues to be a ubiquitous presence in Indian cinema and popular entertainment with choreography, acting and production credits in films. Her professional trajectory encompasses dance, choreography, script writing, acting, production and direction and spans four decades with her first credited screen appearances as a club dancer in M.S. Sathyu’s low-budget feature Kahan Kahan Se Guzar Gaye (1981).1 She has built a significant presence on television judging talent competitions including Indian Idol and India’s Got Talent, and hosting chat, cookery and reality TV shows. Finally, although her directorial oeuvre remains limited to four films, Khan has successfully packaged herself as a celebrity director complete with a finely crafted star text of her own that harnesses her feature films as intrinsic to building her public persona and deploys carefully curated biographical elements to construct and strengthen a star text of her own. Given her long and varied career trajectory which deserves its own extended study, this chapter chooses to focus only on Khan’s feature films, examining her explicit intertextual evocations of a golden age of the big budget, glitzy, multi-starrer that in many ways has come to define

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“Bollywood.” Furthermore, it considers how the four films reflect her cinephilia and a strategic deployment of nostalgia that seems key to her filmmaking, helping create a signature style—veering from homage to pastiche to kitsch—and how these interact with wider cinematic, cultural and sociopolitical zeitgeist. Close readings of Khan’s feature films delineate the roles played by three key elements of her oeuvre: cinephilia that underpins Khan’s directorial sensibilities, filmic—and indeed extra-filmic—nostalgia that she chooses to evoke in her features films, and finally a deepening melancholia underpinning her dizzying, glossy cinema that ranges from homage and pastiche to parody. These three elements cannot be de-linked from Khan’s own personal location as a woman and a religiously and ethnically minoritised one in the film industry and India. A cursory look at key events that bookend this period reveals how Khan’s cinephilia informs her films and reflects an individuated cinematic nostalgia but also expresses a deepening, wider socio-­ cultural-­political anxiety and alienation. As per press reports, MHN was planned in 1999, the year India and Pakistan faced off in a nearly three-­ month-­long border conflict in Kargil, and in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 nuclear tests by India which were followed by Pakistan’s. The filming initially began in 2001 but was delayed due to its lead star Shah Rukh Khan’s (hereafter SRK) injuries and it was only released in 2004. After 2014, Khan has made no movies although her visibility in Indian mediascape remains undiminished, albeit clearly and seemingly deliberately depoliticised. She has repackaged herself as a celebrity director whose appearance is highly mediated to maintain an illusion of hypervisibility while distancing her from any real engagement with making movies.

Cinephilia of an Industry Insider, the Cinephile as Director From her debut film, Khan has asserted her cinephilia onscreen, paying homage to earlier filmmakers, mostly notably Manmohan Desai and Nassir Hussain, and evoking a host of films as metatextual foundational narratives for her scripts including Masoom (1983) for MHN, Karz (1980) for OSO, and most curiously Vittorio Di Sica’s Caccia alla volpe (1966) for TMK. She has also spoken about her love for popular Hindi cinema of the 1970s and 1980s as well as her commitment to making commercially successful films in numerous fora (Chopra 2017; Rao & Khan 2017; Kumar

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2019). While the “filmmaker as practising cinephile” is not a new phenomenon in cinema in general or even in popular Hindi cinema, Khan’s explicit avowal of cinephilia as intrinsic to her filmmaking is unusual in not only her passion for cinema that informs all four of her feature films but also for the Bombay film industry in all its aspects, technological, organisational, personal and spectatorial. This is reflected in the way she layers dizzying intertextual references to filmic narratives, characters, aesthetics and elements of style, including popularly known dialogues, costumes, settings, music and song sequences as well as recognisable star mannerisms. She further adds to this mix an entire range of extra-filmic elements including star texts and well-known gossip circulated in and by film press, offering the knowledgeable viewer an opportunity to view her films not only as spectators but as a collective of fellow cinephiles. To this already enormous bank of references, Khan also brings personal as well as familial knowledge of the industry. When Bharadwaj Rangan notes, “Farah knows her Bollywood,” (Rangan 2007, n.p.), this knowledge extends to Khan’s familial network: her father was a stuntman turned filmmaker, albeit not a  particularly commercially successful  one; her mother is sister of child actors Daisy and Honey Irani, the latter also the former spouse of lyricist Javed Akhtar and mother of directors Farhan and Zoya Akhtar. She is married to Shirish Kunder, who not only edited her first three films but also co-produced, scripted, composed soundtrack for and edited TMK.2 Further family ties link her to an enviably extensive network of members of the film industry. This gives Khan an unparalleled understanding of the film industry and its many unwritten, unseen histories. It is this knowledge—known and unknown, recorded and unrecorded, public and personal—that not only informs Khan’s cinephilia but is actively leveraged on and off-screen in her work.3 Khan’s directorial ventures function explicitly as an assertion of a particularly non-Western cinephilia that expands Susan Sontag’s definition of “a certain taste” to the commercial Hindi film canon as well as an explicit and continuous investment in this particular “cinema’s glorious past” (1996). So while Iyer’s (2016) analysis of a sequence from this film through the lens of parody and pastiche is rich and textured, perhaps Khan’s deliberate citation of the three chosen texts may be seen as closer to homage, informed more by cinephilia in its 1960s French version which is “simultaneously democratic since it takes a popular cultural form very seriously while also being snobbishly aristocratic about it because it

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replaces traditional hierarchies (in which film was found at the lower end of the continuum)…” (de Valck and Hagener 2005, pp. 11–12). It is this specific cinephilia, focused confidently on Hindi films and the industry she’s known all her life, that Khan extends and expands in her debut film, MHN. Although the film is replete with references and intertextual citations of western, especially Hollywood, cinema, Khan’s “certain tastes” remain firmly focused on narratives, histories and concerns of commercial Hindi cinema and familiar to its habitual audiences. The rapid pace of MHN’s opening sequence exemplifies this best with the first 15 minutes constructing a narrative, political, emotional rollercoaster at par with Manmohan Desai at his best: a TV presenter sets up a contentious debate on India’s relationship with Pakistan; a senior Indian army officer makes the case for peace; the show is interrupted by the dramatic entry of the antagonist who refuses any peace attempt; the protagonist make an even more dramatic entry followed by an extensive, slick action sequence; a father makes a death-bed speech, another father is threatened with his estranged daughter’s safety by the terrorists; a family secret is revealed; tearful promises are made; a funeral complete with a flag-draped casket and full military honours is held heavy rain. The pacing recalls the exposition style perfected by Desai in Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) and Naseeb (1981). The film settles into a slightly slower pacing but never loses its rollercoaster quality, relentlessly guiding the viewer from one emotional experience to another, piling rapid-fire sequences that move from action to humour to surprisingly chaste romances, and are punctuated with elaborate song sequences. Khan layers on the filmic references: riffs from songs familiar from a campus film Jawani Deewani (1972); fashion and songs evocative of Hum Kisise Kum Nahin (1977); peril signalled by a poster of Sholay (1975) reflected in the windshield of vehicle full of terrorists and SRK commandeering a rickshaw with Dhanno—the famous tonga-pulling mare—imprinted on the back; protagonists named Ram and Lakshman, both of whom—instead of just one—employed fake identities in yet another school film Do Aur Do Paanch (1980); and a final nod to the helicopter sequence from Suhaag (1979). While MHN can be read as pastiche or even parody, Khan is an adept acolyte of Desai so the story is “told on two levels at once – in dead earnest and with tongue-in-cheek” (Haham 2006, p. xix). Like Desai, Khan’s constructs a polyphonic film text that functions simultaneously on multiple levels and offers multiple hermeneutical entry points to the viewer.

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Khan’s cinephilia also guides the film’s aesthetics that echo the big-­ budget Hindi films of earlier decades but also refuse the parameters of what has been described as “Bollywood,” a specific form of post-­ liberalisation popular cinema in Hindi that deliberately and clearly addresses diasporic audiences, features locales and characters in the global north, and includes conspicuous markers of wealth and consumption (Prasad 2003; Rajadhyaksha 2003). Khan locates her film firmly in India, and even then, once removed from the country’s metropolitan centres. Instead, MHN’s setting is deliberately familiar, specially to the non-­ metropolitan middle classes: the ultra-modern Delhi television studio, familiar primarily due to the private news channel boom of the 1990s; carefully curated middle-class domesticity of bungalows in Himalayan hill stations and cantonments; and the familiar architecture and environments of St Paul’s School in Darjeeling, this last instantly recognisable from a number of earlier films including Mera Naam Joker (1970). The characters too are located in an ostensibly middle-class Indian milieu4 as part of the salaried classes as army officers, teachers and journalists, even when clad in extravagant designer outfits (SRK’s camel coat and Burberry scarf stand out as particularly egregious). They also recall earlier films including Masoom (1983), in particular rewriting Shabana Azmi’s role as Indu, the betrayed wife, who eventually accepts her husband’s illegitimate son into Kirron Kher’s obdurately furious Madhu who refuses any marital reconciliation, leaves her husband and raises their son alone. Naseeruddin Shah’s turn as the husband and father, Prashant in the earlier film and Shekhar in MHN, is part of the film’s cinephilic pleasures, requiring knowledge and memory of the earlier text to savour this alternative narrative possibility. Moreover, Khan explicitly positions the Ramāyaṇa as the ur-text for MHN and harnesses SRK’s star text that has been built in the prior decade on an “aesthetic of stabilization” and with repeated references to various aspects of Rāma. MHN joined his two other releases in 2004, Veer-Zaara and Swades, in almost entirely eliding his parallel text with the hero of the Ramāyaṇa, conflating star persona, cinematic narrative and audience’s prefilmic knowledge of the epic (Singh 2010). Not only is SRK’s character in the film named Ram but it also draws on his earlier “elder brother” persona as protective, caring, courageous and self-sacrificing. In contrast, his estranged brother Lakshman (Zayed Khan) is written as carefree, irresponsible and, until the appearance of his older brother, lacking a male role model. Unsurprising then that the villain, the terrorist Raghavan (Sunil Shetty) is depicted as violent, vindictive and immoral.

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For an audience brought up on a diet of enacted, recited and retold Rāma myth, the struggle and eventual confrontation between Ram and Raghavan provides a familiar pleasure with contemporary twists, with the final scene heightening the sense of simultaneously experiencing a well-­ choreographed action sequence, an imaginary exchange between the hero and villain of the epic, and an assurance that good will (again) triumph. The dialogue between the two opponents emphasises this referentiality, with Ram responding to Raghavan’s repeated shouts of his name with “Dil se bulaa rahe ho to Ram mil hi jayenge” (If you seek Rāma with a true heart, you will find him). The identification is reinforced again at the end with Raghavan asserting “Is Ramkatha ̄ mein maut Ram ki hogi” (in this version of the story, Ram will die) and Ram’s rejoinder “Afsos tum apni Ramāyaṇa bhool gaye” (it’s sad that you’ve forgotten your Ramayana). MHN’s layered intertextuality also provides a rare pleasure to the spectator who is knowledgeable in this extra-filmic cultural knowledge, one that the original literary text cannot provide: the spectacle of the queen enraged by the competition to her son and threat to her husband’s affections. Yet it is a spectacle that can be enjoyed safely as SRK’s star text provides an ongoing extra-textual reassurance to the audience that the hero will not only win against the villain but also win over his embittered family, thus restoring the stability and unity of the familial unit. That this complex, mediated, culturally informed spectacle is enacted on screen by three identifiably Muslim actors—Shah as father, SRK and Zayed as sons— adds a subversive element to the evolving cultural narratives of the period. The filmic and extra-filmic citations must also be considered as not just nostalgia for the multi-star, big-budget blockbuster of the 1970s and 1980s but rather a plea for the cultural ethos that underpinned them. It is this particular impulse in the film that maintains the text, despite seemingly parodic moments, on the side of homage, not pastiche, woven together with a cinephilia that evokes not simply aesthetic and stylistic elements of the older cinema but its social, political, cultural values.

Many Nostalgias, Citations and Refusals Any discussion of cinephilia inevitably requires us to consider nostalgia because of the libidinal, emotional, affective nature of this elusive, individuated attachment to images, sounds and narratives. After all, cinephilia “has always been a gesture towards cinema framed by nostalgia and other retroactive temporalities, pleasures tinged with regret even as they register

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as pleasures” (Elsaesser 2005, p. 27). Moreover the nostalgia that informs cinephilia is itself arbitrary, idiosyncratic, individual, with passions for particular films as—if not more—dependent on the extra-filmic conditions of encountering the text rather than any notion of innate filmic quality.5 Thus while cinephilia is not only a nostalgic love of cinema but also a nostalgic love for a memorialised past that no longer exists but is preserved in memory (Willemen 1994), it is also crucial to recognise that nostalgia “inevitably appears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (Boym 2001, p. xiv). Boym considers mainstream cinema of Hollywood as representative of the most conservative form of nostalgia, one that does not activate “disquieting ambivalence and paradoxical dialectic of past, present, and future” and instead “provides a total restoration” of a constructed past and “a conflict resolution” (2001, p. 33). Given the commercial and cultural dominance of popular Hindi cinema, the industry may be seen as analogous to Hollywood as “the vessel for national myths” (2001, p. 33) that India exports abroad. As such and at first glance, Khan’s invocations of nostalgia appear to be of this same restorative kind. Nowhere is this more obvious  than in the ways Khan engages with gender. Here it is necessary to note that gender ratio is grossly unbalanced not only in India as a country but in Khan’s industry: despite a record number of women working behind the scenes in cinema, the gender ratio in India’s film industry is 6.2 men to every woman (Rangachari Shah & Kapur 2018). As noted earlier, Khan is not only one of the industry’s most successful women directors, but also one of two engaged in making popular cinema. Yet no film by either director would pass the lowest bar of the Bechdel Test which requires that a film must have at least two women in it, who talk to each other, and about something other than about a man. Khan has previously refuted this point by couching her filmic decisions in a naïve formulation of choice: “Why should women directors be pigeonholed into one thing? I want to make a movie with five male characters, what is everyone’s problem?” (Chatterjee 2014, n.p.). Her films however go beyond a lack of women characters with little role beyond ornamental. Over her four features and the decade, women’s roles in Khan’s films have grown more limited, stilted and derogatory. Sanju and Chandni of MHN are given some semblance of independence and attributes beyond their physical desirability although it is this final quality that is foregrounded. Sanju is initially framed in terms familiar from Hollywood’s manic pixie dream girl whose personal quirks make her stand

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out from other young women students at the college. Khan repeats this trope in OSO with Sandy, who is the physical facsimile of the dead Shanti. Both women, played by extraordinarily, and conventionally, beautiful actresses are given a Pretty Woman style glow-up. This is primarily a change of outfit—a bright pink salwar and kurta for Sanju and a sari for Sandy—and their style of make-up to more traditional rather than any transformation of emotional, psychological and social states. MHN’s Chandni stands out as an exception for some degree of sexual autonomy and some emotional depth although this latter is limited to emotionally mothering a man-child. OSO has little use beyond the decorative for either part played by Deepika Padukone. Sandy’s most important attraction is to ventriloquise the off-screen fan and confirm her willingness, indeed determination, to suspend disbelief not only for the star’s onscreen performance but also off-screen actions (TMK expands on this naively committed viewer in strangely desultory and mean-spirited ways); Shanti’s role is to incite affective responses to film history referenced by her glamorous appearances. History and film history referents of her tragic story arc that destabilise the film’s nostalgic invocations are quickly resolved by a restorative resolution (yet this resolution is ambivalent, as Sandy is more a facsimile instead of a reincarnation, hinting at a parallel deployment of reflexive nostalgia discussed below). Khan’s representations of women deteriorate rapidly with TMK, her one film without SRK. The film’s protagonist, played by Akshay Kumar, parodies his own star persona of an action star with an explicit dose of misogyny. The actor’s brief appearance in OSO had parodied the absurdities of action sequences in popular Hindi film as well as Kumar’s hyper-­ macho screen image. It had also included a disturbing sequence of the star—playing himself—losing a film award and attacking a young woman seated near him, apparently in anger at his loss. The sequence wasn’t particularly humorous in OSO so to construct an entire film around the same penchant for violent sexism seems an odd decision. Misogyny and barely controlled gendered violence, played for ever diminishing laughs, inform the character of Tabrez, not only in his catchphrase about the rape of a sex worker being impossible but also in his controlling and coercive behaviour towards his wife Anya, played by Katrina Kaif. This toxic masculinity is repeated in HNY, Khan’s final venture, albeit without an explicit threat of physical violence, by Charlie (SRK again) whose sexist diatribes about Mohini’s (Deepika Padukone again) supposed lack of honour/chastity are played for laughs. While Khan uses

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HNY to replay OSO’s romance between Om and Sandy, the effect is more disturbing than romantic. The female protagonist’s name and profession as dancer references Madhuri Dixit’s role as young woman forced to dance in bars under threat of acid attack in Tezaab (1988). Charlie’s slurs against Mohini thus land differently, reminding the viewer of the brutal violence of the earlier film, undermining any credibility of romance between the two. Khan’s regression into toxic on and off-screen gender roles films starts with relatively subtle and seemingly benign expression in MHN but spirals into increasing toxicity and verbal, if not always, physical violence. This onscreen regression also depends on activating filmic nostalgia which, over the course of the four films, grows darker in tone and content. These increasingly explicit evocations of a violent history and film history prevent a reading of her films as solely restorative nostalgia and indicate a more ambivalent, even critical, view of the past. Boym provocatively proposes that nostalgia “reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgement, or critical reflection” (2001, p. 50). This concept of “reflective” nostalgia offers a potentially powerful framework to consider works by minoritised—by gender and other aspects of identity—auteurs as their visions of displaced, disavowed and reconstituted past may not simply activate a longing for a different time but rather construct a dialogue with the present and future. A more complicated view of the past—informed in part by filmic history of economic precarity and political instability of the 1970s and 1980s and Khan’s own statements (Chopra 2017)—lies under Khan’s seemingly glossy pastiche in OSO. It forces the viewer, even if momentarily, to acknowledge a grimmer real history that accompanies the reel histories of the time. These are reinforced through the film: a film star’s mansion is surrounded by impoverished film fans with confident knowledge of cinema; a famous film star may be humane enough to bring a dying man to the hospital but his assistant can also grease enough palms to make the body disappear after death; and a junior artist may seem to dream of stardom even with the knowledge that he has few possibilities of success. This constant onscreen assertion and subversion of history provides fertile grounds for the film to activate both restorative and reflective nostalgias that form the basis of Khan’s cinephilia, and demand that her oeuvre be considered not only in aesthetic and stylistic terms but for the location, urgency and implications of her nostalgia: what is this memorialised past she evokes in her films and

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why does it matter? How do her citation preferences in her intertextually dense films operate, not only as aesthetic and stylistic choices but also semiotically to signal concerns about the present and even more so the future? Any meaningful analysis of Khan’s oeuvre, and OSO in particular, requires us to parse through the ways in which these two nostalgias— restorative and reflexive—are in constant productive struggle. Thomas Elsaesser differentiates between cinephilia as the “love that never lies” of the first generation and “the love that never dies” of the post-1980 generation of cinephiles which feeds on nostalgia and repetition (2005). OSO is a loving crafted expression of this second kind, of Elsaesser’s “cinephilia 2,” through a continuum of registers ranging from homage to pastiche to parody. These changes in register complicate any description of the film as solely homage, moving fluidly to pastiche, parody and back. Narratively, the film employs a structure familiar to popular Hindi film audiences with two clear halves, the first set in the 1970s and the second in the new millennium. SRK, the country’s biggest star, plays Om Makhija, a junior film artist in the first half and Om Kapoor, a major film star in the second. The double role is also a familiar pleasure for the audience, recalling the earlier cinema, and not in the least with that era’s biggest star Amitabh Bachchan in films such as Don (1978), The Great Gambler (1979) and Satte pe Satta (1982) and culminating with inimitable excess with a triple role in Mahaan (1983).6 This doubling is mirrored by Padukone who plays the film star Shantipriya in the first half of OSO and Sandy, a wanna-be film actress and Om’s fan in the second. The film positions Shanti as analogous to the earlier star Hema Malini, not only by choice of costume and mannerisms but also film paraphernalia. She is first seen in a poster for “Dreamy Girl,” a play on the Malini star vehicle Dream Girl (1977). This referencing does not appear incidental as Malini was not only one of the few female stars of the decade to be able to carry a film on her own but also known for her double roles in films focused on reincarnation including Mehbooba (1976) and Kudrat (1977). Towards the climax, Khan adds another citational twist by introducing a vengeful ghost drawn from an even earlier film, Madhumati (1958). This final citation resonates further as that film also features a rare triple role by its female star Vyajanthimala, once again one of the few female stars with the ability to deliver box office success based solely on her star power. For the cinephile for whom “the love never dies,” OSO is an “intertextual extravaganza” (Iyer 2016, p. 214) with each shot abounding in filmic references. In the first half, these activate an affective nostalgic response

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through an intensified mise-en-scène. The second half self-referentially harnesses this invoked filmic and extra-filmic nostalgia to provoke an intense emotional response that is at once earnest and sceptic as the film simultaneously recognises and distances itself from filmic narrative and history, reveals and conceals the mechanism of filmic storytelling, provokes and disavows the very cinephilic affections at its core. In her discussion of the “Dhoom Tana” song sequence, Iyer questions the choice of the four films cited as “curious” as they are neither the “most popular or canonized” although the question could also be aimed at the entire film. She adds that the choice suggests “a cultural amnesia towards other attributes that a broader spectrum of popular cinema from the past would afford” (2016, pp. 216–7). However, given that Khan’s citation choices, not only in that song but right through the film, appear very deliberate, perhaps these are neither incidental nor an indication of cultural amnesia but rather a deliberate “re-mastering, re-purposing, and re-framing” (Elsaesser 2005, p. 36) of popular Hindi cinema by a series of technological, narrative and aesthetic choices for reconstituting an imagined rather than historically accurate filmic and real past. Moreover, as de Valck and Hagener note “cinephilia in the new media age not only celebrates discoveries and classic masterpieces, but also engages in popular reworking of what may be called ‘the film-historical imaginary’” (2005, p. 15). Perhaps the more pertinent questions are about the motivation, nature and purpose of this nostalgia which remains, in different forms, the central preoccupation of all four of Khan’s feature films and how filmic citations are marshalled in her work, and for what purpose. Sperb notes that nostalgia “is less about a reclaiming a vanishing past than about paradoxically resisting a potential threatening future” (Sperb 2015, p. 2). If so, OSO’s representation of the industry in the 1970s—an era that is often viewed as “better” in terms of inclusivity and tolerance—is less about real or reel history and more reflective of anxieties about the future. In contrast, the contemporary industry is shown to have greater diversity although this is entirely through two scenes: first, a parade of well-known stars on the red carpet at the Filmfare awards night, and then in the extravagant song sequence for the title track set at a party celebrating Om’s win which features over 30 stars of the past half century. The selection of images, narratives, information and sounds help activate nostalgic pleasures of a memorialised past while also constituting a melancholic warning about possible futures through its selected citations.

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Yet this citation also complicates the sequence as straightforward nostalgic evocation. Khan’s title track cites her film’s opening sequence as well as the popular Karz song. Yet it is distinct enough to remain a homage. Similarly, with its unprecedented parade of film stars, the sequence visually references the “John Jani Janardhan” song sequence from Naseeb featuring multiple film stars gathered to celebrate the golden jubilee of director Desai’s earlier film Dharam-Veer. Khan’s citation is further complicated by the Desai’s sequence functioning primarily as a spectacle to emphasise Amitabh Bachchan’s dominant star status while diegetically locating him as a film fan with passing fancies of film acting. Bachchan’s character in the film is a waiter, moonlights as a cage fighter, and is closer to SRK’s aspiring Om Makhija in his economic precarity. In turn Om Makhija references not only Bachchan’s character from Naseeb with his secular values but also with his pendants of multiple religions that recall those worn by Bachchan in Desai’s Coolie (1983). It is worth bearing in mind that this half of Khan’s film is approximately set in 1979–1980 by its citation of Karz, the year when Bachchan was declared “the one-man industry” (Chakravarty 1993). Thus, Khan’s citational choices also reinforce SRK’s star status. However, unlike Om Makhija’s starstruck fan who deals with stars at a distance and in fantasy—with the exception of Shanti—in OSO, Desai’s sequence is entirely dominated by Bachchan’s character who interacts playfully with the stars despite the differences in economic and social class. The sequence does not hide the extra-filmic camaraderie, between the stars and Bachchan, especially in interactions with Dharmendra, evoking the two stars’ onscreen friendship from Sholay (1975), one that Khan’s junior artist cannot access. Conversely, Khan’s star-studded party is no longer accessible to a character like Bachchan’s hotel waiter as the sequence invisibilises any serving staff, creating a nearly impenetrable class bubble of wealth and class, countering any attempt to demystify film stars or the industry. As such, the sequence works to create an illusion of access to an exclusive party while paradoxically enhancing the distanced mystique conferred by stardom. Moreover, Khan’s historicising and self-theorising of popular Hindi cinema are evident from the opening sequence which recalls studio films of the 1950s. Unlike the meticulous reconstruction of a period by a film like Mughal-e-Azam, cited in dialogue later in the film, this construction of the past is constituted by the production of “media images saturated with memories of pastness evocative enough” to give a sense of the era (de Valck & Hagener 2005, p. 17). The bombastic quote and sculpture of a

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fictive studio logo gives way to a digitally reconstructed song sequence that forms the title of Khan’s film and is diegetically located on the sets of Karz (1980). Clips of Rishi Kapoor dancing in the original song sequence are placed alongside shots of SRK as a junior artist playing an audience member on the set as well as a fantasy sequence where he imagines himself as the elder star. Multiple reel times and narratives of memory, diegetic reality and fantasy are amalgamated into a single cinephilic whole. A guest appearance of the earlier film’s director, an eerily un-aged Subhash Ghai, not only functions as a visual bridge between the two eras but collapses filmic, interfilmic and extra-filmic realities. The sequence activates multiple pleasures: the thrill of being on the set of Karz and becoming part of film history, of witnessing the anachronistic proximity of multiple generations of stars in the same contiguous space, and of seeing the current superstar as an extra, in the audience, as just another fan (Sarkar 2013). In a single sequence, history has been congealed into history as presented on screen while film and film history are inseparably intertwined with history (de Valck & Hagener 2005). Furthermore, Khan herself appears in cameo as one of the purported extras dancing alongside SRK, collapsing filmic histories and times, and further complicating OSO’s activation of nostalgia. This self-insertion of the director into the filmic text is a longstanding technique and functions not only as a “deep archiving impulse” (Sarkar 2013, p.  217). Khan’s choice of placing herself in filmic past and diegesis signals a wilful anachronism, one that challenges usual conceptions of anachronisms as a slight or a mistake in the practice of historical representation. As demonstrated throughout OSO, instead of mistakes or slights, Khan’s uses of anachronisms “hinge on sly misuses and creative revisions of historical and film historical referents” (Gorfinkel 2005, p. 156) to recreate a lost moment of popular Hindi cinema, one that is not only rendered obsolete by neo-­ liberal capitalist process and technological advances but also concurrent sociopolitical changes. This wilful anachronism is also evident in the hyper-intense artificiality of mise-en-scène (in itself a familiar cinematic convention of popular Hindi cinema) not only in OSO but all of Khan’s work, which renders them as cinematic artefacts that appear “out of time and out of place,” simultaneously evoking, reimagining and reconstructing a time and place while also rendering it impossible. Although OSO, like all films under discussion here, operates in filmic and cultural contexts entirely different from Hollywood that Gorfinkel analyses, Khan’s choices similarly incite “an

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earnestly emotional response, from an audience that recognises the limits and myopias of the cultural past as seen through the fractured mirror of film history” (2005, p. 160).7 Given this wilful anachronism, Khan’s evocations of filmic past cannot be read as simplistic restorative nostalgia as she neither parodies the past, nor evokes it with any degree of historical accuracy, nor indeed celebrates it in pastiche. These anachronisms are also coded in creative refusal of familiar, almost inevitable, narratives as Khan privileges affective impact over predictable plot choices. Each of her onscreen choices is also a deliberate misuse, inversion or revision of earlier film history references, indicating that her anachronism is a creative strategy. The clearest example of this refusal is her inversion of viewer expectations that Om and Shanti would fall in love after he saves her from a burning film set, not only because of conventions of filmic romance but also because the sequence references the well-known story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt falling in love. While Om obviously expects such a result, Shanti is not only married but is also erotically disinterested in him. The same refusal of romance is echoed in the second half where Sandy’s obvious sexual interest in Om, reincarnated now as a major star, is met with nothing more than fraternal care. Khan’s refusal of romantic happy ever-afters merits a separate study but her creative revisions of film historical referents are not limited to this trope alone. Despite a relentlessly albeit superficially upbeat tone—asserted through hyper-­ saturated colours, bright lights, extravagant locations and costumes, and fast-paced music—all of Khan’s films end on ambiguous, indeed melancholic, notes. Moreover, this melancholia appears to grow with each film, manifesting finally in an unusually, effectively, unsatisfying finale to HNY. Perhaps Khan’s oeuvre is better considered in light of Elsaesser’s questioning not cinema but our discipline itself. If Film Studies requires the deconstruction of the very cinephilia the discipline is built upon, popular Hindi cinema in general, and Khan in particular, poses an intriguing dilemma. If we as film scholars have politicised pleasure and psychoanalysed desire, is it not the task of a committed cinephilic director to undo both? If so, OSO rises to Elsaesser’s challenge for a film to “once more become innocent and political” (2005, p. 40), not despite but because of its deployment of nostalgia. Moreover, if nostalgia “depends on where you stand” (Stewart 1988, p.  228) are minoritised creatives, by dint of their socio-cultural precarity more likely to veer towards a critical, challenging, reflective form than a conservative, restorative one? Or perhaps creating commercially successful cinema requires a fine balancing of

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reflexive and restorative nostalgias, reasserting certain forms of conservatisms while refusing others? And is this balancing act when performed by minoritised auteurs inevitably underpinned by anxieties that find expression in a through thread of melancholia?

Melancholia, Grief and Non-mourning The pleasures afforded by cinephilia rest on retrospective knowledge— filmic and extra-filmic—that the viewer holds, individually and collectively, as well as a recognition of this moment of history and film history being already lost (Gorfinkel 2005; Elsaesser 2016). The very act of cinephilia requires a kind of mourning of what has already been lost and thus becomes an act of re-membering, albeit a necrophilic one (Willemen 1994). The cinephile filmmaker may be then conceived of as a graverobber, using “history as a limitless warehouse that can be plundered for tropes, objects, expressions, styles, and images from former works” (de Valck & Hagener 2005, p. 15). Thus, the work of a director like Khan becomes not only an archaeological endeavour of rediscovery, retrieval and storage but also a process of dis-membering, membering and re-­ membering.8 At the heart of this process is a crisis of memory, not only of filmic memory but of memory itself, which ironically has become the central psycho-cultural concern of our times. Driven by the catastrophes of the twentieth century, including in case of South Asia, the violent ruptures between colonial and postcolonial periods, formations and reformations of postcolonial states ensure that memory is inextricably intertwined with trauma. This leads to a kind of Janus-headed re-membering where traumas of the past also anticipate future traumas, not only in the failures of the nation-state but also in an ambiguous anxiety of the impending Anthropocene catastrophe (Elsaesser 2005; Roth 2011; Ghosh 2016). In face of such dread, any evocation of nostalgia is inextricably interwoven with melancholia, of a repetitive cycle of “non-mourning.” Unlike mourning which is a way of dealing with loss including the painful withdrawal of investment from the lost object and eventually achieving closure, melancholia is grieving for a loss that is unclear or unidentifiable. While any application of Freudian theories must necessarily be undertaken with caveats, they offer interesting pathways for analysing the melancholia that underpins Khan’s feature films, in a latent form in MHN and OSO, growing explicit in TMK and culminating with HNY.9 Freud describes melancholia as a “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the world,

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loss of the capacity to love, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings” (1953, n.p.). Freud adds that this leads to a process of disenchantment and self-critique. This is most clear in Khan’s third outing, TMK which is unusual for its relative lack of success both at the time of its release and afterwards. The film is remembered a decade later only for its “Sheila ki Jawani” song sequence, in direct contrast to the fandom that has grown around MHN and OSO. It is also the film with the least involvement by Khan who is credited only as the director, unlike her other films. In contrast, her husband Shirish Kunder is credited multiple times and the style of the film is different enough from Khan’s to raise questions about the extent of her involvement in the project. Moreover, the film announces itself as an official remake of de Sica’s neo-realist classic, an odd choice in itself as the filmmaker, his style and politics could not be further removed from Khan’s. The choice also disavows Khan’s well-established and cinematically demonstrated “certain tastes” which are firmly rooted in the popular Hindi film. Unsurprisingly, TMK jettisons any attempt at adhering to its purported origin text and attempts to reclaim its own film history. Nominally relying on de Sica’s plot of a conman using trappings of a film shoot in a rural location for a heist, TMK, like Khan’s earlier films, is concerned with “industrial histories” of popular Hindi film industry that could “both highlight and conceal, through respective nostalgic hazes, technological and studio histories past” (Sperb 2015, p. 8). If stardom was a theme of OSO (Chakravarty 2013), popular Hindi film industry and its place in world cinema are the main concern for TMK. However, the film seems unable to decide if it wishes to expose the sleazy underbelly with the production apparatus that frames “Sheila ki Jawani” song sequence, parody stars who want to win the Oscars, mock the fandom of the rural, impoverished spectators or comment on the chaotic nature of popular Hindi film production. This indecision undermines Khan’s usual intertextual citations, which still abound, but demonstrate an entropic disenchantment with the same film history referents that had previously been deployed to great affective satisfaction. This unexpected and—within Khan’s oeuvre—anachronistic disavowal of popular Hindi cinema and industry serves as a lowering self-esteem and a resultant loss of confidence in not only Khan’s own filmmaking but also in popular Hindi cinema as referents of her unique cinephilia: the onscreen Tabrez pretends to direct an anti-colonial film, the premise of which parodies Lagaan (2001) and quickly abandons it to the villagers he disdains; the already married protagonists have little love for

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each other—Tabrez is controlling, Anya is dissatisfied and there is palpable relief when they are shown as going their separate ways in the final sequence; Aatish Kapoor (Akshay Khanna) the film star harkens after Hollywood success and has little of OSO’s wonder at films he makes or the industry of which he is a part. The reflexivity and nostalgia of the earlier film is replaced by a profound disenchantment: the poorly made Bharat ka Khazana (India’s treasure) made by the villagers after Tabrez is arrested—one of the slim plot references to de Sica’s film—is enthusiastically watched by the cast and crew involved but met with disdain by the rest of the audience. Yet the shoddily crafted work is declared a “masterpiece” like “French cinema” by a critic whose authority is established by his sombre western wear and faux-­ American accent, and wins Aatish the much-vaunted Oscar. The heretofore latent melancholia is foregrounded in TMK by the stylistic elements—frenetic narrative pace, highly saturated visual style and an acute reflexivity—that have become identified as Khan’s directorial style but redeployed here with intense disenchantment. Khan references much of her own previous work, most explicitly recreating the red-carpet scene from OSO for TMK’s finale but the earlier glamour, excitement and wonder is replaced by chaotic disarray and alienation. The film industry that had rolled up the red carpet to celebrate a new release in the earlier film is missing here and Aatish is not only the sole “star” but is seated alongside Anya, the aspiring, possibly porn actress and the rough-edged villagers. At one level the sequence appears to lament the democratisation of Hindi cinema brought in by technological, material and cultural changes. At another, it echoes Khan’s melancholic statement that the shoot of OSO’s title track was “the last time they  – the Hindi film industry  – were big happy family” (Chopra 2017). This profoundly painful dejection is underscored by the end credits song sequence in TMK that plaintively pleads “everyone wants a happy ending” and eschews the playful, tongue-in-­ cheek approach used for these in the earlier two films (Gehlawat 2020, p. 108). If her earlier works had resisted “falling into an easy caricature mode” (Sarkar 2013, p. 220) in TMK, Khan’s usual flourishes of homage, pastiche, simulacrum and parody are no longer able to avoid this fall. In her final (so far) feature film, Khan reclaims much of her usual cinematic flourish, creating another ensemble, big-budget spectacle with HNY, building in a richly intertextual text that draws on Tezaab, not only naming her female protagonist Mohini but initiating her appearance on screen with the familiar sound of male voices chanting her name; Shalimar (1978), the big-budget international ensemble film about a jewel heist, Deewaar

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(1975), where the protagonist is told that his father is a thief and Naseeb (1982), for the cage fighting. She reassembles part of the OSO  cast with SRK, Deepika Padukone, Boman Irani and much of her habitual behind-thescreen team. Abhishek Bachchan, son of Amitabh Bachchan, the star whose films from the 1970s and 1980s are most frequently cited by Khan, is cast here in a double role. The film parodies the industry but without the affection of OSO, often cruelly spoofing various recognisable personalities. The most notable of these is Saroj Khan (no relation), an older choreographer and at times Khan’s competitor, who had choreographed the song sequences in Tezaab. HNY’s nostalgic evocations hold a darker edge, recalling history and film history of poverty, deprivation and violence. By the time the film reaches its most critical referent at the finale, it is clear that HNY is an exercise in reflective nostalgia, less a longing for a lost past and more an engagement with the challenges of the present and expressions of anxieties for the future. Charlie’s (SRK) entrance on stage for the final song sequence cites a much older film, Raj Kapoor’s explicitly political Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai focussing on the post-independence Indian state’s attempt to rehabilitate dacoits/rebels of the Chambal valley and reintegrate them in the lawful national mainstream. Charlie’s next dialogue is densely intertextual: “jahan roz hi danga rehta hai” (Garm Hava 1973; Tamas 1988; Bombay, 1995, Black Friday, 2004 and many more on sectarian violence); “Jahan roz akhbaro mein scamo ka panga rehta hai” (too many to name as films on political corruption formed the heart of 1970s and 1980s popular Hindi cinema); “Jahan aam admi sadkon pe aadha nanga rehta hai” (Boot Polish 1954; Jagte Raho 1956; poverty remained a dominant theme of popular Hindi cinema right until the 1990s). His final assertion “is haal mein bhi, is daur mein bhi, har dil mein bhi tiranga rehta hai” is less a nationalist slogan and more a cri de cœur full of pathos. This reflective nostalgia evoked by this dense citation exposes the audience to the melancholia of the endlessly repetitive cycle of poverty, violence and grief. Citations of SRK’s earlier films and Khan’s own films add to this already teetering intertextual pile. If Khan’s melancholia was latent (MHN, OSO) or instinctive, HNY activates what in postcolonial context is the “critical agency” of melancholia where the present is not just crippled by the past but they are both involved in the same cycle (Kumar 2010). This critical agency develops as the past remains unresolved and some part of it continues being carried forward (Khanna 2006). If self-critique is a symptom of

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melancholia, such constant critique—and collective self-critique in the postcolonial context—becomes a powerful form of criticism of the independent national state, not only in the present but also its near seven decades at the time of HNY’s release. In such a framework, Khan’s brief insertion of a look-alike of newly elected Indian PM’s message is less a function of “the most lavishly mounted propaganda movie yet about India’s increasing soft power” (Rangan 2014, n.p.) and more a melancholic recognition that history and film history can “move through history and arrive at the present with similar problems, as they have never been addressed when the time was nascent: the moment of independence” (Kumar 2010, n.p.).

Conclusion In the run up to the release of HNY, Khan said that she had “been brash and outspoken” but she was going to be 50 and “as a mother I’m more careful as to what I say” (Chatterjee, 2014, n.p.). The statement added to a general distancing of many minoritised members of the Hindi film from explicit politics. An intersectional understanding of identity and power could provide greater insight than simply considering Khan on the axis of gender as her experience and creative work is located on a more complex intersection of power and marginalisation. Although any clear answers are beyond the scope of this chapter, placing Khan’s feature films in this rubric may not only provide insights into her oeuvre but also to wider creative output by minoritised filmmakers in popular Hindi cinema. She remains a ubiquitous presence in the Indian mediascape. Yet there has been a marked shift in her public engagements where she seems to channel the manic pixie dream girl that she has often placed onscreen in her films with a relentlessly cheerful demeanour marked with periodic wistfulness. Her lack of directorial output suggests a more troubling self-­ silencing where the condition of melancholia is exacerbated by actual grief for the loss of people, opportunities, lived realities and ideals. For the cinephilic director of popular Hindi cinema, a form that relies on affective outpouring as an identifier, this creates impossible creative constraints as any cinematic expression runs the risk of affective honesty. * Author’s note: For more on “melancholia,” please refer to: Thomas Elsaesser’s 2015 “Black Suns and a Bright Planet: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as Thought Experiment.” Theory and Event 18 (2): n.p. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/578627. Also, Elsaeeser’s 2015 “Trauma, Memory, History, or: Postmodernism as Mourning Work?”

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Notes 1. Particularly interesting in light of Khan’s extravagant “item numbers” as well as for its early reflexive look at casting couch, albeit in the modelling rather than film industry. 2. While Khan has said little publicly, it is notable that Kunder’s name does not appear in credits for HNY.  The choice of stars, storyline, script and only glimpses of her signature style suggest that TMK may be the least “Khan” of Khan’s films. 3. Khan expands on OSO as a “passionate love letter to movies” to “specially Hindi industry, and the quirks of it” (Chopra 2017). 4. Khan engages with a more complex mediation of class here with accents, attitudes and cultural capital as signifiers instead of simply wealth and material consumption. 5. See Willemen 1994; Sontag 1996; Dika, 2003; Elsaesser 2005, 2015. 6. While a number of stars performed double roles in films, Bachchan’s big successes seemed intended to hold his oversize star persona which seemingly would not fit a single role in a single film. SRK’s star text draws explicitly on the earlier star’s (Singh 2010), suggesting yet another level of citation. 7. Gorfinkel’s theorisation as wilful anachronism, nostalgia and cinema provides a more meaningful framework than those deployed, for example, by Wilkinson-Weber who dismisses Khan’s instructions to OSO costume designers as “the nostalgia …tinged with the sense that 1970s and 1980s Bollywood was…ridiculous” (2010, p. 140). Such an extrapolation would rarely be applied to the study of an auteur of the Global North. 8. See also Elsaesser 2004. 9. This essay employs Freud’s ideas through a postcolonial lens, Khanna’s 2006 conceptualisation as its primary reference.

References Anand, C. (1981). Kudrat. Trishakti Productions. Arora, P. (1954). Boot Polish. R.K. Films. Asif, K. (1960). Mughal-e-Azam. Sterling Investment Corp. Barot, C. (1978). Don. Nariman Films. Bedi, N. (1972). Jawani Deewani. Rose Movies. Bhansali, S.L. (2007). Saawariya. SPE Films, SLB Films. Boym, S. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, New York. Chakravarty, S.S. (1993). National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987. University of Texas Press, Austin.

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———. (2013). ‘Configurations: The Body as World in Bollywood Stardom’. In: Sen, M., Basu, A. (eds). Figurations in Indian Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York and Basingstoke, pp. 179–201. Chakravorty, P. (1977). Dream Girl. Trimurti Films. Chandra, N. (1988). Tezaab. N Chandra. Chatterjee, R. (2014). ‘Farah Khan: I Used to Cuss to Fit in with the Boys, Now I Don’t because I Know I’m Far Superior’. HuffPost India. December 7. http:// www.huffingtonpost.in/2014/12/07/farah-­khan-­interview_n_6282600.html. Accessed on 19 March 2021. Chopra, A. (2017). ‘Ten Years of Om Shanti Om with Farah Khan.’ Film Companion. November 9. https://www.filmcompanion.in/interviews/ bollywood-­interview/10-­years-­of-­om-­shanti-­om-­farah-­khan-­interview-­with-­ anupama-­chopra/. Accessed on 15 June 2021. Chopra, Y. (1975). Deewaar. Trimurti Films. ———.(2004). Veer-Zaara. Yash Raj Films. de Sica, V. (1966). Caccia Alla Volpe. Compagnia Cinematografica Montoro, Nancy Enterprises, N.C. Bardoli Enterprises. de Valck, M. & Hagener, M. (2005). ‘Introduction: Down with Cinephilia? Long Live Cinephilia? And Other Videosyncratic Pleasures.’ In: de Valck, M., Hagener, M. (eds). Cinephilia: Movies, Love, Memory. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, pp. 11–26. Desai, M. (1977a). Amar Akbar Anthony. Hirawat Jain and Company, MKD Films, Manmohan Film. ———. (1977b). Dharam-Veer. S.S. Movietone ———. (1979). Suhaag. Rajinder Kumar Sharma. ———. (1981). Naseeb. MKD Films Combine, Aasia Films. ———. (1983). Coolie. MKD Films Combine, Aasia Films. Dika, V. (2003). Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Elsaesser, T. (2016). Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam. ———. (2004). ‘The New Film History as Media Archaeology.’ Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques/Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies 14(2-3): 75–117. ———. (2005). ‘Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment.’ In: de Valck, M., Hagener, M. (eds). Cinephilia: Movies, Love, Memory. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, pp. 27–44. ———. (2015a). ‘Black Suns and a Bright Planet: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as Thought Experiment.’ Theory and Event 18 (2): n.p. https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/578627. ———. (2015b). ‘Trauma, memory, history, or: Postmodernism as mourning work?’. https://mindthescreen.wordpress.com/2015/12/23/trauma-­ memory-­history-­or-­postmodernism-­as-­mourning-­work/. Accessed on 30 June 2021. (cannot find reference in body for these two references)

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Freud, S. (1953). ‘Mourning and Melancholy.’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth Press, London. https://www.sas. upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-­l ibrary/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf. Accessed on 24 June 2021. Ganti, T. (2012). Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Duke University Press, Durham NC. Gehlawat A. (2020). ‘The Picture is not yet over!: The end credits song sequence in Bollywood.’ In: Gehlawat, A., Dudrah, R. (eds). The Evolution of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema. Routledge, London, pp. 105–118. Ghai, S. (1980). Karz. Mukta Arts. Ghosh, A. (2016), The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gorfinkel, E. (2005). ‘The Future of Anachronisms: Todd Haynes and the Magnificent Andersons.’ In: de Valck, M. , Hagener, M. (eds). Cinephilia: Movies, Love, Memory. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, pp. 153–168. Gowariker, A. (2001). Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. Aamir Khan Productions, Jhamu Sughand Productions. ———. (2004). Swades: We, the People. Ashutosh Gowariker Productions, Dillywood, UTV Motion Pictures. Haham, C. (2006). Enchantment of the Mind: Manmohan Desai’s Films. Roli Books, New Delhi. Hussain, N. (1977). Hum Kisise Kum Nahin. Nasir Hussain Films, United Producers. Iyer, U. (2016). ‘Looking for the Past in Pastiche; Intertextuality in Bollywood Song-and-Dance.’ In: Fogarty, M., Evans, M. (eds). Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films. Equinox, London, pp. 207–226. Kapoor, R. (1970). Mera Naam Joker. R.K. Films. Kapur, S. (1983). Masoom. Krsna Films Unit. Karmakar, R. (1960). Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hain. R.K. Films. Kashyap, A. (2004). Black Friday. Mid Day Multi Media, Big Bang Pictures, Jhamu Sughand. Khan, F. (2016). Main Hoon Na/Making/Farah Khan  – The Director. Red Chillies Entertainment. ———. (2004). Main Hoon Na. Red Chillies Entertainment, Venus Movies. ———. (2007). Om Shanti Om. Red Chillies Entertainment. ———. (2010). Tees Maar Khan. Hari Om Entertainment, Three’s Company, UTV Motion Pictures. ———. (2014). Happy New Year. Red Chillies Entertainment. Khanna, R. (2006). ‘Post-Palliative: Coloniality’s Affective Dissonance,’ Postcolonial Text. https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/ view/385/815. Accessed on 24 June 2021.

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Kumar, K. (2010). ‘“Bhagat Singh Topless, Waving in Jeans”: Melancholia Through Mimesis in Rang de Basanti.’ Wide Screen 1(2). https://widescreenjournal.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/bhagat-­singh-­topless-­waving-­in-­jeans-­ melancholia-­through-­mimesis-­in-­rang-­de-­basanti.pdf. Accessed on 29 June 2021. Kumar, R. (1980). Do Aur Do Paanch. Devar Films. Kumar, V. (2019). ‘Farah Khan on Making Mainstream Commercial Films: My Father Died Penniless Because His Movies Flopped’. India.com. August 27. https://www.india.com/entertainment/bollywood-­n ews-­f arah-­k han-­o n-­ making-­mainstream-­commercial-­films-­my-­father-­died-­penniless-­because-­his-­ movies-­flopped-­3757947/. Accessed on 20 March 2021. Marshall, G. (1990). Pretty Woman. Touchstone Pictures, Silver Screen Partners IV. Mitra, A. & Mitra, S. (1956). Jagte Raho. R.K. Films. Nihalani, G. (1988). Tamas. L.M. Bijlani, Govind Nihalani, Freni Variava. Prasad, M. (2003). ‘This Thing Called Bollywood.’ Seminar 525. https://www. india-­seminar.com/2003/525/525%20madhava%20prasad.htm. Accessed on 20 March 2021. Rajadhyaksha, A. (2003). ‘The “Bollywoodization” of Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena.’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4(1):25–39. Ramanathan, S. (1983). Mahaan. Satya Chitra International. Rangachari Shah, G. & Kapur, M. (2018). ‘Introduction.’ In: Rangachari Shah, G., Kapur, M. (eds). Change Makers: Twenty Women Transforming Bollywood Behind the Scenes. Penguin Random House India Pvt Ltd, Gurgaon, pp. ix–xii. Rangan, B. (2007). ‘Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai.’ https://baradwajrangan.wordpress. com/2007/11/10/review-­om-­shanti-­om-­saawariya/. Accessed on 19 March 2021. ———. (2014). ‘Happy New Year…Heil Bollywood.” https://baradwajrangan. wordpress.com/2014/10/24/happy-­new-­year-­heil-­bollywood/. Accessed on 19 March 2021. Rao, R.K. & Khan, F. (2017). ‘Tape Cast.’ Film Companion. December 18. https://www.filmcompanion.in/inter views/bollywood-­i nter view/ rajkummar-­rao-­and-­farah-­khan-­tapecast-­fly-­beyond/. Accessed on 15 June 2021. Roth, M.S. (2011). Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living with the Past. Columbia University Press, New York. Ratnam, M. (1995). Bombay. Aalayam Productions, Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited, Jhamu Sughand. Roy, B. (1958). Madhumati. Bimal Roy Productions. Samanta, S. (1976). Mehbooba. M.R. Productions. ———. (1979). The Great Gambler. Associated Films and Finance Corporation.

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Sarkar, B. (2013). ‘Metafiguring Bollywood: Brecht After Om Shanti Om.’ In: Sen, M., Basu, A. (eds). Figurations in Indian Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York and Basingstoke, pp. 205–235. Sathyu, M.S. (1973). Garm Hava. Film Finance Corporation. ———. (1981). Kahan Kahan Se Guzar Gaya. MS Sathyu Productions. Shah, K. (1978). Shalimar. Suresh Shah, Judson Productions. Sheshkumar, A. et  al (2009–2018). India’s Got Talent. Big Synergy Media Fremantle Media, India, 8 seasons, 100 episodes. Singh, S. (2008). ‘The Road to Rāmarājya: Analysing Shah Rukh Khan’s Parallel Text in Commercial Hindi Cinema.’ Bells: Barcelona English language and literature studies 17. https://raco.cat/index.php/Bells/article/ view/141365/192876. Accessed on 25 March 2021. ———. (2010). ‘From Kurukṣetra to Rāmarājya: A Comparative Analysis of the Star Personas of Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan.’ In: D.  Dimitrova (ed). Religion in Literature and Film in South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 213–222. ———. (2017). Amitabh Bachchan. BFI/Palgrave, London. Sippy, R. (1975). Sholay. NH Studioz, Sippy Films. Sippy, R. N. (1982). Satte Pe Satta. Rupam Chitra. Sontag, S. (1996). ‘The Decay of Cinema.’ New York Times. February 25. https:// www.nytimes.com/1996/02/25/magazine/the-­d ecay-­o f-­c inema.html. Accessed on 18 June 2021. Sperb, J. (2015). Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick. Stewart, K. (1988). ‘Nostalgia – A Polemic.’ Cultural Anthropology 3(3): 227:241. Travis, B. (2020). ‘Box Office: The 25 Highest Grossing Movies Ever Directed By Women.’ Forbes. May 9. https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbean/2020/05/09/box-­o ffice-­t he-­2 5-­h ighest-­g rossing-­m ovies-­e ver-­ directed-­by-­women/?sh=3bb4c1225e7c. Accessed on 9 January 2021. Vandy, Jaising, M.V., Alva, N., Alva, N.J. et  al. (2004  – 2021). Indian Idol. ARSenic’s Business Empire, Fremantle Media International, Miditech Private Ltd, India, 12 seasons, 317 episodes. Wilkinson-Weber, C. (2010). ‘A Need for Redress: Costume in Some Recent Hindi Film Remakes’. Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies 1: 125–145. Willemen, P. (1994). Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis.

CHAPTER 8

Guneet Monga: Gender, Labour and the “Disrupter” Indie Film Producer Nandana Bose

Usually a film producer’s contribution amounts to invisible, behind-the-­ scenes, creative labour, what Monga refers to as “hustle.” Without any obvious, explicit signature style that auteurs are typically associated with, the auteur theory becomes an unproductive approach when applied to film producers because visible signs of their creative inputs and interventions are absent. Thus, instead of applying an approach such as the auteur theory which is hackneyed, outdated, and has limited applicability when appraising the primarily hidden work of a producer (unless s/he is also the filmmaker), I adopt the evolving approach of pursuing feminist historiography by focusing on the creative, administrative, logistical, intellectual and affective labour invested by Monga over decades that turned her into a singular powerhouse of indie film production. In pursuing this route of enquiry, I am informed by the vibrant and rapidly expanding field of feminist media historiography, and in particular, by the seminal scholarship of Debashree Mukherjee and Neepa Majumdar.1 Mukherjee foregrounds the heterogeneous nature of film work, its precarity and risks involved in her

N. Bose (*) Kolkata, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_8

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pathbreaking 2020 book Bombay Hustle, Making Movies in a Colonial City. She also emphasizes fatigue and exhaustion as an integral aspect of the affective labour of the female film worker. Monga’s exhausting hustle is chronicled in this chapter by extrapolating a narrative of a pioneering indie female producer’s labour from her audio-visual and print interviews, her social media posts and journalistic reports.

Shifting Dynamics in Hindi Film Production There are perceptible shifts in gender and generational dynamics in almost every department of commercial filmmaking. Several research studies on media and gender suggest that more women behind the camera result in increased screen time and speaking roles for female characters, and more balanced and varied gender representations in front of the camera. Apart from growing numbers of debutante female filmmakers of fiction, assistant directors, and editors, there are more female scriptwriters who have greater opportunities to explore the inner lives of women of varying ages; delve into female psyches, perspectives and sensibilities; and create textured female characters living rich and varied experiential and affective lives well beyond their twenties. It is not happenchance that the capable direction of Gauri Shinde drew upon Sridevi’s histrionic talents to engender one of the late star’s most memorable and nuanced performances in English Vinglish (2012). While 1990s Bombay commercial cinema (with a few exceptions) rarely wrote scripts exclusively for its leading female stars, the present industrial context enables a commercially successful female scriptwriter-­ filmmaker to write a role with a specific leading female star in mind—the instance of Zoya Akhtar writing the character of Safeena for Alia Bhatt in the hip-hop sensation Gully Boy (2019), described by First Post as “a character that could well be the Angry Young Woman” (Kokra 2019, n.p.). Of particular interest is the rise of younger female producers, notably, Guneet Monga’s boutique film production house Sikhya Entertainment founded in 2008, and Zoya Akhtar’s Tiger Baby Films (co-founded in 2015 with her mother Honey Irani) that co-produced Gully Boy along with her brother Farhan Akhtar’s company Excel Entertainment; and female-stars-turned-co-producers, notably Anushka Sharma who, along with her brother Karnesh, established Clean Slate Films in 2013, and is being currently hailed as a game changer in web content creation in the aftermath of the resounding success of the crime thriller Paatal Lok (2020), and the critical acclaim of Bulbbul (2020) released on the

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streaming giant, Amazon Prime. In March 2021, Alia Bhatt joined the league of top female stars turned producers, Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, by launching her production company Eternal Sunshine Productions along with her parents and sister. Some senior female stars have major stakes in production companies as co-owners (such as Diya Mirza’s Born Free Entertainment founded in 2011, and most recently, One India Stories launched on her birthday in 2019; Juhi Chawla et  al.); or through spousal/familial connections, notably, Rani Mukerji and Aditya Chopra’s iconic production house Yash Raj Films (YRF) that produced Mardaani (2014), Hichki (2018) and Mardaani 2 (2019) as star vehicles tailor-made for Mukherji to extend her career and reinvent her star persona by diversifying into the crime thriller/action and comedy genres; Vidya Balan and her husband Siddharth Roy Kapur’s production company Roy Kapur Films established in 2017; and Madhuri Dixit’s RnM Moving Pictures Production (co-owned with her husband Dr Sriram Nene) that has kept her dance legacy alive virtually and on the television through dance reality shows, besides venturing into Marathi film production. According to Monga, “the fact that the number of women in the film industry is growing is partly because of supportive men” who believe in gender equality such as Anurag Kashyap who placed her at the helm of his company AKFPL (Kapur and Shah 2018, n.p.).

Disrupt to Construct A summary profile description on the archived web page of Anurag Kashyap Films Private Limited (AKFPL) underscores why Monga is considered a disruptor: “Anyone can make a film, passion, tears and blood all withstanding but finding an audience for it is a different struggle altogether. Finding an alternative audience which is not restricted by region or geography and channelizing the right stream for the Indie effort at a global level has been Guneet Monga’s forte. A route less traveled in India. A definite new hope” (n.p.). Although she started her career fifteen years ago, one feels producer, CEO and Founder of Sikhya Entertainment she has been hustling for many more years because of the strides she has made in disrupting the producing landscape for independent films and international co-productions. Describing herself as “a disruptor” (Kapur and Shah 2018, n.p.), she has broken stereotypes associated with Bollywood film financiers by discovering unconventional modes of distribution and film financing and bridging the gap between Indian films and foreign

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buyers and distributors. A non-conformist in her personal and professional life, she says that they “do everything that the world tells us not to” (ZFF Masterclass 2013). The global face of Indian cinema and a trailblazer, she accelerated international co-productions and was the first producer to use the 1985 India-France treaty to co-produce her magnum opus The Lunchbox in 2012 (Ghosh 2021) at a time, and in a country, where co-­ productions remain a relatively nascent film financing model. Funding for independent filmmakers is a perennial challenge compounded by a general lack of knowledge about financing Indies, the Central government does not provide any tax breaks or significant grants for Hindi cinema; and few sales agents represent India at international film festivals. Contrarily, it is very common to be an independent producer in a country such as France where, according to Monga, “producers are the real tastemakers” (Ghosh 2021, n.p.) unlike India where the actor and director come first (Ghosh 2021). Another example of an international co-production, Guneet’s film Monsoon Shootout (2013), a cops-and-gangsters thriller, was funded by money from France and the Netherlands. Ever the risktaker, when it got held up due to a shortage of money, she sold the only property her family owned, which was a house in Delhi she had built for her mother. When she needed funds to produce Peddlers (2012) and Haraamkhor (2015), she turned to social media and crowd-funded the projects via Facebook much before it was a popular mode of fundraising. Remarkably, “she single-­handedly raised nearly Rs 1 crore from Facebook users for the film Peddlers which cost Rs 2 crore, posting the film’s script on the social networking site” (Rege 1999, n.p.).When the student short film Kavi that she was co-producing was nominated for the Student Academy Awards in 2009 she wrote random emails to rich people, including the President of India Pratibha Patil, requesting them to fund her journey to Los Angeles so that she could attend the prestigious award ceremony. After a visit to the Rashtrapati Bhavan opened doors and sponsors, this desperate, unorthodox method proved successful when she and her team walked the red carpet (Outlook Business Wow 2019). This would be the first of many exhilarating encounters at the Oscars. A woman of extraordinary grit, determination and enterprise, setbacks have taught Monga the single most important lesson that a film producer needs to learn—that there is an audience for every film and one has to find it. Finding precisely these alternative pathways to audiences for her corpus of films is at the heart of the disruption that she has enabled. Her

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unorthodox modus operandi is matched by her penchant for going against the grain and breaking traditions by eschewing stereotypical Bollywood song and dance spectacles. Known for greenlighting unconventional, non-­ formulaic scripts and stories that straddle commercial entertainers and the art house, Monga has produced more than thirty films, which include some of the most critically acclaimed films in contemporary India, such as The Lunchbox, Gangs of Wasseypur and Masaan. Fundamentally Indian at heart, these indies have universal appeal. Driven by a “need to define yourself in the international market” (Ghosh 2021, n.p.), she likes to call her cinema the new commercial which are typically low-budget films with strong scripts focusing on dark, edgy, off-beat narratives and characters, many of which are situated within the category of Neo-Noir. That Girl in Yellow Boots (2011), for instance, is a thriller that exposes corruption, incest and desperation within Mumbai’s seedy underworld. Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), a contemporary classic directed by Anurag Kashyap, is a brutal revenge crime drama based on the coal mafia in Dhanbad, Jharkhand. Peddlers tells the story of two young men entrapped in Mumbai’s drug trade and awaits theatrical release in India. Haraamkhor, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui, tells a forbidden love story between a teacher and his student. Masaan is a remarkably hard-hitting film about caste, death, love and desire. “The sheer diversity of these stories reflects the churn taking place in modern, aspirational India […] Gripping storylines that are neatly packed, they are a refreshing antidote to the predictable glitz and glamour of star-led films Bollywood has dished out for decades” (Kapur & Shah 2018, n.p.). Today, there are domestic audiences for the kind of gritty content Monga engenders. Since the first multiplex arrived in India in 1997 and the recent pandemic-driven digital streaming platform boom, newer distribution channels have encouraged audiences to develop diverse, more eclectic tastes and given independent filmmakers varied avenues for their work, encouraging them to take greater risks. According to Monga, she has witnessed a sea of change (sic) in the Indian cinema realm. “I have definitely seen Indian independent cinema come of age. From going to festivals being a taboo to being very cool and a privilege. Looking at my journey with Say Salaam India (2007), Dasvidaniya (2008) to Oscar winning documentary short film Period. End of Sentence. (2018) to now Soorarai Pottru (2019) and Pagglait, I can say that it has been a decade of independent cinema. I have thrived on the periphery of Bollywood and been able to have our own little universe of creators” (Chakraborty 2021, n.p.).

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The Art of the Hustle(r) Monga explores creative ways of hustle which she describes as the power of showing up, taking ownership of the project, inventing a path every time because there is no clear path to film financing; building a vision and living under the burden of that vision for a few years. Hustling means meticulously planning a year-long festival trajectory from the very beginning of a film; learning to speak the language of finance in the country with which she negotiates deals; constant, dynamic strategizing and following up after meeting people; and reading up and keeping oneself informed about current deals taking place (Jio MAMI 2021). She has been moving up in the chain, from meeting sale representatives to meeting distributors in foreign countries. She makes it a priority to attend the annual Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) international film festival to keep herself informed about global trends in cinema, and points out that one of her most precious connections, Ava Duvernay, the powerhouse American indie filmmaker, producer, and writer, is entirely as a result of attending MAMI (Ibid.). The opportunity to attend major international film festivals every year has informed and amplified her hustle (as AKFP films were selected every year), although she rarely watches films at these festivals as she is in meetings all day—they are power packed, intense work days. Aside from MAMI, platforms like the annual Film Bazaar, organized by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) have evolved featuring mentors from all over the world for valuable workshops and sessions. NFDC invited Lars von Trier’s editor Molly Marlene Stensgaard for an editing workshop and Monga used her for Monsoon Shootout and Haraamkhor (Bhushan 2013). Hustling is exhausting work—the metaphor she provides for her kind of hustle is that of running through a dense fog shooting arrows and hitting some targets while missing others. But it is a hustle that she is proud of (Jio MAMI 2021), an integral part of which is being punctual for meetings and always ready with her “A” game, thoroughly prepared with films on pen drives and pitch-related paraphernalia. Monga’s art of hustling is characterized by “intelligent hard work” which keeps her ahead in the game. For instance, two-part feature film Gangs of Wasseypur was sold as an eight-part mini-series (each of forty minutes duration) to Netflix United States territory as a consequence of her gaining that piece of vital knowledge at international festivals and travelling to the US in 2012, long

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before Netflix has started its international content production (Jio MAMI 2021). Monga’s hustle has involved expending considerable time and energy in building international clout and a formidable network. Travelling the world to understand the international market, with her trademark operational style in tow, she has taken chances. She has made contacts and started a relationship which years later has borne fruit. For instance, when she was looking for a US partner for her magnum opus The Lunchbox, her prior networking paid off when Sony Pictures Classics acquired it, making her dream come true of “that one Indian film that goes and sells around the world” (Kapur & Shah 2018, n.p.). With that never-say-die attitude and chutzpah, she has become a regular on the international film festival circuit, developing an enviable list of international sales contacts and quickly gaining a reputation as a link between the Indian and Western markets. Film critic Baradwaj Rangan provides valuable insight into Monga’s pioneering work: “Most of the people who work inside India don’t have that kind of network outside the country” (qtd. in Kapur & Shah 2018, n.p.). Due to her extensive networking, Guneet has made impressive contacts within film studios around the world. “At the end of the day, festivals and other people latch on to one person and depend on that one person to provide the gateway to that particular film-making community because programmers cannot keep track of every single movement in every single country. Guneet helped to create the bridge between Indian independent films and foreign distributors” (Kapur & Shah 2018, n.p.). She also knows how to structure a deal whilst keeping the process simple to three queries—how much money is involved? What is the share? What will the film earn? Everything else is in the contracts and clauses. The bottom line is to keep it simple, make it easy to pay yourself and not spend on lifestyle (Ramnath 2012). Because for Monga, “budgets go wrong, films don’t go wrong” (ZFF Masterclass 2013). Despite her keen business sense, she is equally aware of the vagaries of business and of the entertainment industry which she learnt from her father, a property consultant, who had always informed her about fluctuating fortunes in business. Her parents had also instilled a deep sense of honesty in her and the importance of having a clear conscience (Kapur & Shah 2018). Contrary to the traditional image of the mercenary, money-minded Bollywood producer, Monga is “spiritual about the business of filmmaking” (Mahadevan 2020). She spiritually and emotionally feels that stories

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choose you. For her it is an intuitive, instinctive process. If a story moves her, she does what it takes to produce it, even if people warn her that it may not be financially viable. The story should also be global, impacting people around the world which she can then “position, structure and package so that they have a larger footprint” (Singh 2021, n.p.). She never takes her viewers’ time for granted (Femina Woman 2019), feeling a sense of responsibility towards the public who come to cinema halls, unconsciously looking for answers. “I almost feel like, what are we doing with people’s time, people’s money?” (Kapur & Shah 2018, n.p.). If they choose to spend their money on a movie, she wants them to feel it was worth it (Kapur & Shah 2018). “Considerable thought goes into structuring a film” (ZFF Masterclass 2013). Underscoring the importance of strategy, Monga’s responsibility as a producer is to find the right format and platform for each story, packaging the film, and figuring out the most effective way to reach out to audiences. Working with an incredible team of producers, she enjoys testing financing models and making it happen (Jio MAMI 2021). For her, film production involves common sense, as it is not rocket science, thinking on the spot, taking responsibility, and problem solving (IVM Podcasts 2021). Her collaboration with the director is based on complete faith and trust, although it can often be an isolating process (ZFF Masterclass 2013). Monga’s hustle is idealistic too—it is based on the inherent dream of storytelling (Show Up 2019), an extraordinary work ethics and a winning attitude. Her motto is to keep working and trusting one’s instinct (Social Ketchup 2020). She says that there is immense power of showing up and following up, and never giving up on one’s dreams (Show Up 2019). Her life is testament of the singular power of persistence, positive energy and resilience.

Labour Sikhya is a Punjabi word that means “to keep learning” and Monga has been learning from the ground up from the time she started as an “intern’s intern” on a French-German-Indian film Valley of Flowers in 2004 (Ghosh 2021) which involved photocopying and scanning documents, entering phone numbers into a database and doing odd jobs for the production team (Kapur & Shah 2018). It was grunt work—the number crunching, logistics and networking—but this first experience of being on a film set

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proved so decisive and invaluable that she advises people to go study producing or start ground up and not judge the process. This stint came after she had tried her hand at several jobs. She started very young and by the time she was twenty-one, Guneet had been a DJ, an insurance agent, a sales agent for Laughing Cow cheese, an event planner, a rally car driver and a property saleswoman for her late father (Show Up 2019). Brimming with ambition and hungry to make movies, she dreamt of moving to Mumbai after studying mass communication in Delhi. Harish Amin recognized that she had the skillsets for film production and encouraged her to do so (Outlook Business Wow 2019). She describes her move as a sweet story, moving from an intern to a location manager, production manager, line producer; she already knew many “below the line” people in Mumbai such as gaffers, light boys and vendors, caterers; and a peer group from her college days helped considerably. She moved to the filmmaking capital along with FTII graduate and editor, Prerna Saigal, “her wall” and closest friend, with whom she has attended college in Delhi and interned with her mother (Jio MAMI 2021). She met Anurag Kashyap while working on the Balaji Telefilms production Once Upon a Time Mumbaai (2010), and worked with him at AKFPL for five to six years. It was with him that she got her first glimpse of the Venice Film Festival, built relationships in France, Korea, China and so on (Ghosh 2021), and worked tirelessly to export AKFPL globally by “attempting to convert the personal equity of its founder-filmmaker into finance and distribution deals” for his films (Ramnath 2012, n.p.). She built bridges between Kashyap’s company, foreign buyers and distributors, found different ways of selling modestly budgeted, off-beat Indian films to foreign markets through sale of theatrical, television and DVDs rights, cracking video-on-demand deals, and going to unthinkable places that included discovering unconventional distribution channels such as screening films on oil rigs and video-on-demand in Sweden (Ramnath 2012). As a seeker at heart, and more specifically, a seeker of the business of film, Monga “loves talking about the business of independent cinema” (Ramnath 2012, n.p.) which has involved extensive travelling to, and developing experiential knowledge of navigating film festivals thereby creating a festival footprint; meeting sales representatives, distributors, visiting studios, producers’ offices in Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, and repeatedly delivering well-prepared pitches, presentations and screening her films; applying for international grants and scholarships, attending

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production workshops and online script labs; informing one’s passion by engaging in arduous, exhaustive research on arts funding and treaties for artistic collaborations in various countries; and politely but shamelessly asking questions in order to constantly learn on the job (Jio MAMI 2021). She has met with people repeatedly with the agenda of doing business in five years. For her it is about making a long-term connection which is fully interpersonal (Ramnath 2012). By “turning herself into a foot soldier” (Jio MAMI 2021), over the years Monga has emerged as a singular repository of knowledge on international co-productions. She won a scholarship to Rotterdam during which time she understood the workings of co-productions. She attended the producers’ breakfast programme at Cannes, was recommended for the year-long Transatlantic Partnership (TAP), spending a week in Berlin, Halifax and IFP, New York, and built a peer group of young producers around the world who introduced her to lawyers and sales agents, who in turn gave her advice on contracts (Jio MAMI 2021). India is a 100% equity market where money invested has to be returned with interest whereas in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand film funding is taxpayers’ money, administered by the arts and culture ministry of these governments. Indie film producers make applications for a plethora of grants, and there is a clear process guiding allocations of a diverse pool of funds (according to diversity, city, state, etc.). Each country has co-­ production treaties, and credibility comes with grants (Jio MAMI 2021). Thus, hustling involves hard labour and putting in the hours relentlessly. As she says, “You have to be in the corner and do the work that nobody is doing and make enough noise so that you are noticed” and the trick is to keep at it (Kapur & Shah 2018, n.p.).

Challenges In an interview, Monga informs Barkha Dutt that her career has been out of desperation (The Quorum 2019). It is a journey of being broke many times yet it did not stop her (Outlook Business Wow 2019). Cyrus Broacha refers to her survival skills and enterprise in his podcast series (IVM Podcasts 2021). Born in New Delhi on 21 November 1983, she is the proverbial “outsider” in Bollywood, hailing from a middle-class family that had no connections to the world of cinema. She has experienced great loss, depression, setbacks and death, and has risen to meet every challenge that has appeared in her personal and professional life. At a young age, she

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witnessed domestic violence against her mother perpetrated by in-laws. Both her parents died within six months of each other. At twenty-one, she arrived in Mumbai with borrowed money from her neighbour in Delhi, Kamlesh Agarwal, who offered to invest 50 lakh rupees in her film project if she in turn would make “cute cute films for children” (Jio MAMI). When she secured the capital, she did not have a script so she networked and met as many people as she could, searching for stories in food courts and malls. On finally finding a script that excited her, about the story of four boys with limited resources but an unrivalled passion for cricket, she decided to buy into it through the first-line production company she founded, Speaking Tree Films. Titled Say Salaam India, its release unfortunately coincided with the defeat of the Indian cricket team at the World Cup in the West Indies which prompted exhibitors to immediately return the film reels to Monga. Thus, her first film failed spectacularly. However, this dismal situation trigged her best attributes as she hit upon an unconventional mode of distribution which would set the foundation for her unusual career path and define her hustle whilst teaching her several significant lessons. She decided to take the movie to students, a group of people who always get excited by cricket. Travelling across small cities and towns in North India, she arranged private screenings in schools for a nominal fee (Kapur & Shah 2018). Self-distribution, rarely a conventional strategy, paid off as she was able to return the entire money to Agarwal in nine months. She battled depression after her success with The Lunchbox was dubbed a fluke while her inner demons of grief and unaddressed trauma started depleting her self-confidence (Jio MAMI). She suddenly found herself adrift and without a job when Kashyap took a sudden decision to shut AKFPL after she had been its CEO for four years. When That Girl in Yellow Boots was selected for the Sixty-seventh Venice Film Festival in 2010, Monga and her team arrived in Italy with more than a hundred posters and a thousand postcards, having no idea that sites for posters had been sold months in advance. She ended up sticking the posters on her friends’ and colleagues’ T-shirts (Kapur & Shah 2018). She was inexperienced, unprepared and out of her depth. When no buyers showed up after the film was screened, she found out from the then festival director, Marco Mueller, that producers were expected to set up meetings with buyers months before they met at a festival. He gave her the market book—a massive tome of around 1500 pages—that listed all the festival attendees and advised her to meet as many of those people as she could within a span of three years. These were lessons learnt through

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failure that she never forgot (ZFF Masterclass 2013). As she points out, the world doesn’t prepare you for success, “it really prepares you for failure - get up again, be resilient” (Kapur & Shah 2018, n.p.). Gaining credibility did not come easily. Monga faced discrimination based on age and gender (Chakraborty 2021). During the early years of her career, she would colour her hair grey and wear a sari to look older at meetings. She was often turned away by marketing heads, CEOs and CFOs of companies who had little patience to listen to a young woman peddling stories. She says that young people having really strong opinions about content has been traditionally discouraged in the industry (Outlook Business Wow 2019). Rarely taken seriously and dismissed as “arthouse” and a festival filmmaker during her early days, at meetings she would often have to text her ideas to a male colleague for them to be considered (The Quorum 2019). As she did not smoke, she could not take smoking breaks when so many deals were closed out (The Quorum 2019). According to her, some men are intimidated by a woman in a position of authority—a generation of boys that has grown up feeling entitled to their privilege and not ready for an independent Indian woman (Kapur & Shah 2018).

Monga’s Woman’s Lens In April 2021, Monga was awarded the second highest civilian honour of the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters at the Residence of France for her contribution to world cinema through her Indo-French productions and “her relentless work towards women empowerment” (PTI 2021). That female empowerment has taken the form of representation through such films as Period. End of Sentence. which began with some Oakwood high school students in north Hollywood wanting to bring about change in the lives of girls in rural India who were not allowed to attend school during their periods. Action India donated a pad machine along with the students who raised $3000 to purchase another machine but they encountered numerous challenges which their English teacher, Melissa Burton, wanted to document the process as a film to raise awareness about periods being normal and that they should not hinder the education of girls. Monga became involved in co-producing this documentary on request from one of the students’ parents. In her words, “it was an epic journey, surreal and beautiful” (Femina Woman 2019). Monga credits the power of the international streaming giant Netflix, which distributed the

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documentary, for spreading awareness worldwide about the stigma attached to menstruation in India (Mahadevan 2020). Monga is on a mission to address the gender gap in the film industry. She was shocked to discover that “less than 5% of Indian directors are women” (Film Companion 2021) which drove her to co-found the cinema collective Indian Women Rising with producer Ekta Kapoor and filmmaker Tahira Kashyap. The collective is a result of her dream to create a peer group of producers for mentoring and to “build an army of creative producers” (Ghosh 2021, n.p.) as she aims to “discover, amplify and distribute” the works and voices of Indian female filmmakers (Film Companion 2021). She recalls many films and filmmakers getting lost and having to lobby with distribution for theatres. She also mentions encountering considerable amount of judgement when her films did not secure distribution, and feeling unprotected when she did not have support in India. She wishes there was something like Indian Women Rising when she was starting out. The group’s first initiative was to promote Bittu, a short fiction by Karishma Dev Dube which won the Student Academy Oscar and was on the shortlist for best live-action short at the Oscars (Singh 2021). Dube approached her to orchestrate her Oscar campaign which involved building a team around the filmmaker, intense period of promotions, interviews, and hustling (IVM Podcasts 2021). Monga’s most recent initiative has been a podcast on early breast cancer detection, inspired by Tahira Kashyap’s survival and battle with the dreaded disease, and observing how women tend to neglect their health. It is also deeply personal as Monga recalls her mother succumbing to cancer and being conflicted over medical bills which she felt would burden the family (Mahadevan 2020).

Engendering the “Woman’s Film” in Commercial Hindi Cinema Monga’s collective should further galvanize the woman’s film in commercial Hindi cinema that has gradually evolved over the last two decades. Constitutive of a steady stream of female-centred narratives, it is designed to appeal to female audiences, a demographic that has gradually grown in importance as a consequence of the post-1997 boom in multiplex cinema,2 and more recently, the plethora of digital streaming platforms that can be conveniently accessed by women on laptops, mobile phones and

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televisions without leaving their homes. The woman’s film is a distinctive genre of smaller budget films about and for women invested with narrative agency; layered, textured female characterizations that are defined by their professions, skills, personalities and experiences, and not solely by their physical appearances and dancing abilities; representing multiple female perspectives that address important, often neglected or taboo, socially relevant issues such as menstruation and education of girls. Such women-­ centric films may be critically acclaimed whilst usually performing modestly, or breaking even, at the box-office. Incidentally, there is a long history of the genre of the woman’s film in Hollywood which was especially popular in the 1930s and 40s. Often disparagingly conflated with melodramas and referred to as “weepies,” filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk, George Cukor, Joseph von Sternberg, and stars such as Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford have been associated with this genre.3 In previous eras of Hindi cinema, the serious and consistent exploration of the “woman question” was relegated to parallel or art cinema of Shyam Benegal and the middle-brow cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee. It is an evolving genre that is not a pure genre as it intersects with, and is informed by, the stylistic and aesthetic elements of other popular genres such as comedy, horror, social drama, crime thriller, sports film and the biopic (similar to the Hollywood woman’s film). The common denominator that binds them together is the deliberate and diverse articulations of female consciousness of Indian women, investing them with a voice and gaze, especially when female filmmakers, scriptwriters and producers are at the helm which is indicative of a larger shift in the gendered composition of the Bombay film industry in the hitherto underrepresented areas of scriptwriting, direction and film production. As Monga observes when receiving the French honour, with her content, she has “constantly strive[n] to uplift women’s narratives in cinema” (PTI 2021). There is also greater emphasis on sensitive, keenly observed storytelling and scripting by writers such as Juhi Chaturvedi whose talent is demonstrated through the creation of characters such as Piku (2015), and the ephemeral Shiuli and her distraught professor mother (evocatively portrayed by the accomplished animator Gitanjali Rao) in October (2018), both films by Shoojit Sircar. These complex women protagonists are embedded in the interwoven matrices of class, caste, religion and location. In the contemporary woman’s film, she exists for herself, her identity is not exclusively relational to

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a man as a mother, wife, daughter and sister. She can now be depicted as a friend, senior or junior colleague, in leadership positions and even a boss. The ambitions and aspirations of female protagonists that populate the woman’s film are more varied and different—romance, men and marriage are no longer the ultimate goals, instead the motivating desires are for freedom from male domination and abusive relationships within domestic spaces, financial independence, higher education, foreign travel, self-­ sufficiency and self-determination. The evolution of the woman’s film over the past twenty years at long last addresses a representational lacuna within commercial, popular Hindi cinema. No longer caricatures, polarized binaries, embodiments of virtue (Sati Savitri) and vice (“the vamp”), there is genuine and consistent creative desire, even an urgent need, to depict women’s lives, experiences, psyches, idiosyncracies with authenticity, depth and sincerity that do resonate with female audiences (especially young, educated, urban women) in India and beyond, a sizeable spectatorial demographic historically overlooked.

Case Study of a Woman’s Film Monga has recently adopted a woman’s lens, post-MeToo, as is clear from Pagglait which is one of her first projects under the new consciousness that has given her wings and her company a new direction. It is also Monga’s most personal film. She elucidates upon her emotional investment in the project: I was 24 when I lost both my parents, I did not cry. Twenty or 25 people came over to mourn. I was caught up with gadda kahan se aa raha hai, halwai kahan hai (where are the mattresses coming from, where is the caterer?). I asked for a Limca in the mourning period and an uncle called me crazy… I was judged then for how I was grieving. But grieving is such an internal process. I shaved my head years later. I feel more close to my parents now than I did in my early 20s. You see some of that in the movie. For me, storytelling is not transactional. It’s my life’s work. It needs to make an impact. (Ghosh 2021, n.p.)

Monga’s “life’s work” is revealed when the film references sanitary napkins which proves to be pivotal in terms of both the narrative and its producer’s career. Such overt allusion to menstruation is rare for commercial Indian cinema. Directed by Umesh Bisht, Pagglait is described by Monga

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as “a beautiful coming-of-age film” of Sandhya Giri Pandey (Sanya Malhotra), a newly widowed young Hindu woman living with her marital joint family in Lucknow, with a clear message for women that “if you don’t make decisions for yourself then the world will make decisions for you, and the day you start making those decisions the world will call you crazy” (IVM Podcasts 2021). Representation of spatial mobility intertwined with gender identity in Pagglait is of particular interest. Spatial mobility of women is a feminist issue. Women’s problematic habitation of space and lack of control over their spatial environments is in stark contrast to male privileges of unrestricted spatial access, surveillance and control, and Indian cinema has often portrayed women restricted in their movements, trapped in both passive roles and within domestic spaces which are predetermined and fixed in patriarchal societies. The habitation of the North Indian Hindu joint family located in Lucknow is a cloistered, claustrophobic retreat into the narrow confines of domesticity, bound by traditional family values and rigid gender roles, and characterized by familial politics, tensions, and absurd diurnal duties and rituals. The women in this diegetic world are imprisoned in their own homes, under surveillance, and enjoy little privacy even in their bedrooms as relatives intrude into intimate spaces, while access to the outside world remains problematic and often secured under false pretences. Furthermore, generational inaccessibility to public space is strongly suggested. Sandhya finds an unlikely ally in the wheel-chair bound Dadi Amma, her late husband Astik’s paternal grandmother, who is primarily a mute, immobile observer. Configured in the mould of female mentor rather than stereotypical competitor, Sayani Gupta as Aakansha Roy, Astik’s colleague and ex-­ girlfriend, is an intentional, inspirational model of a woman who is able to move and act with as much “freedom” as her male counterparts. She is indicative of upward social and spatial mobility—at ease and confident within her professional and personal environments. The types of spaces she inhabits inform and construct her identity as a modern, single, independent woman living alone in North India. The film is sensitive in its depiction of an intricate web of fragile, flawed, dynamic female social relations that are primarily supportive and nurturing in refreshing contrast to the stereotypically manipulative, backbiting, cat-fighting saas-bahu women that are commonly represented on Indian media. It reflects the female mentorships that Monga has thrived upon for the advancement of her career, and speaks about in many of her interviews.

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The progressive denouement is suggestive of the freedom found on the road (albeit a cinematic cliché), or the seemingly transformative, liberating potential of mobility—Sandhya travels alone in a public bus to the neighbouring city of Kanpur to take up employment, and for the first time is seen unaccompanied by her Muslim friend who, till that point of departure, has assisted/accompanied her in transgressing circumscribed spatial and social boundaries. It is a journey of self-discovery reminiscent of Monga’s who moved from Delhi to Mumbai in search of her dream to tell stories and make movies. When the French honour was bestowed upon her, she dedicated the award “to every girl with a dream [telling them to] “continue to dream freely and create fearlessly. The universe is always conspiring in favour of the brave and I stand here as proof of that!” (PTI 2021). Monga is outspoken about current issues and pandemic-induced changes affecting the film industry such as the increased attacks on freedom of expression and the positive impact of streaming platforms or OTTs (over-the-top) on the distribution of indie films, forcing the market to have diverse voices. Haraamkhor was banned by the Central Board of Film Certification until the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) intervened, and urged the industry to initiate a dialogue on how an important statutory body such as the FCAT can be removed overnight without even a discussion (Ramasubramanian 2021). According to her, OTTs are creating opportunities for actors, writers and producers to expand their base as well as the integration of regional language projects into the mainstream scheme of things. Talking about backing regional projects, she says that she has always believed in cinema irrespective of the language it is made in. “Some of the best works in India are happening in regional cinema. I would love to work in other languages because as a creator and a storyteller, you can’t limit yourself to a language,” which is the reason for venturing into co-producing a Tamil blockbuster, Soorarai Pottru, starring superstar Suriya (Chakraborty 2020, n.p.) and directed by Sudha Kongara. Sikhya Entertainment, which Monga launched with her late mother in 2008, is currently in expansion mode with five divisions headed by five new creative producers. Besides feature films, it is focusing on documentaries and short content. It produced India’s first mobile-only interactive thriller show Kaun? Who Did It? for Flipkart where audiences choose the killer and win cash prizes. Besides innovative formats and platforms, her production house has consciously adopted a strategy to transcend geographic and linguistic borders to explore stories beyond India to South

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Asia (Ghosh 2021). Since the powerhouse producer believes that movies are a soft power that can ignite important conversations, showing the steps required for change to happen (Mahadevan 2020), it is hoped that Sikhya Entertainment and Monga will continue to be at the forefront of effecting real change in the world. In conclusion, this chapter has demonstrated that constant hustling is hard labour. The nature of independent film production, especially the risky nature of funding raising and film financing, is unstructured, artisanal, often exploitative and certainly precarious, often times facing debtors and bankruptcy, coping with financial insecurity as a part of Monga’s personal and professional existence. Monga’s entrepreneurial zeal; proactive, upbeat personality; and acumen for networking and building a corpus of contacts and knowledge (on innovative modes of film financing, pitching story concepts, founding her own production company, personally distributing films to enabling multinational co-productions and authoring hype at prestigious international film festivals) draw on a considerable amount of energy, time, focus, legwork and meticulous attention to details that she has expended in order to establish herself as an internationally renowned independent female producer from India.

Notes 1. For more on this evolving approach involving gender, labour and film work, see N.  Majumdar (2009), Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India 1930s–50s; N. Majumdar (2015), “Gossip, Labor, and Female Stardom in Pre-Independence Indian Cinema: The Case of Shanta Apte”; D. Mukherjee (2013), “Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive”; D. Mukherjee (2020a), “Somewhere between Human, Non-Human, and Woman: Shanta Apte’s Theory of Exhaustion”; D. Mukherjee (2020b), Bombay Hustle, Making Movies in a Colonial City. 2. On the emergence of multiplex cinema in India, see G. Viswanath (2007), The Multiplex: Crowd, Audience and the Genre Film; A.  Athique and D.  Hill (2010), The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure; S.  Gopal (2011), Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema. 3. For more on the Hollywood and British woman’s film, see C.  Gledhill (1987), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film; M. A. Doane (1987), The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s; M. Bell and M. Williams (2009), British Women’s Cinema.

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References Akhtar, Z. (2019). Gully Boy. Excel Entertainment, Tiger Baby Films. Anon, Anurag Kashyap Films Private Limited (AKFPL) (n.d.). ‘About Guneet Monga’. https://web.archive.org/web/20130619193655/http://www. akfpl.com/about-­guneet-­monga.html. Accessed 20 Aug 2021. Arun, A., & Roy, P. (2020). Paatal Lok. Clean Slate Filmz. Athique, A. & Hill, D. (2010). The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure. Routledge, Abingdon. Bala, V. (2012). Peddlers. Sikhya Entertainment Batra, R. (2013). The Lunchbox. DAR motion pictures, UTV Motion Pictures, Dharma Productions, Sikhya Entertainment, NFDC, Arte France Cinema. Bell, M. & Williams, M. (2009). British Women’s Cinema. Routledge, London. Bhushan, N. (2013). ‘Cannes: India’s New Wave Producer Guneet Monga (Q&A)’. The Hollywood Reporter. May 22. https://www.hollywoodreporter. com/movies/movie-­n ews/cannes-­i ndias-­n ew-­w ave-­p roducer-­5 24945/. Accessed on 25 Aug 2021. Bist, U. (2021). Pagglait. Balaji Motion Pictures, Sikhya Entertainment Bist, Umesh et al. (2021). Kaun? Who Did It? Flipkart Video. Sikhya Entertainment. Chakraborty, J. (2020). ‘Producer Guneet Monga: OTT is forcing the market to have new voices out there’. Hindustan Times. November 18. https://www. hindustantimes.com/bollywood/producer-­guneet-­monga-­ott-­is-­forcing-­the-­ market-­to-­have-­new-­voices-­out-­there/story-­0s2TSovrqRX0mMDizTYU2K. html. Accessed on 27 Aug 2021. ———. (2021). ‘Guneet Monga: I have faced ageism but definitely not gender discrimination’. Hindustan Times. April 18. https://www.hindustantimes. com/entertainment/bollywood/guneet-­m onga-­i -­have-­f aced-­a geism-­but-­ definitely-­not-­gender-­discrimination-­101618688903781.html. Accessed on 27 Aug 2021. Doane, M.A. (1987). The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Dube, Karishma Dev (2020) Bittu. Karishma Dube et al. Dutt, A. (2020). Bulbbul. Clean Slate Filmz. Femina Woman (2019). ‘Oscar Nominee Guneet Monga talks about Period Short Film | Guneet Monga Interview’. April 3. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=HYyKAwixoF4. Accessed on 22 Aug 2021. Film Companion (2021). ‘Ekta Kapoor, Tahira Kashyap & Guneet Monga Interview with Anupama Chopra’. February 3. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=v8UdxRK5K2Q. Accessed on 20 Aug 2021. Ghaywan, N. (2015). Masaan. Drishyam Films, Macassar Productions, Phantom Films, Sikhya Entertainment, Pathé, Arte France Cinéma.

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Ghosh, A. (2021). ‘Guneet Monga: “I own my hustle, I’m proud of my hustle.”’ Mint Lounge. May 8. https://lifestyle.livemint.com/how-­to-­ lounge/movies-­t v/guneet-­m onga-­i -­o wn-­m y-­h ustle-­i -­m -­p roud-­o f-­m y-­ hustle-­111620410724320.html. Accessed on 26 Aug 2021. Gledhill, C. (1987). Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. British Film Institute, London. Gopal, S. (2011). Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Helvey, G. (2009). Kavi. Sikhya Entertainment IVM Podcasts (2021). ‘Cyrus Says Ep. 703: feat. Guneet Monga’. May 31. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ViWpN90pHc. Accessed on 20 Aug 2021. Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (2021). ‘Bridging The Gap Between Indie And Epic: Guneet Monga in conversation with Smriti Kiran’. Dial M For Films. April 22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0bD87wBZsI. Accessed on 20 Aug 2021. Kapoor, S. (2007). Say Salaam India. Speaking Tree Films. Kapur, M. & Shah, G. (2018). ‘The Woman Who Transformed Bollywood Behind the Scenes: An Excerpt’. Bloomberg Businessweek. October 19. https://www. bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-­1 0-­2 0/excerpt-­h ow-­g uneet-­ amarpreet-­kaur-­monga-­transformed-­bollywood. Accessed on 18 Aug 2021. Kashyap, A. (2010). That Girl in Yellow Boots. Anurag Kashyap Films, Sikhya Entertainment, NFDC. ———. (2012). Gangs of Wasseypur. Anurag Kashyap Films, Jar Pictures. Kokra, S. (2019). ‘Alia Bhatt’s Safeena from Gully Boy is the Angry Young Woman Bollywood desperately needs’. First Post. February 21. https://www. firstpost.com/entertainment/alia-­bhatts-­safeena-­from-­gully-­boy-­is-­the-­angry-­ young-­woman-­bollywood-­desperately-­needs-­6127891.html. Accessed on 26 August 2021. Kongara, S. (2020). Soorarai Pottru. Sikhya Entertainment, 2D Entertainment. Kumar, A. (2013). Monsoon Shootout. Sikhya Entertainment, DAR Motion Pictures. Luthria, M. (2010). Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai. Balaji Motion Pictures and Telefilms. Mahadevan, A. (2020). ‘Guneet Monga On Empowering Women Through Cinema’, Episode 2. Femina Champions. February 14. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ofcLi5jWZ7Y. Accessed on 22 Aug 2021. Majumdar, N. (2009). Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India 1930s-50s. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago. ———. (2015). ‘Gossip, Labor, and Female Stardom in Pre-Independence Indian Cinema: The Case of Shanta Apte’. In: Gledhill, C., Knight, J. (eds). Doing Women’s Film History, Reframing Cinema, Past and Future. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, Springfield, pp. 181–92. Malhotra, S.P. (2018). Hichki. Yash Raj Films.

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Mukherjee, D. (2013). ‘Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive’. BioScope 4(1): 9–30. ———. (2020a). ‘Somewhere between Human, Nonhuman, and Woman: Shanta Apte’s Theory of Exhaustion’. Feminist Media Histories 6 (3): 21–51. ———. (2020b). Bombay Hustle: Practicing Modernity in a Colonial Cine-Ecology. Duke University Press, Durham. Nalin, P. (2006). Valley of Flowers. Monsoon Films/Wonderworks, TF1 International, TPS Star, Film Cooperative, Pandora Film Verleih, Diaphana Distribution. Outlook Business Wow (2019). ‘She didn’t have the money to accept the Oscar she won: The incredible story of Guneet Monga’. February 2. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=hiTJ-­Cul-­UQ. Accessed on 25 Aug 2021. PTI (2021). ‘Oscar-winning producer Guneet Monga receives second highest civilian French honour’. The Hindu. April 14. https://www.thehindu.com/ entertainment/movies/oscar-­w inning-­p roducer-­g uneet-­m onga-­r eceives-­ second-­highest-­civilian-­french-­honour/article34314439.ece. Accessed on 22 Aug 2021. Puthran, G. (2019). Mardaani 2. Yash Raj Films. Ramasubramanian, U. (2021). ‘Guneet Monga on FCAT: Freedom of speech is being taken away’. Mid-day. April 8. https://www.mid-­day.com/entertainment/bollywood-­news/article/guneet-­monga-­on-­fcat-­freedom-­of-­speech-­is-­ being-­taken-­away-­23167454. Accessed on 24 Aug 2021. Ramnath, N. (2012). ‘Guneet Monga | Sealing the deal’. Mint Lounge. October 26. https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/tP9mOVFYoF0RJOSX4vCveP/ Guneet-­Monga%2D%2DSealing-­the-­deal.html. Accessed on 22 Aug 2021. Rege, P. (1999). ‘Parallel Queen: Guneet Monga, has managed to bridge the gap between Indian films and foreign buyers and distributors’. India Today. November 30. Updated 22 December, 2012. https://www.indiatoday.in/ magazine/cover-­s tor y/stor y/20121224-­g uneet-­m onga-­h elped-­g ive-­ independent-­cinema-­a-­facelift-­761047-­1999-­11-­30. Accessed on 22 Aug 2021. Sarkar, P. (2014). Mardaani. Yash Raj Films. Shah, S. (2008). Dasvidaniya. Sikhya Entertainment. Sharma, S. (2015). Haraamkhor. Sikhya Entertainment. Shinde, G. (2012). English Vinglish. Hope Productions. Show Up (2019). https://www.ted.com/talks/guneet_monga_show_up. Accessed on 20 Aug 2021. Singh, S. (2021). ‘I would love to be the one to make the Indian Oscar-winning film: Guneet Monga’. India Today Insight. April 18. https://www.indiatoday.in/india-­ t o d a y -­i n s i g h t / s t o r y / i -­w o u l d -­l o v e -­t o -­b e -­t h e -­o n e - t o -­m a k e -­t h e indian-­oscar-­winning-­film-­guneet-­monga-­1792356-­2021-­04-­18. Accessed on 24 Aug 2021.

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Sircar, S. (2015). Piku. MSM Motion Pictures, Saraswati Entertainment Creations, Rising Sun Films. ———. (2018). October. Rising Sun Films, Kino Works. Social Ketchup (2020). ‘#KetchupTalks with #Guneet Monga | Zindagi In Short’. February 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CFuV4rJ2nE. Accessed on 22 Aug 2021. The Quorum with Barkha Dutt (2019). ‘Guneet Monga & Her Desperate Journey to Cannes, Crowdfunding, and “Arthouse.”’ April 15. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=09Y0rdx-­_0Y. Accessed on 22 Aug 2021. Viswanath, G. (2007). ‘The Multiplex: Crowd, Audience and the Genre Film’. Economic and Political Weekly 42 (32):3289–3294. Zehtabchi, R. (2018). Period. End of Sentence. Guneet Monga, Melissa Berton, Garrett Schiff, Lisa Taback. ZFF Zurich Film Festival (2013). ‘ZFF Master Class with Guneet Monga’. October 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=XF0KKovSV jg&list=PLwXPzvBPXbzeYJ4gt3BZI6wo9Dd9t9J3Y&index=7. Accessed on 20 Aug 2021.

PART II

The Transnational and Postcolonial Turns

CHAPTER 9

Roots and Routes: Home and the World in Sooni Taraporevala’s Transnational Storytelling Akriti Rastogi

Dominant modes of transnational filmmaking, particularly from South Asian context, often address the questions of cosmopolitan identities and their expression in second-generation migrants, as opposed to the rooted traditional representation of first-generation Indian migrants. Indeed, South Asian cinema, as Kaushik Bhaumik (2013, p. 7) observes, has predominantly been about migrations of different kinds. With respect to this articulation, Deepa Mehta’s  Bollywood Hollywood  (2002), Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham  (2002), and Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala  (1991) and The Namesake  (2006) are prominent examples. Transnational screenwriting in Sooni Taraporevala’s account is an exploration of first-and second-generation migrant accounts—often adapted from existing literature and contextualized in contemporaneous chronotopes (space and time) (Bakhtin 1981). This chapter will map Taraporevala’s screenwriting from the perspective of transnational cinemas. Additionally,

A. Rastogi (*) Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_9

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the questions of poetics versus politics, historiography versus historiophoty (White 1988) will texture my analysis. While images work as the representations of history, written accounts make for historicized discourse. The transnational idiom of her screenplays is of particular interest to me, and I shall locate this idiom through close text analysis of Taraporevala’s screenwriting practice. Themes of universalism, emancipation, representation, identity and belonging, and self-realization emerge as the tenets through which I unpack the said idiom. To map her journey, I begin with a brief account of her career to annotate and understand the nuances of her screenwriting. It was 1975 when a young girl jetted off to the US on a full scholarship for undergraduate studies at the Harvard University. Her family owned a photography studio, and she started taking pictures with her Instamatic camera that accompanied her to the US. Growing up in South Bombay, Taraporevala’s world and her explorations through photographs began with the subject of her home city. Her family and community formed the primary subjects of her exploration along with the multitudes of life in the big city and its myriads of contexts. Her tryst with film cameras continued henceforth, along with her training in film studies and critique. As a literature student, Taraporevala had a knack for reading and never had an intentional plan for a career in filmmaking. It was during her sophomore year at Harvard that she met Mira Nair—her frequent collaborator—along with whom she crafted adaptations that put Indian cinema on the transnational map of film festivals. Both she and Nair had a penchant for the documentary format. While Nair pursued stories through documentary filmmaking in the initial years of her filmmaking, Taraporevala set out to capture images that evoked chronotopes of the newly neoliberal world of the eighties, where diasporic communities had found little to no representation in cinema, aside from the Yash Chopra fantasies that stereotyped the wealthy Non-residential Indian (NRI)  in Hindi cinema. Drawing from their training, cinema vérité became one of the methods for both Nair and Taraporevala—where life itself became the primary subject, and the camera an unobtrusive narrator of life events. In an interview with journalist Pragya Tiwari (2014), Taraporevala speaks about her screenwriting craft and quotes, “literature taught me a lot of things about character, about point of view, about narrative. Studying films taught me a lot about how you construct a film, how you make a film and photography taught me about the visual world. So, I approached screenwriting through all those three strands when I wrote Salaam Bombay!”

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From her auto-ethnographic accounts in photographic work to her screenwriting, Taraporevala’s characters often mirror the world reality and self-determination journey of an Indian living away from home. Much like the critic bell hooks’ journey to Stanford University, where she describes feeling like an ‘unwanted outsider’ (2018, p. 12), Taraporevala’s characters are outsiders, often at the margins in the new place. Her writing is often imbued with narratives of self-actualization within a historical milieu of globalization of the nineteen eighties having a defined postcolonial rubric. Her collaborations with Mira Nair have been termed as ‘beyond Bollywood’—borrowing the term from Jigna Desai’s critical work on ‘cinemas of India’ (2004). Indeed, their collaborations emerge from outside the mainframe of film industries in India, while representing India at the world forum. Further, cinemas in India have never been confined to one unanimous category, neither have the Indian practitioners abroad been a homogeneous group. Indian voices in cinema right from the silent era have had a global perspective, and there has been a consistent cosmopolitan milieu when it comes to the film industry. To understand filmmakers and filmmaking emerging from India, one needs to take stock of the voices that emerge from the homeland toward the rest of the world. Starting with Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani, and Raj Kapoor and Satyajit Ray, Indian cinema has had a worldwide footprint. In the 1990s, once the markets in India opened up and the economic liberalization was afoot, cinematic voices from India started to venture into the newly globalized world. At this moment of multiculturalism, immigrant filmmakers and film professionals emerged who made films for their home country while being situated elsewhere. A significant example to illustrate this moment is Nair and Taraporevala’s cinematic collaborations. As fellow Harvard graduates in the 1970s, and a long-standing friendship, they created cinema from India for the world’s eyes.

The Immigrant Experience and the Figuration of the Other In his articulation on the experiences of immigrants, Hamid Naficy argues that the other faces the double-edged sword of possibilities and impossibilities, making the figuration ‘a disorder’ (2018, p. xi). While their first collaboration Salaam Bombay! (1988) emerged from their academic training in visual anthropology and documentary, their following endeavors

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were cinematic adaptations of postcolonial histories where Taraporevala’s voice shined as a grounded storyteller alert to the socio-cultural nuances and dialects. Her characters are painted in quaint hues of resilience—of creating a home in the world despite all the fallouts. The immigrants go on to live the aspirational more often than not ‘American dream’ while pining for a home they formerly had. The pathos of loss for a lonely immigrant—Ashima in The Namesake (2006) and ChaiPau/Krishna in Salaam Bombay! (1988)—enunciate the gritty reality of the exilic life, much like her stills of life in the Mumbai neighborhoods. Childhood and the homeland thus become the focal points of her journey as a media practitioner. From the ballet teacher Saul in Yeh Ballet (2020) to the father Jay in Mississippi Masala (1991), her characters are out in a supposedly utopian multicultural world negotiating the odds against their outsider status as an immigrant. When Taraporevala charts the journey of Babasaheb Ambedkar, she addresses the question of caste and all its ills with framework of immigrant. Like any other screenwriter working at the margins in a transnational world, Taraporevala’s narratives are housed in multicultural, cosmopolitan, and universal themes. Drawing from Shohat and Stam (2014), this multiculturalism is layered and often can only be seen with respect to the interlocutor in this construct (p. 4). Further, the Eurocentric logics of media capital in most transnational films define this conceptualization of multicultural worlds, and are therefore, biased to a certain degree in service to the capital that funds them. Taraporevala’s photographic métier refracts into her transnational screenwriting—rather astutely in her articulations of exile and indeed, almost the entirety of her work resides in a home that is constantly displaced, deterritorialised, and in a state of becoming. In Aparajita Saha’s interview (2001) with Taraporevala, she mentions how Mira Nair’s father called her a ‘rudderless ship’. Indeed, Taraporevala’s work has voyaged across geographies and communities that are difficult to place under neat categories. Much like her lens looks at the world, her screenwriting conjures milieux that represent the life of Indians at home and in the world. Drawing her vision from Satyajit Ray, Osmane Sembene, Henry Cartier Bresson, and Raghubir Singh, Taraporevala’s visual vocabulary is replete with references that put the idea of local storytelling in the universal context. Her inspiration from Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) to the  Bressonian frames give clues into her craft. Take, for example, her exemplary work on documenting the Parsi community in Mumbai. Capturing life in media res, Taraporevala’s knack for moments and stories

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in visual setting, also emerges from her voracious reading habit. Her postcolonial adaptations of novels and accounts mirror the self-actualization framing of  Merchant-Ivory Productions—also known for their unique transnational body of work often collaborating with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In the next section, I explore this frame of screenwriting where such transnational collaborations set the tone of a world in constant flux and migrations, and the registers of an immigrant experience are attuned to haptic audiovisual codes (Marks 2000) and accents of the homeland in the world (Naficy 2018). When her characters emerge from the Indian context—for example, Salaam Bombay! (1988), Such a Long Journey (1998), Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000), Little Zizou  (2008), and Yeh Ballet (2020)—the textures of displacement and departure frame the precarious question of identity. Whereas, when her characters are placed outside India, the same question becomes articulated with the lens of migrant and the outsider, whose only recourse is to find a home within exile.

Transnational Screenwriting from the Margins of the Media Industries Studies in screenwriting often come from the perspective of the Hindi film industry (see Anubha Yadav 2011, 2021; and Sanghita Sen 2017)—particularly, from the lens of political economy and mapping the control and gatekeeping aspects of screenplay writing along with the emerging importance of the screenwriter and story. In terms of film history, and historicizing screenwriting Rakesh Sengupta’s (2018, p. 20) work has illuminated the textures and figures controlling the film script and its absences from the archives. Transnational screenwriting that addresses glocal (global and local) issues is unique to Taraporevala, and consequently to this study. I argue, it is this instinctive amalgamation of skills (from street photography to visual anthropology, and filmmaking) that allows Taraporevala to walk in industries at home and the world with a fluid translatability. As a Parsi woman, her association and disassociation from India and the world becomes her politics, and she is often crafting ‘coming of age’ narratives in a romantic guise. In most of her interviews across platforms, she expresses her ease in being the outsider—and therefore a neutral figure observing her subjects and milieux at a distance. The trouble in such transnational translations often concerns the stereotypes that inevitably emerge from

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the flattening by the Western investments into these projects by the producers. Despite the control of the script by the financing bodies, Taraporevala’s screenwriting is critical to understand and map the transnational exchanges of filmmaking in the newly liberalized India starting from her debut as a screenwriter. Further, as someone who never trained for screenwriting, her practice offers insight into a unique screenwriting technique—which in her case is a palimpsest of her training as a street photographer, visual anthropologist and literature. Salaam Bombay! had its premiere at the Cannes and later at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1988. The film received the Caméra d’Or and audience award at the Cannes film festival. Speaking to Anmol Karnik (2020) in an interview about the writing and research work for this film in an interview, Taraporevala shares the anecdotes of her and Nair sitting on the garbage dump in Dharavi exchanging notes and discussing the development of their first feature film project. Nair had worked extensively in Mumbai in the years prior to her first feature film and collaborated with Taraporevala’s skilled eye to map the journey of Chaipau/Krishna into the whirlpool of Bombay life. In his tryst with Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), Satyajit Ray (2010) defines the sense of rapture and distinction he felt for the first time towards cinema. Taraporevala too speaks of this sense of enchantment with Ray’s work—that is often replete with serendipitous journeys of self-actualization. Her own collaborations with Nair too are awash with the weight of such fleeting moments that drive the characters into chaos and once the storm is over, the character arc shifts into new vistas. After Salaam Bombay!’s (1988) phenomenal success with an Oscar nomination in the Best Foreign Film category, Taraporevala started getting a lot of screenwriting projects in Hollywood. At the time, in her words, the film industry in the US had a lot of money that could facilitate content development and support screenwriters financially. During the mid-1980s, Taraporevala decided to return to India. In Mumbai, she worked as a screenwriter for the Los Angeles production companies as a screenwriter and simultaneously worked towards her photography that later came together as the book in 2004 on Parsis in India. She continued as a screenwriter for Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991), My Own Country  (1998), and The Namesake  (2000). She also adapted Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey  (1998) into a screenplay for Canadian film director Sturla Gunnarsson. The film portrayed the life of a Parsi family with a prosperous past, living in a densely packed tenement society of Bombay. The novel, and thus the film in some ways, retains the

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rubric of postcolonial narratives and therefore, inherits the construct of ‘oriental gaze’ (Said 2019). Taraporevala’s screenplay pulls focus to the marginalized and overlooked parts of Bombay—much like her first film with Nair where the main protagonist embarks upon the journey to collect a sum of five hundred rupees to return home, only to be consumed by the topography of the city and its crowds. In Jabbar Patel’s Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000) her screenplay charts the uphill battle of a Dalit man who confronts the skewed socio-economic situation of India before independence, while in Mississippi Masala (1991), the diasporic family is displaced time and again until the main protagonist reconciles with his home in Uganda. Thus, her career charts representations that come from the diasporic contexts and native contexts of India. More importantly, the storytelling is always from the outsider’s perspective. At home and in the world, Taraporevala chases dreams of an exilic existence and maps them with the axes of identity and belonging. The canvas of her narratives, as it were, stands on the tenets of memory and reconciliation in exile. While Mississippi Masala (1991), My Own Country (1998), and The Namesake (2006) look at the geography of India from the outside, rest of her films emerge within India and look towards the world from an aspirational window of possibilities. Aside from her work with the South Asian media practitioners, Sooni worked extensively for the Hollywood studios, a career spanning almost two decades of script writing for HBO shows and many others. As a result, her screenwriting too gets caught in the nexus of labor, capital and culture (Bhaumik 2013, p. 3) determined by the logics of the US-based studios. Hollywood being the canonical mainstream industry in the West flattens representations to a commoditized ideal. Transnational cinema,  on the other hand, is often demarcated by the accents of being the other (Naficy 2018)—an outsider away from home Taraporevala’s screenwriting retains the haptic nature (Marks 2000), of an exilic image that invokes the local, while being in a dialectical relationship with the capital that funds her work from the US.

Decoding Universalism: A Child’s Play Aside from a beginning, middle and an end, a screenplay is successful when it communicates across demographics and enthuses the audience with human emotions. Studying Taraporevala’s work, one can’t help but notice the recurring thematic of childhood, teenage and ‘coming of age’.

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Her fascination with children is evident right from her debut to in fact all of her films, where the protagonists often reminisce their childhood and their nostalgic past. Within this romantic ideal of the past lies that peaceful home, where the protagonist feels most like herself—from My Own Country (1998) to Little Zizou (2008), we see a bevy of characters who recollect the past with photographs and letters, and often these memorabilia are unearthed in a child’s hands who carefully crafts a memory of an idyllic past when everything in the world was at peace. In Salaam Bombay! (1988) too, despite the bleak end of Chai Pau’s fate, we see his yearning for the home as the letter writer annotates his dictation. Children are the bearers of hope in her narratives. They represent a possibility of a utopian future—where all is resolved and there is no room for tumult. In Such a Long Journey (1998), we find Gustad Noble’s character (played by Roshan Seth) revisiting his childhood in a flash of memory when everything was peaceful and prosperous until it was all taken apart once he was on the cusp of adulthood. Drawing from her cinematic references in Satyajit Ray and François Truffaut, Taraporevala’s work peers at the many possibilities of storytelling, most of all a universal appeal that situates and resonates with audiences across contexts. In her interview to Pragya Tiwari, she cites how romantic poets like T.S. Eliot and later filmmakers like Truffaut who shaped her cinematic vision and indeed, her screenwriting (ibid.). Thus, childhood becomes the prism through Taraporevala reflects upon this new world order, where the stable notions of identity and home are constantly contested at the behest of the changing world. While cultural imperialism may define her work to a certain extent, universalism shines in the eyes of the child characters she crafts in her narratives—from adaptations like Such a Long Journey (1998) and The Namesake (2001) to her own screenplays like Little Zizou (2008). Children, then, are the important figuration in her work that thread a purpose, and a hope across the contentious debates around the questions of belonging. They offer the alternative to start afresh and therefore, create a universal template in her work. In addition to this, the idea of home and exile appear time and again in all of her screenwriting—that I explore in the next section.

Finding Home in the World: Tracing the Exilic Eye Sooni’s screenwriting draws from the exilic experience of the South Asian community whether it be in Mississippi Masala (1991) or My Own Country (1998), and The Namesake (2006). Memories of home and their

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palimpsest fantasies, ruptures and repressions (Naficy 2003, p.  205) are juxtaposed with the world that frames her narratives. Even in Salaam Bombay! (1988) and her other films, exile is consistent thematic. The vision of life in media res is captured through the constant revisit her protagonists make to the lost home—whether it is Chai Pau in Salaam Bombay! or Jay in Mississippi Masala (1991). The topos of home is detached from the idea of nation-state and placed in a transnational flux of exilic departures and arrivals. On the one hand, her characters undergo ‘deculturation’ as it were (Naficy 2003, p. 207), and on the other, they strive for the idea of a complex identity milieux that connects them to their homeland and makes them distinct from the country that they have now inhabited. Taraporevala’s authorial vision and photographic practice frames this space as one that is constantly becoming for her ensemble cast across her body of work. Hamid Naficy (2018) in his articulation about third world cinema accounts for syncreticism through which identities of the migrants blend with the host country. In Taraporevala’s adaptations too, that take a transnational turn, for instance, in Mississippi Masala (1991), and The Namesake (2006), the characters, particularly the ones from the second-generation of migrants move toward a syncretic identity. The American ideal of individualism drives the life of her characters who find a semblance of home and place in the distant foreign land. All these films take place in the geography familiar to Taraporevala—from Indian roots to the aspirational NRI out in the world, fighting against the tides of bias, belonging and the lifelong question of finding a home in this new world. Home becomes a contested site for her post-colonial adaptations as her characters are often living away from their native place and are further displaced by local tensions. From ChaiPau/Krishna in Salaam Bombay! (1988) to Boman Presswala (played by Boman Irani) in Little Zizou (2008), her characters critique the world. Her personal association with the notion of exile unravels the idea of home and makes it a shifting entity as opposed to its conventional fixity. Taraporevala’s ‘exilic eye’ frames the questions of Indian identity in the new world orders while revisiting her influences from Bresson and Raghubir Singh’s photography, cinema vérité, and the ‘coming of age’ films of Fellini, Truffaut, Ray, Osmane Sembene, and many others. Studying her entire body of work, one comes across her unique standpoint as a media practitioner—one that straddles the identity of the diasporic Indian and one that explores the modes of marginalization within India. Her visual vocabulary as a seasoned street photographer refracts

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into the characters that emerge in her narratives, particularly in her direction debut Little Zizou (2008) where her community animates into characters that stand on opposing sides while facing the anticipated threat of extinction. The texture of life in Mumbai and the thickness of visual description emerges in the shots within the premises of the editor of the Parsi newspaper and in the religious opinion leader’s home. The fracture in the society is illuminated using wide lensing and frames in a low angle or Dutch position. The dialogue too has wafts of the Parsi colloquialisms and Anglophone commentary on the Parsi culture with respect to India and the world. The idioms of displacement here are local, whereas in her screenwriting representing the Indian diaspora, the concerns of the narrative take on a transitional scale where home is a displaced topos and identity an ongoing quest. The camera, therefore, is always in an exilic stance waiting to blend in—particularly with respect to her films with the diasporic angle. In The Namesake (2006), Ashima’s close ups and gestural nuances establish the tenderness and innocence of the home, while later in New York, her gestural nuances communicate the longing of home that she has left behind. Only in Ashok’s presence do we see the reconciliation with the home in the world. The close ups of Ashima and Gogol after Ashok’s passing, convey the throbbing pain of loss. For Ashima, the idea of home is displaced onto her family and after Ashok’s demise, we see her gestures of longing transform to screeching pain of grief and loneliness in a foreign land. Displacement then becomes the haptic code, through which Taraporevala conveys the shared pain of the diasporic community. While aspiration and celebration of customs and rituals of India in a foreign land are intrinsic to tie together the diasporic community, pain and loss emerge as the site of loneliness—where the presence of the diasporic community is no longer important to the protagonist. The emotional landscape of the outsider displaced from home becomes the common thread that connect her characters across her films. The idea of home and displacement in Salaam Bombay! (1988) are perhaps most pronounced when Chai Pau/Krishna visits Irrfan Khan—the letter writer on the footpath and asks him to write to his mother in the village about him figuring out a way to return home, only to find that he does not know the exact address to his home and thus, cannot reach his family. His displacement mirrors in the closing shot of the film when he winds up the toy in his hands and spins the top. The film is replete with the theme of home and displacement, making a comment about how for the most marginalized group of all street children have a constant unending search for home and

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belonging. In her latest film Yeh Ballet (2020), Taraporevala revisits this topos, but this time the protagonists come from stable homes in Mumbai. The pursuit of the dream and the journey towards its realization become the home in Yeh Ballet (2020)—where the protagonist Nishu at one point is literally displaced from his parents and lives off at the basement of the dance studio—a place that will turn his dreams of scholarship at the US university into a reality. When Taraporevala’s protagonists look out to the world from an aspirational lens, the idea of home acquires the flight of their dreams, and when her protagonists look at home (India) from outside, the idea of home acquires the platitudes of loss and longing. In the next section I expand this idea of diaspora and displacement using sequences from Taraporevala’s screenwriting.

Diaspora and Displacement An important thread that emerges in Taraporevala’s work is the figuration of diasporic Indian and the idea of displacement. As a Parsi and an Indian, her own vantage point is equipped to trace the axes of positioning identity within the western canon. Thus, the nomadic state of diaspora and their continuous displacement at the hands of time and turn of events become the narrative tensions through which Taraporevala excavates the émigré. In fact, even the cityscape is in a constant state of flux, and across her work from within India to outside, we see she frames that freeze the precarious form of ever-changing life in a home that is not one’s own. The anglicized postcolonial protagonists from Mississippi Masala (1991), to Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000), and the rest of her works, portray the angst of the diaspora to find a place they can rightfully call home—where they are accepted for who they are, unlike their experience as ‘transplant organs’—drawing from My Own Country (1998). While, the screenwriting accommodates the transition of this non-resident Indian as a non-resident alien, her characters often come from the diasporic community into a world that perhaps has little to no elbow room for their likes. Another critical dimension is the idea of a belabored existence as the diasporic Indian, who must work hard in order to find a place and a semblance of home in this foreign land. In Mississippi Masala (1991) we see the entire family work at the liquor store to make ends meet, while in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000) she opens with Ambedkar’s character cleaning dishes with an African American man to provide for his studies. The biases of the diasporic existence also surface as a result, most starkly in the case of Mississippi Masala (1991) and My

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Own Country (1998). Displacement too threads the bridges in New York and Kolkata together in The Namesake and pushes the characters across India, Africa and the US in Mississippi Masala (1991) and My Own Country (1998). While work and constant uphill battles, feature the diasporic life in Taraporevala’s screenwriting, there are no alternatives left for the diasporic characters but to confront the perpetual displacement. Indeed, the poignant end of Mississippi Masala (1991) is the most characteristic in this regard, when the main protagonist Jay gives in to the change that has engulfed his home in Uganda.

The Insurmountable Weight of Representation in Adaptations The cinema from South Asian perspective, particularly films portraying characters speaking in English and adopting an anglicized identity, often falls into the problems of stereotyping. Drawing from Shohat and Stam (2014), Said (2019), and hooks (2015), I revisit the ideas of oriental gaze and its departures/repetitions in Taraporevala’s work. Ruchir Joshi (2009) in his scathing critique in the Telegraph, commenting on films from India for the Euro American audiences, like Slumdog Millionaire  (2008) and Salaam Bombay! (1988), alerts the readers about the problems with the cinematic representations of India from transnational filmmakers like Danny Boyle and Mira Nair. The problems of African-American representation at the hands of a ‘brown’ filmmaker pursuing independent transnational filmmaking are enunciated in bell hooks and Anuradha Dingwaney’s (1992) reading of Mississippi Masala critiques the idea of forced syncreticism using romantic love. The situated and universal chronotope of romantic reconciliation is often the main thematic and the consistent problem with these representations that seldom delve into the texture of two disparate worlds meeting. Indeed, the politics of the screenwriting is also determined by the funding/producers of the story—who often hail from a privileged background. To sum up this position, I draw from Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, to place the chronic problems of representation (also ‘myths’) vis-a-vis the work of screenwriting: ‘myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflection’ (2013, p. 116). In Taraporevala’s screenwriting these local references are nuanced in the conversational language and the mise-en-scène of the slum illustrates the reality—particularly in Salaam Bombay! where she frames the story of

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a depraved section of Mumbai. Chai Pau’s dilemma of returning home yet finding comfort in the streets of the slum enunciates the emancipation that the viewers seek but are not offered. Instead, once he loses Manju we see him walk into a dark alley and wind a top. This melancholic ending serves as a metaphor for the life of the many street kids in India whose reality is but a rigmarole of conflicts and a constant search for home. However, there have been many criticisms to these representations that illuminate facades of stereotypes that inherently get attached to such representations. Pooja Rangan (2017) in her insightful critique on the participatory documentary argues that the human subject in such works is ‘both cultivated and calculated’ (p. 9). Indeed, ‘humanitarian filmmaking’ involves processes, she further illustrates, that are deeply embedded in the qualifying practice of framing the true ‘human’ subject (p. 8). Indeed, the process of framing Salaam Bombay! started with the documentary tracing the life of street children in Dharavi and later as the process unfolded, so did Taraporevala’s screenplay for the film. Similarly, in her documentary Girl Rising (2013), the young girl living in a tenement housing in Kolkata is shown to aspire of a life where she can realize her dreams of being an artist. However, the emancipatory mode of address in the narrative foregoes any aspirational window—particularly because of the use of animated characters that further distance the child from the real world. In Yeh Ballet (2020), Taraporevala returns to the same geography of Dharavi but this time the dreams of her characters have room for an aspirational and transnational window. Hence, one cannot help but wonder about the politics of representation with respect to the production structures supporting the screenplay. When Taraporevala’s pen is resourced by the in-house production company, the result is a much more balanced and nuanced representation that explores the gritty struggles and uphill battles for the lesser privileged in this world. By contrast, when her pen is supported by funding from transnational circuits—like in  Girl Rising  (2013) and Salaam Bombay! (1988), the same children from similar circumstances find it hard to break free from their situations. With Mississippi Masala (1991) as well, the same lingering question of representation and agency haunts the narrative. Despite the push for the multicultural and cosmopolitan surface of the narrative that shifts between Africa and the US, and within the US between two othered communities, one finds copious illustrations of racism within the South Asian community, and an almost flattening of the conflict between families from different races by the veneer of romantic love. While, the dialogue is sensitive to the switches in tonal variations and

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differences from one context to the other, the representation of an inter-­ racial and universal future happens outside either of the racial communities—when Meena (played by Sarita Choudhury) and Demetrius (portrayed by Denzel Washington) flee away to a new place in their car. To sum up, I turn to bell hooks’ (2015) remarks about the mediations of film as active texts that are interpreted and often passively appropriated by the audiences (pp.  3–4). Thus, while transnational representations like Taraporevala’s characters fight for a more equitable space for images, what also becomes crucial to unpack here is the complex control mechanisms that shape and define such narratives. Further, such mechanisms are often beyond the control of the screenwriter and in the service of the collaborative medium that is cinema.

Unpacking the Transnational Idiom In Sooni’s work one can see the transnational address to the audience beyond the local climes of India and engaging with the Euro-American circuits, especially the film festival circuit. While Satyajit Ray (2010) argued for ‘a uniquely and recognizably Indian’ idiom of cinema (p. 22), Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (2010) argue that transnational cinema does not necessarily create ‘blissfully deracinated post national subjects’ (p. 4). In other words, encountering transnational cinemas is to witness a unique mix of emergent cosmopolitan identities and resilient native identities. Universalism in Taraporevala’s storytelling teeters between the imaginaries of utopian possibilities and the evils of the worlds these characters inhabit. What is critical to point out here is the rich cultural backdrop that both Taraporevala and Nair share in terms of an identity and heritage. Mira Nair speaks about her legacy in Lahore and how her family had to move to India. She was born in Orissa with roots in Punjab and much later in Uganda post marriage. Her consequent feature traced the conflict of an Indian man who finds a home in Uganda, and leads a peaceful life with his African friends, but is forced out of Africa under the Idi Amin regime. The film tries to focus on the South Asian narrative and is told in some ways for a non-resident Indian audience who may share the questions of home and belonging in this new world order. To both Nair and Taraporevala, identity, coming of age and finding a home in the world become the thematic through which they frame their auteuristic transnational idiom. This idiom is rooted in a distinct documentary stylistic, with inspirations from cinema vérité style of explorations. Indeed, Taraporevala often mentions how

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deep ethnographic research is an integral part of her writing process and the sense of responsibility that rests on the shoulders of a screenwriter when framing these fraught problems in a three-act structure. To both Nair and Taraporevala, their tryst with the guerrilla style of media making is central to arriving at the narrative, as is the rich diasporic literature that addresses their concerns of home and the world. While the mise-en-scène and character tableaus often engage with the social idiom of the local, the conflicts and their resolutions are framed in a universal canvas—occasionally, having overtones of emancipation.

Conclusion Drawing from Raymond Bellour’s (2018) observation that film texts are perennially ‘discoverable’ (p.  115), I conclude this chapter with more questions that offer more aspects of discovery in Taraporevala’s extensive body of work. While transnational cinema on the one hand offers a niche for filmmakers from the invisible and marginal spaces, on the other hand, there are gaps in addressing the lack of representations of people hailing from the othered communities. When analyzing this space of filmmaking emerging from India, Pooja Rangan’s articulation ‘immediations’ becomes a critical entry point to map the poetics and politics of images that emerge in and of documentary practice (2017). While research itself is an intrinsic and necessary aspect of screenwriting, does it offer a dialogue with the peoples it involves? And if it does, how far does the screenwriter bend the narrative arc in service of the media markets? When bell hooks (2015) alerts us to the poverty of images that refuse to represent the colored black and brown peoples, how far does the industry address this lack? And when a filmmaker or a screenwriter creates a media project for a transnational market space, how far do they kowtow to the logics of capital? Sooni Taraporevala’s illustrious works address some of these questions, yet leave room for responses from the diverse groups of audiences. Her work outside the industry in building solidarity networks and support systems for emergent voices is equally critical. What is also critical is the alliance such a voice brings of the Indian film industries with the rest of the world. To study Taraporevala’s work is also to understand the place of sanctions and support groups that facilitate work in the film industry in India and outside, yet the mainstream narrative pushes for her authorial voice over her collaborations that facilitated her movement across contexts.

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References Bakhtin, M. (1981). ‘Excerpt: Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel’. In: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, Austin, pp. 84–120. Barthes, R. (2013). Mythologies. Vintage, London, pp. 116–118. Bellour, R. (2018). ‘Film Analysis and the Symbolic’. In: Fox, A., Radner, H. (eds). Raymond Bellour: Cinema and the Moving Image. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 105–118. Bhaumik, K. (2013). ‘Film and migration, South Asia’. In: I.  Ness (ed). The Encyclopaedia of Global Human Migration. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, West Sussex, UK, n.p. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm232. Accessed on 15 July 2021. Boyle, D., Tandan, L. (2008). Slumdog Millionaire. Celador Films, Film4, Fox Searchlight Pictures. Chadha, G. (2002). Bend it like Beckham. Kintop Pictures, Film Council, Filmförderung Hamburg. Desai, J. (2004). Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. Routledge, New York. De Sica, V. (1948). Bicycle Thieves. Produzioni De Sica. Ezra, E., & Rowden, T. (2010). Transnational cinema: the film reader. London, Routledge. Gunnarson, S. (1998). Such a Long Journey. Amy International Artists, The Film Works. hooks, b. (2018). Belonging: a culture of place. Routledge, New York. ———. (2015). Reel to real: race, sex and class at the movies. Routledge, London. hooks, b., Dingwaney, A. (1992). ‘Sisters of the Yam: Mississippi Masala’. Z Magazine (July/August Issue). Joshi, R. (2009). ‘“The Thin Edge”: The Ghosts of Goof Films- Frida Kahlo and invisible cities of the screen’. March 22. The Telegraph (Calcutta Edition). https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/the-­ghosts-­of-­good-­films-­frida-­ kahlo-­and-­invisible-­cities-­of-­the-­screen/cid/495761. Karnik, A. (2020). ‘Episode 15: My Journey, From Harvard To Yeh Ballet | Featuring Sooni Taraporevala’. Currious List Podcast. July 5. https://rb. gy/2nx33k. Accessed on 12 May 2021. Marks, L.U. (2000). The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Mehta, D. (2002). Bollywood Hollywood. Different Tree Same Wood, Téléfilm Canada, Canadian Television Fund. Naficy, H. (2018). An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

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———. (2003). ‘Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational Film Genre’. In: Shohat, E., Stam, R. (eds). Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media. Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, pp. 203–226. Nair, M. (1988). Salaam Bombay. Mirabai Films, Film Four International, National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC). ———. (1991). Mississippi Masala. Black River Productions, Channel Four Films, Cinecom Pictures. ———. (1998). My Own Country. Mirabai Films. ———. (2006). The Namesake. Fox Searchlight Pictures, Cine Mosaic, Entertainment Farm (EF). Patel, J. (2000). Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar. National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC). Rangan, P. (2017). Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary. Duke University Press, Durham. Ray. S. (1955). Pather Panchali. Government of West Bengal. ———. (2010). Our Films Their Films. Orient Blackswan, New Delhi. Robbins. R. (2013). Girl Rising | India Chapter. The Documentary Group, Double Exposure Studios, Vulcan Productions. Saha, A. (2001). ‘Sooni was everywhere, doing everything’. The Rediff Special. April 6. https://www.rediff.com/news/2001/apr/06spec.htm. Accessed on 2 July 2021. Said, E. W. (2019). Orientalism. Penguin Books, London. Sen, S. (2017). ‘Breaking the Boundaries of Bollywood’. In: Harrod, M., Paszkiewicz, K. (eds). Women Do Genre in Film and Television. Routledge, New York, pp.121–137. Sengupta, R. (2018). ‘Writing from the Margins of Media: Screenwriting Practice and Discourse During the First Indian Talkies’. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 9(2):117–136. Shohat, E. & Stam, R. (2014). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. Routledge, London. Taraporevala, S. (2008). Little Zizou. Jigri Dost Productions, Studio 18. ———.(2020). Yeh Ballet. Netflix, Roy Kapur Films. Tiwari, P. (2014). ‘Review of Sooni Taraporevala  – TBIP Tête-à-Tête’. The Big Indian Picture. January 30. http://thebigindianpicture.com/2014/01/ sooni-­taraporevala-­tbip-­tete-­a-­tete/. Accessed on 2 July 2021. White, H. (1988). ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’. The American Historical Review 93(5): 1193–1199. Yadav, A. (2021). Scripting Bollywood. Women Unlimited, New Delhi. ———. (2011). ‘An evolving present within a past: A history of screenwriting practices in popular Hindi cinema’. Journal of Screenwriting 2(1): 41–59.

CHAPTER 10

Mira Nair and the Cinema of Postcolonial Spectacle Benita Acca Benjamin and Meena T. Pillai

Charting the postcolonial space through its social assemblages, material practices, cultural formations and economic relations is a fraught endeavour that should simultaneously capture the macropolitical and micropolitical structures that the space inhabits. In this process, representing the postcolonial space constituted through the curious entanglement between diverse affective geographies and socio-spatial dynamics becomes a task that straddles the received aesthetic and political registers, with the understanding that one remains inseparable from the other. It is in such a context that the act of imagining and representing spaces, reiterating its material and discursive existence, ought to be analysed so as to reveal the geopolitical hegemonies that mediate these contesting imaginations/representations. This chapter tries to read select films of Mira Nair to identify the ways in which the spectacle of excess associated with the postcolonial space reveals the aesthetic, affective and material politics mediated by transnational relations. To this end, the chapter attempts to tease out the ways in which Mira Nair’s films, which are premised in the social, cultural

B. A. Benjamin • M. T. Pillai (*) University of Kerala, Trivandrum, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_10

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and economic context of India, hinges on the strategic performance of ‘Indianness’ to ensure its transnational mobility. The representation of films from postcolonial locales often involves an orchestrated engagement with various national/regional metaphors to signify its rootedness within the milieu, reducing the vibrant socio-­material relations that are constitutive of the place into an aesthetic paradigm that would serve as an essentialist trait suggestive of its ‘otherness’ or postcoloniality within the global film market. In order to analyse the strategies through which postcolonial films by diasporic directors, who are positioned at the interface of the insider-outsider dichotomy, latch onto a postcolonial imaginary that “re-orientalises” the socio-spatial relations and practices (Lau 2009, p. 573), the chapter intends to study three films by Mira Nair, an internationally acclaimed director of Indian origin. The films chosen for the present study are Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996), Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Monsoon Wedding (2001) as they have Indian characters who inhabit Indian socio-cultural spaces. A close analysis of these films would help the study in tracing not only the affective loci deployed in constituting the aesthetic terrains of these films but also the transnational circuits of circulation and reception that mediated the ‘realism’ in these films. Though these films represent different spatio-temporal contexts and socio-economic relations, the spectacle of excess and the extreme social aesthetics, as seen in these films, serve as a unifying chord that attempts to fashion a postcolonial ‘aura’. It is in this context that Guy Debord’s observation that the devolution of social life “from being to having” and ultimately “from having to appearing” gains significance (2002, p. 7). The transnational routes of travel consigned for the films and the consumerist practices that these films attempt to cater are intricately linked to the politico-economic changes occurring within India. Liberalisation and the consequent opening up of the national boundaries resulted in changes in the social, technological, economic and cultural terrains due to which Bollywood also ascended into a global culture industry with novel modes of production, circulation and consumption (Desai 2013, p.  208). Moreover, globalisation also punctured the traditional “binary-style power dynamics” by inaugurating new multi-directional mobility of films across geographical and cultural divides (Schaefer & Karan 2013, p. 8). The radical change in the depiction of social life in India following liberalisation in anticipation of a larger global audience, as seen in the selected films, becomes evident through the disinclination of the film industry to act as

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the prime agent of national consciousness as Indianness was “packaged and showcased differently” so that it could be marketed as a commodity to be consumed by an international market (Pillai 2012, p.  44). As the post-national impulses of the film industry due to the economic reforms suggest its growing awareness of an audience that lies outside the precincts of the nation, the new marketing strategies deployed by the films tried to redefine the ways in which it engaged with the referents of national identity. It is in such a context that the films of Mira Nair, a diasporic Indian, gain significance as a cultural artefact that stands in as a microcosmic representation of the nation and as a consumable commodity that mediates the perceptions of the transnational audience. While Salaam Bombay! (1988) depicts India at the cusp of economic liberalisation, Monsoon Wedding (2001) represents the new consumerist ethos that has pervaded the public and private imaginations in India. Similarly, the release of the film Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love in 1996 would attest to the presence of a larger global audience as it was screened and received nominations at multiple international film festivals despite it being banned in India. Moreover, the preponderance of English dialogue in Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love and Monsoon Wedding would also suggest the attempts to appeal and engage with a transnational audience. Given the transnational moorings of the films, it becomes imperative to consider the strategic construction of postcolonial spaces so as to ascribe an exotic appeal to the cinematic representations. These films, which are “wrapped in the exotic aura of the cultural commodity fetish” (Huggan 1994, p.  27), mediate the new political economies of desire through global networks of distribution and aid the crystallisation of essentialist assumptions about its place of origin. The transnational implications of culture industries and cultural commodification engender new circuits which reproduce geopolitical hegemonies through new forms of cultural imperialism. Since the study is interested in looking at the politics underlying the depiction of ‘othered’ socio-cultural spaces and practices, the chapter would engage with the idea “haptic visuality”, a term coined by Laura Marks to denote “the tactile and contagious quality of cinema” (2000, p. xi–xii), to spell out the aesthetic tropes that circumscribe the popular imaginations of postcolonial spaces. In order to tease out the representational strategies employed to commodify cultural difference so as to understand the construction of spaces as embodiments of material and social practices, the chapter will be divided into two sections. The first section will look into the ways in which the representation of postcoloniality

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is realised through the spectacle of excess. The second section will study the affective cartographies that mediate and aestheticise the exoticisation of postcolonial spaces.

The Spectacle of Excess in Postcolonial Cinema Guy Debord observes, “the spectacle appears simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification” (2000, p. 7). By deploying the spectacle as a metaphor to symbolically define the social life in postcolonial spaces, Mira Nair’s films sensuously represent what could be called a society of spectacle. While Salaam Bombay!, Kama Sutra and Monsoon Wedding are films that depict the socio-economic topography of India at different points in time, they employ the tactful display of spectacles which serve as totalising frameworks disguised as hyperrealistic representations. Though the “visual excess brought in by spectacle, choreography, costume and music” aids the creation of “brand Bollywood” (Raghavendra 2012, p.31), the spectacles of excess in the selected films not only attempt to embody and perform Indianness but also serve as a conduit for the exoticisation of postcoloniality. Thus, the spectacle of excess functions primarily as a sensuous expression of the radical alterity or ‘otherness’ of the social geography. In Salaam Bombay!, which was released at around the time that immediately preceded the economic liberalisation in India, the social life of the subcontinent is represented through the spectacle of the mob. The plot unravels in the backdrop of an overcrowded slum in Mumbai which houses vagrants, sex workers, pimps, and other menial labourers. The film employs visuals that depict the crowded spaces not only through the representation of habitualised practices that capture the “specific semantic of the everyday” (Bausinger 1984, p. 344) but also through the staging of social rituals and other social assemblages that evince the amorphous social spaces of the heaving city. The sprawling cityscape and the crammed streets are introduced in the shot when Bombay is introduced to the viewer. As the boy Krishna arrives in the city, he is chased by a mendicant though he escapes by disappearing into the crowd. The final scene shows Krishna and Rekha getting lost in the sprawling mob celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi. Routine activities like selling tea, visiting the train station, everyday transactions in the marketplaces and casual sauntering through the street play out against the overcrowded urban spaces. Here, the portrayal of the postcolonial cityscape and its lurching movement towards modernity are

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articulated through the spectacle of the mob and the chaotic spaces that it inhabits/constitutes. While the roads and railway tracks, among many others, suggest the “ferocious manoeuvres [of] modernity”, the thronging mob that inhabits these spaces denotes the “‘non-modern’ populations”, deflating the discourses of ‘development’ in the region (Srivastava 1996, p. 403). Apart from the portrayal of the overpopulated city amidst mundane activities, the film also relies on the spectacle of the mob through various social gatherings or rituals. Some of these include marriage ceremonies, the funeral procession of Chillum, and the bustling religious gathering celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi, which are socio-culturally sanctioned congregations that illustrate the banality of shifting demographic assemblages within the metropolitan spaces. Here, the spectacle of the mob and the congested cityscapes where it is transacted provide a discordant image of modernity by foregrounding the non-disciplined and unruly mob that is projected as emblematic of the social rhythm of the postcolonial city. Similarly, the erotic spectacle of excess in Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love hints at the larger transnational economies of production, circulation and reception enjoyed by postcolonial films. Through the depiction of the sexual rivalry between Tara, the princess, and Maya, her maid, the film strategically enables the gendered transformation of the third world into a site where the spectacle of erotic excess is normatively performed. The sensual appeal of the film, evoked through the “kaleidoscope of gleaming bodies, saturated colors, trails of incense, and accented English seems to pander to Western wet dreams” (Marks 2000, p. 232), as these visual and bodily excesses gain access across transnational visual registers through the ‘re-orientalisation’ and ‘re-sexualisation’ of the figure of the subaltern woman. The film set in sixteenth-century India shows the influence of the ancient Indian text Kama Sutra (translated as “Principles of Lust”) not only through the sexually charged visuals accompanied by the erotic display of female bodies as they engage in sexual activity but also through the character of Rasa Devi, who teaches from the Kama Sutra to young courtesans. The abject position of Maya, who later becomes the favoured courtesan in Prince Raj Singh’s court, due to the interpenetrating networks of her socio-economic position and gender relations that are at play, aids in reifying the position of the non-agential subaltern woman who functions as the site of the postcolonial spectacle of excess. Moreover, the depiction of the postcolonial woman as a mysterious seductress whose ‘undressal’ symbolically fulfils the “unveiling of an enigma” and the “Western fantasies of penetration into the mysteries of the Orient” is realised through the

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image of the subaltern woman who embodies the exotic-erotic fantasy (Yegenoglu 2003, p.  543). As a result, the portrayal of the gendered object of the exotic-erotic gaze of the viewer in the film Kama Sutra acts as an essentialist and homogenised frame that allows the crystallisation of the cultural assumptions underlying the conceptualisation of the ‘orient’ and the gendered subaltern. Here, the spectacles of erotic excess attempt to produce desires by repackaging traditional nomenclatures through the appropriation of the ancient Indian text Kama Sutra, attributed to Vatsayana, into a more palatable and commodified genre that ensures its mobility across the transnational viewers. In the film Monsoon Wedding, which takes as its setting the post-­ liberalised cityscapes of India, the spectacle of consumerist excess characterises the postcolonial space. The film depicts the elaborate wedding preparations of Aditi Verma who still harbours romantic feelings for her colleague only to eventually reconcile with the groom. The assertion of cultural difference through various consumption practices and the influence of global networks in mediating Indian culture become evident through the visual representation of the social, economic and cultural ramifications of a wedding ceremony hosted in an upper-middle-class family. It is in this context that Adrian Athique’s observation that “contemporary Bollywood style simultaneously operates as a symbolic performance of India in the liberalization era” gains traction (2012, p. 278). The consumerist agency of the family is revealed through the splendor of the wedding ceremony, the expensive textile shops they visit, gifts brought by the groom’s family, and the ostentatious display of the bride’s ornaments as the maid tries them on, among many other instances. By portraying the splendour of the marriage ceremony, the film attempts to ensure cultural capital to various socio-cultural and religious practices within the transnational viewing spaces, thereby suggesting “a strongly hybridized Indo-­ Eatern/Western-global orientation” (Schaefer & Karan 2012, p. 75). The aggrandised spectacles of consumerist excess deployed in the film attempts to glamorise cultural difference through the consumerist desires of the neo-liberalised postcolony and the “globalised commodification of ethnicity”, whereby Indianness is marketed “as a consumer lifestyle culture” (Pillai 2012, p. 45). Here, ‘Indianness’ is exoticised through the display of the consumerist agency and consumption practices of the family. In the selected films, the mediation of transnational gaze through representations that exoticise and commodify cultural difference so as to substitute it as material reality is achieved through spectacles of excess.

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Through these visual excesses- spectacle of the mob, spectacle of eroticism and spectacle of consumerism- the films construct certain visual narratives that consolidate geopolitical and cultural differences, thereby replicating hegemonic power structures across transnational “scopic regimes” (Grayson & Mawdsley 2018, p.  2). Such visual simulacra homogenise spaces, subjectivities and everyday realities into essentialist traits and generalisable cultural tropes that recycle postcoloniality as “exotic cultural spectacles” (Huggan 1997, p. 421). As a result, the spectacles of excess employed in Salaam Bombay!, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love and Monsoon Wedding become the salience of these postcolonial spaces, where the cultural context and social actors become interchangeable, yet fixed, metaphors.

Aesthetic and Affective Coordinates of the Pre/ Postcolonial Space The aesthetic lexicon that constitutes the affective cartographies of the pre/postcolonial space is contingent on various material, social and cultural assumptions. By studying how some spaces become synonymous with certain extreme social aesthetics and the meanings that invest spaces with emotions, it becomes possible to comprehend the transnational politics of representation that fashion the habitus inhabited by the ‘other’. In this section, the chapter will look into the ways in which the visual aesthetics employed in the selected films serve as affective motifs and moral allusions that discursively construct pre/postcolonial spaces. As a result, the mediated pre/postcoloniality, as seen in these films, tries to provide totalising representations so that the “film signifies through its materiality” and fosters “a contact between perceiver and object represented” (Marks 2000, p. xii), revealing the politics that translate the emotional topoi underlying the everyday lived reality in pre/postcolonial spaces. Thus, the attempts to map the modalities through which spaces are made to embody cultural difference would shed light on the tactful consolidation of spaces as “sensuous geographies” (Rodaway 1994, p.  37), situated within the aesthetic and affective registers of pre/postcoloniality. The association of ‘othered’ spaces with certain social aesthetics suggests the strategic mediation of these spaces for transnational consumption. In order to associate ‘otherness’ as an intrinsic feature of the exotic cultural geographies, Mira Nair’s films construct these spaces as sites of

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abjection. It is in this context that the attempts to contain the social ontology of these spaces within the aesthetics of difference would reveal the transnational entanglements of these depictions. Mira Nair’s films tap onto certain aesthetic templates that discursively and affectively construct these spaces through the “spectacle of distant suffering” (Boltanski 1999, p. xv) so that various geopolitical and socio-cultural differences are reiterated through voyeuristic gaze- “observation of the unfortunate by those who do not share their suffering, who do not experience it directly” (p. 3). Here, the extreme social aesthetics become an intrinsic quality that represents the pre/postcolonial spaces as an incoherent and chaotic assemblage, reducing the specificity of the social and spatial visions of the region into a homogenising ‘feeling’ of the place. In such instances, the totalising aesthetic tropes that denote the exotic cultural geographies invoke certain ‘orientations’ towards these locales, which in turn is instrumental in equating these regions to the “affective value” (Ahmed 2004, p.  29) that it evokes among the transnational audience. The hegemonic socio-cultural assumptions that undergird the affective construction of space so as to reproduce hegemonic geopolitical relation onto the aesthetic parameters that define ‘othered’ spaces become evident through the study of Mira Nair’s films. In Salaam Bombay!, which is set in the Mumbai slums, the ‘othered’ bodies are situated within the “haptic urban ethnoscapes” (Dudrah 2012, p.  66), by tracing how the urban social geographies articulated through the film serve as a marker of ontological difference that distinguishes postcolonial spaces. It is in this context that Glauber Rocha’s (2012) observations with regard to Brazilian cinema and the “aesthetics of hunger” gain prominence here. By deploying hunger as a metaphor to express the decrepitude of the city, the film tries to translate the difference embedded within the socio-economic geography of the postcolonial space by “cultivate[ing] the taste of misery, not as a tragic symptom, but merely as an aesthetic object” (n.p.) which will be of interest in the transnational viewing spaces. In the film Salaam Bombay!, one comes across various instances when hunger becomes an image replete with affective value. Such instances weave in the moral and social fabric of the city and its subjects, revealing the affective relations that discursively constitute the ‘sense’ of the place. Thus, the instances like Krishna buying tea for a wasted and food-deprived Chillum, Manju eating the food that Krishna asks her to hand over to Sola Saal, Krishna providing a glass of tea to Sola Saal to console her when she is new in the neighbourhood, and Krishna stealing a samosa from a marriage banquet where he

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serves food to the guest suggest the social structures and material relations that define the affective dynamics of the postcolonial cityscapes. Here, these images of hunger exceed the limits of a mere backdrop that reveals the socio-economic structures of the locale as they also assume the role of a ritualistic trope that actively performs, recreates and constitutes the social aesthetics of the postcolonial space. Such noirish depictions that portray the socio-economic landscape as inhabiting the people as much as the people inhabit these spaces seem to suggest that “the imaginative possibilities of ‘urban renewal’ are always shadowed by the material realities of spatial decay” (Chambers and Huggan 2015, p. 786). By entwining the social life of the city with the fate of its citizens, the film constructs the transnational imaginations of the postcolonial city as a “deeply profane place, corrupted by money and commerce and littered with dangerously seductive amusements” (Chatterjee 2004, p. 141). Here, the imageries of decay and degeneration attributed to the place also suggest the molding of affective dispositions among the viewing public. As a result, the representation of the postcolonial urbanscapes using the idioms of pathos seek to reinstate geopolitical hierarchies through the film’s narrative of misery, which constructs the polarity between the viewer and the third world geographies via affective tangents of difference. The films Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding employ extensive images of the city in order to mirror the social life of the people in these urban postcolonial settings—Mumbai and Delhi respectively. The visual representation of the socio-economic dynamics of these places through shifting images of the cityscapes- crowded roads, street vendors, railway stations, tea stalls, etc- assume a phantasmagoric quality as they show the city as a constantly metamorphosising space so as to suggest how the city constitutes its itinerant social spaces. As a result, the socio-spatial dynamics of the postcolonial city is aesthetically reproduced to provide an overarching coherence via the eye of the camera. Thus, the unseen presence of the camera, which mediates the urban spaces for transnational viewing, acts as an organising gaze that captures the ‘chaotic’ social spaces of the city while assembling it into a vibrant spectacle of structured otherness. Here, the eye of the camera serves as a flaneur “who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes” (Sontag 2005, p.  55). The phantasmagoric images of everyday life in the postcolony which tend to ground the plot within the social, cultural and economic referents of the locale than to contribute to the narrative progression, appear as “fragmented views” that

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“regroup themselves into a new unity … that can only be looked at” (Debord 2002, p. 7). The portrayal of postcolonial urban spaces in Mira Nair’s films hinges on its depiction as a “premature metropolis” that resists coherence (Chatterjee 2004, p. 141). As a result, the attempts to spell out the dynamics of postcolonial urbanscapes have resulted in conceptualising urban public spaces as a class-ed space, which is visually realised through the aestheticisation of social disparities. While this could be glossed over in a film like Salaam Bombay! as it exclusively narrates the social life in the slums of Mumbai, the representation of urban public spaces through its association with the working-class population in a film like Monsoon Wedding which predominantly depicts the upper middle/upper class consumerist practices suggest the ways in which the urban spaces in the postcolony gets interchangeable with the humdrum of proletarian life. Hence, the attempts to aestheticise the materiality of everyday life in the postcolony become narrowed down to the phantasmagoric portrayal of the postcolonial urbanscapes as “a world of anxious virility” (Mbembe 1992, p. 14). As the film Monsoon Wedding shifts from the luxury of the Verma household to depict the cityscapes of Delhi, one witnesses the confluence of social and spatial hegemonies in representing what could be regarded as a murky, crowded and disenchanting metropolis, which serves as the backdrop for unveiling the monotony of everyday existence through the actions of rickshaw-pullers, street vendors, and pedestrians. Here, the urban spaces, which are in stark contrast to the Verma domesticity, become a ‘classed’ space where the strategic deployment of postcolonial urban aesthetics that relies on “formal exoticism that vulgarizes social problems” hints at how the politics of transnational representations “satisfies a nostalgia for primitivism” (Rocha 2012 n.p.). Thus, the association of urban spaces with specific classed activities becomes a stylistic choice in these films wherein it functions as an aestheticised trope alluding to the place’s postcoloniality. The postcolonial urban spaces in these films serve as “poverty porn” (Nayar 2011, p. 132), as these spaces are affectively charted by empathetically moving the global viewing public. In Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, which is set in sixteenth-century India, the political, social and cultural mapping of the precolonial setting is achieved by employing the aesthetics of violence. Here, violence is used as a metaphor that hints at the socio-political relations and the moral cartography of the region. As a result, images of violence function as a “ritualistic performance that recreates concepts of the pre-colonial occult” (Nandi &

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Chatterjee 2012, p. 9). By inscribing violent masculinity into the region’s social aesthetics, the film tries to engage with various imageries of aggression as an essentialist feature of the Oriental cultural geography. The film includes various instances that employ violence as a trace that links the cultural and physical landscape of the region. In the film, the display of violence assumes the proportions of a public spectacle of power and masculinity, as in the case of the wrestling match between Raj Singh and Jai Kumar, which is witnessed by a multitude of people. Similarly, Jai Kumar’s execution by elephant also gathers a crowd that is excited by the spectacle of violence. Here, the aestheticisation and normalisation of violence is located within an “economy of death”, whereby death elicits a “space for enjoyment” (Mbembe 1992, p. 21). The cheering crowd that drools over the sight of violence signifies the banality and immanence of violence in the exotic landscape of the ‘other’. The immediate audience who has gathered to witness the spectacle not only reinforces the process of othering but also attempts to underline the translation of cultural difference, which crystallises around the polarity between the response of the jeering crowd and the revulsion incited among the transnational audience. As a result, these public spectacles predicated on the aesthetics of violence construct the moral and cultural terrains of the region. In such a context, it becomes pertinent to situate the spectacle of the bleeding bodies not only as an aesthetic paradigm but also as an affective strategy that consolidates new spaces of visual encounter. Thus, the aesthetics of violence functions as a fetishised trope that attempts to translate the cultural spaces inhabited by the ‘orient’, hinting at the material, social, and affective relations that constitute these ‘othered’ geographies. Here, the precolonial exotic space is portrayed as the site of abjection that elicits disgust among the transnational audience. The exotic precolonial space represented in the film becomes a site where spectacles of abjection plays out or a site of sensuous excess that catalyses affective disidentification among the transnational audience. The affective responses of the viewers, whether that be of pity or revulsion, which emanate from the sensuous representation of the exotic socio-­ cultural spaces points at a larger hierarchy of values bolstered by geopolitical power structures. The extreme social aesthetics employed to represent the ‘othered’ spaces serve not only as mere thematic tropes that allude to the existential malady of these spaces as they are also instrumental in structuring affects in accordance to a regime of value. By employing certain visual aesthetics to represent the socio-cultural and politico-economic terrains,

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Mira Nair’s films attempt to ensure the transnational mobility of the films by channelising specific affective dispositions, which would then qualify as a generic trait that re-colonises ‘othered’ cultural geographies within globally favoured formats. As a result, affects become fetishised through its association with the aesthetic use of extreme social indicators and its reproduction via spectacles of pre/postcolonial decadence.

Conclusion The present study tried to understand how the melodramatic and hyperrealistic portrayal of the social, cultural and economic conditions in Mira Nair’s films has allowed the mediation of geopolitical hegemonies in the construction of the exotic aura. By analysing the films Salaam Bombay!, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love and Monsoon Wedding, the present chapter tried to see the modalities through which Indianness is commodified and performed to ensure its mobility across transnational affective registers. To this end, the study tried to see how visual representations of ‘othered’ spaces lean on totalising spectacles of excess and extreme social aesthetics, reducing the socio-spatial dynamics of these cultural geographies into mere embodiments of cultural difference.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). ‘Affective Economies.’ Social Text 22(2):117–139. Athique, A. (2012). ‘Addressing the Nonresident: Soft Power, Bollywood and the Diasporic Audience.’ In: A. G. Roy (ed). The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad. Sage, New Delhi, pp. 277–294. Bausinger, H. (1984). ‘Media, Technology and Daily Life.’ Media, Culture and Society 6: 343–351. Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Chambers, C. & Huggan, G. (2015). ‘Reevaluating the Postcolonial City.’ Interventions 17(6):783–788. Chatterjee, P. (2004). The Politics of the Governed. Columbia University Press, New York. Debord, G. (2002). The Society of the Spectacle. Hobgoblin Press, Canberra. Desai, J. (2013). ‘The Scale of Diasporic Cinema: Negotiating National and Transnational Cultural Citizenship.’ In: Gokulsing, K.M., Dissanayake, W. (eds). Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinema. Routledge, Oxon and New York, pp. 206–217.

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Dudrah, R. (2012). Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema. Routledge, Oxon and New York. Grayson, K. & Mawdsley, J. (2018). ‘Scopic Regimes and the Visual Turn in International Relations: Seeing World Politics through the Drone.’ European Journal of International Relations 25 (2): 431–457. Huggan, G. (1994). ‘The Postcolonial Exotic.’ Transitions 64: 22–29. ———. (1997). ‘Prizing “Otherness”: A Short History of the Booker.’ Studies in the Novel 29(3):412–433. Lau, L. (2009). ‘Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals.’ Modern Asian Studies 43(2): 571–590. Marks, L.U. (2000). The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke University Press, Durham. Mbembe, A. (1992). ‘The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolonial.’ Public Culture 4(2):1–30. Nair, M. (1988). Salaam Bombay!. Cadrage, Channel Four Films, Doordarshan, La Sept Cinema, Mirabai Films, NFDC. ———. (1996). Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. NDF International, Pony Canyon, Pandora Film Production, Channel Four Films, Mirabai Films ———. (2001). Monsoon Wedding. IFC Productions, Mirabai Films, Delhi Dot Com. Nandi, S. & Chatterjee, E. (2012). ‘Introduction.’ In: Nandi, S., Chatterjee, E. (eds). Spectacles of Blood: A Study of Masculinity and Violence in Postcolonial Films. Zubaan, New Delhi. Nayar, P.K. (2011). States of Sentiment: Exploring the Cultures of Emotion. Orient Blackswan, New Delhi. Pillai, M.T. (2012). ‘Post-national B(H)ollywood and the National Imaginary.’ In: A.  G. Roy (ed). The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad. Sage, New Delhi, pp. 42–54. Raghavendra, M.K. (2012). ‘Mainstream Hindi Cinema and Brand Bollywood: The Transformation of a Cultural Artifact.’ In A.G.  Roy (ed). The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad. Sage, New Delhi, pp. 27–41. Rocha, G. (2012). ‘Aesthetics of Hunger/Aesthetics of Dream.’ (Translated by Randall Johnson and Burnes Hollyman). Diagonal Thoughts. October 24. https://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1708. Accessed on 29 Aug 2021. Rodaway, P. (1994). Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. Routledge, London and New York. Schaefer, D. J. & Karan, K. (2013). ‘Introduction.’ In: Schaefer, D.J., & Karan, K. (eds). Bollywood and Globalization: The Global Power of Popular Hindi Cinema. Routledge, New York, pp. 1–12. ———. (2012). ‘Bollywood and Soft Power: Content Trends and Hybridity in Popular Hindi Cinema.’ In A.G. Roy (ed). The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad. New Sage, Delhi, pp. 57–80.

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Sontag, S. (2005). On Photography. Rosetta Books, New York. Srivastava, S. (1996). ‘Modernity and Post-Coloniality: The Metropolis as Metaphor.’ Economic and Political Weekly, 31(7): 403–412. Yegenoglu, M. (2003). ‘Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism.’ In: Lewis, R., Mills, S. (eds). Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Routledge, New York, pp. 542–566.

PART III

Gender, Sexuality, Subversions

CHAPTER 11

Figurations of Fallible Women: The Art and Act of Writing by Juhi Chaturvedi Madhuja Mukherjee

Juhi Chaturvedi, screenwriter of popular Bollywood films such as Vicky Donor (Shoojit Sircar, Vicky Donor. Eros International, Rising Sun Films, J.A.  Entertainment, 2012), Piku (Shoojit Sircar, Piku. MSM Motion Pictures, Saraswati Entertainment Creations, Rising Sun Films, 2015), October (Shoojit Sircar, October. Rising Sun Films, Kino Works, 2018), Gulabo Sitabo (Shoojit Sircar, Gulabo Sitabo. Rising Sun Films, Kino Works, 2020), in a recently published interview said (Yadav, p. 256): Women in the [Indian film] industry have been at the receiving end for years. The #MeToo movement had happened for a reason. I have heard stories that would make you cringe at the seriously lopsided approach that the industry has adopted. I know a very senior actress from the 1950s and ‘60s, who has told me her version of what the industry was like back then, and I am glad that I am working at this time.

M. Mukherjee (*) Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_11

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In response to Chaturvedi’s comment on ‘working at this time’ one may ask, what ‘times’ do we live in? How have the ‘times’—particularly in terms of film production in India and women’s decisive role in it—altered?1 We enquire: set against deep seated hierarchies within the industrial structure, in what ways have the parameters of film work evolved—with the corporatization of Bombay cinema, and in relation to modes of recruitment, protocols of contracts, subjects of payment / non-payment, shifting job responsibilities, or vis-à-vis matters of gender / class / caste / community and work cultures, practices, rights, unions, as well as break from work, leave, medical support, safety, insurance, workspace, working conditions and so on?2 Can we generate any comprehensive account of the complicated configurations of film work as well as the exploitations and exclusions, which are squarely entrenched in an industrial and patriarchal system?3 Also, what are the various degrees of violations and violence, which women, from diverse backgrounds and trainings, and working in various capacities, encounter and endure?4 How is the precarious and gendered working milieu interconnected with and reflected in filmic work?5 Moreover, what is ‘film work’? What does it entail? And, where are the women located within this framework?6 Chaturvedi, for instance, works ‘from home’, and suggests (Yadav, p. 256): “I feel there is always politics around a woman who works from home. Managing the home and also being an artist who works from home is challenging”. She further elaborates (Yadav, p. 248): “I have finally realized … start work at 10 am, do what you can between 10 am and 3 pm and maybe write for an hour at night”. In this interview, she also discusses the creative process of building characters, dialogue writing, the art of screenplay, and issues of collaboration (with Shoojit Sircar). In the introduction to the Studies in South Asian Film & Media (11 [2]) volume on “Women at Work: The cultural and creative industries”, Rashmi Sawhney writes: While much of the scholarship on post-Fordist post-industrial work cultures continues to be mapped against the iconic ‘factory worker’, this mode of work has never really been a defining feature of film and entertainment industries anywhere in the world, … Nonetheless, despite not being recognized as an industry by the Indian state [until 2001], the film industry itself was organized through many established instruments of industrial organization, of which trade unions were a crucial part [italics added]. ((2020, p. 168)

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Briefly, Sawhney proposes that creative labor needs to read against the classical definition of workers; although, one understands that film work encompasses extensive physical labor, just as, the final product is associated with a wide range of industrial and media networks.7 Of late Debashree Mukherjee (2020a), following her previous research on the gender and cine workers, has produced a productive and critical approach of studying the subject of film work. Specifically reading the actor-singer Shanta Apte’s unparalleled biographical writing—Jau Mi Cinemat? (1940)—and the staging of an unprecedented strike (1939) against the revered Prabhat Film Co.,8 Mukherjee theorizes the problem of ‘exhaustion’ with regard to work, and locates it within the growing field of research on female stardom, industrial fatigue, and the subject of cinema as work.9 Mukherjee argues (2020a, pp. 22–25): cinema is constituted by productive energy relations between machines and organisms, humans and nonhumans. The exhaustion that builds up within this ecology offers us a generative analytic to expand film history toward a history of embodiment as production experience. Thinking about exhaustion as corporeal depletion allows us to see connections between the image and the labor that produces it. At the same time, we are also able to reconceive cinema’s relation to modernity with attention to the specificities of other places in other times, in other bodies, in other circuits of power and practice.

In this article (titled “Somewhere between Human, Nonhuman, and Woman”) Mukherjee (2020a, p.  24) emphasizes on the questions of “Apte’s text as theory (from the South) that helps us rethink the meanings of gender, embodiment, affective labor, inequality, and human-machine relations”. She initiates a comparative study between Apte’s performative and scandalous strike (in ‘men’s clothes’) with M K Gandhi’s influential methods of protest (particularly ‘fasting’) and also reminds us of the wider workers’ movements, inclusive of the Bombay mill workers’ agitations during the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, Mukherjee (2020a, p. 32) underscores the varied aspects of film work and the features of affective labor as she explains: The modern Western idea of labor power derives from this thermodynamic model and describes a quantifiable, mechanical potential for energy expenditure. Apte saw labor power not as mechanical and abstract potential but as organic and individualized latency. … Her use of the concept of labor power

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is material and embodied, rooted in experience and affect, even as it is firmly located within a transactional regime of value.

Furthermore, via Apte’s text she underlines matters of caste in a modernizing society, and the perils of the performative body. Indeed, Apte’s writing highlights a significantly under-researched area in film histories— the issue of ‘caste’ hierarchies within the industry (and the presence / absence of multiple communities)10—as she describes a ‘seven-tier’ caste system within the film world, at the top of which are the capitalists, companies (including managing directors), distributors, exhibitors, advertisers, et al., followed by the workers as well as the Publics.11 In this chapter therefore, I explore the notions of “material and embodied” (2020, p. 32) labor, which is “rooted in experience and affect” (ibid.) through the works of Juhi Chaturvedi. In addition, my own research has developed within the field of feminist historiography,12 and grows from my book project (2017), as well as by means of on-going audio-visual documentation project (titled ‘The Shadow and Arc Light’) concerning women, skills, variable job responsibilities, collaborations, creative processes and the locations and space of film work.13 The purpose of the chapter, therefore, is three-fold. First, I consider the characteristics of film work; secondly, as a filmmaker and researcher, I attempt to extract the women’s function in the production of films, and thus, finally, I reexamine the ‘place’ and the (historical) ‘time’ where in work is performed and unfolds. For instance, during February 2020, I had recorded an audio-­ visual interview of Chaturvedi, in the course of which she narrated the following14: Madhuja Mukherjee (MM): So, in the 2010s you were in fact, doing 3 or 4 jobs simultaneously. May I ask, how was your typical workday? Juhi Chaturvedi (JC): Oh, it was crazy! It would just not end. It would start at 5.30–6 in the morning or sometimes I would be sitting up at 4.30 in the morning. If I have gotten up, done a bit of writing … it would be time for my daughter to wake up, and then she would be sent to her playschool and I would quickly get ready and go to office … advertising company hours weren’t easy either. Coming back from office, and in between office hours, if I would get a little time I would write. …. I would return in the evening and be with my daughter, and by 8.30 PM she would go to sleep. After that, after finishing my dinner, I would start writing again until 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock in morning.

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I was sleeping [only] 2 hours or 3 hours in a day and that’s about it. And, I didn’t even know how to write a ‘proper’ or copybook screenplay, so I was just writing, deleting, writing, deleting.

Chaturvedi, who is a trained visual artist, first worked as an art director in advertising companies, thereafter, she shifted to copywriting, and then, began to work as dialogue writer for films (Shoebite, Shoojit Sircar, unreleased), and eventually emerged as a screenwriter of repute following the stupendous success of Vicky Donor. During this period, she also shifted from one city to the other, got married, bore a child, and took care of her family and parents.

The Home and the World In the light of the above conversations, I am rethinking Chaturvedi’s ‘creative and affective labour’ as a screenwriter, and the mode and import of ‘writing as work’ through the film Piku, which opens with shots of CR Park, New Delhi. A gate opens and the laundry-person enters. We hear a voice, which sounds hassled. “Budhan, check, the ‘press-man’ should be here; and chop the fruits”. Next we see Piku (Deepika Padukone) getting ready (for work) in haste, and speaking to her father (Bhaskor / Amitabh Bachchan) about his health condition and ‘constipation’. In between she does a range of household chores like handing over the clothes which need to be ironed, putting clothes inside a washing machine, just as she continues to speak to her father and says: “please Baba, I am already late for work … hand me the list [for household items].” Later, on her way to office (Piku is an architect, and part-owner of an architecture firm) she quarrels with the driver (of the hired car), and thereafter, she enters her small office space, which is adjacent to her business partner’s (Syed / Jisshu Sengupta) cubicle. Piku clearly appears rushed, stressed, annoyed, and impolite—even with her clients. In the next scene, during the meeting with the clients and her presentation, a woman from the reception enters to inform that there is a message from her father. A much harried Piku says, “read it!” The woman begins to read from her note pad and says, “day before yesterday there was some semi-liquid motion, since then I have constipation and gas [indigestion]. What should I do?” Piku drops the pen on the table, and leaves in a huff; and the film cuts to the shot in which she arrives home in an auto rickshaw. In short, Piku is a story of a

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father and a daughter and explores a myriad of entangled issues including gender, work (/ office), family (/ home), and (embodied) affective labour. Terri Chapman and Vidisha Mishra (2019) show how ‘female labour force participation rate’ (FLFPR) have been declining despite the steady economic growth in India. They argue: Current research reveals four primary factors … 1) the pervasiveness of entrenched patriarchal social norms that hinder women’s agency, mobility and freedom to work; 2) rising household incomes that create a disincentive for labour market participation among women mainly informed by the same norms in (1); 3) the disproportionate burden of unpaid work and unpaid care work on women; and 4) the lack of quality jobs for women reinforced by gendered occupational segregation and a significant gender wage gap . (n.p)

While Piku’s income / wage is unknown, it is clear (from a latter scene) that she is an entrepreneur, economically (and sexually) independent, nonetheless, I wish to explore the problems of “unpaid care work”, which frames the narrative of the film. For example, following a series altercation with her father, with the domestic worker, with a potential boyfriend, with her Aunt (during a family dinner), and even with the owner of the car hire company Rana (Irrfan), Piku decides to take a break, and the song “Subha ki dhoop” (/ The morning sun) inaugurates the moment of hiatus. However, in the subsequent shots and scenes we see Piku in a shopping mall, playing with strands of her hair, thereafter cleaning her house space (dusting books), during which her father cries: “Piku! There is no water in the flush!” We cut to a close-shot of the sink, which is blocked with tealeaves, and Piku says, “Budhan [name of domestic worker]! How many times have I told you not to dump tealeaves in the sink?” Later she cleans the sink, which is followed by shots of Piku massaging her face, cleaning the ceiling as the pressure cooker whistles vigorously, and thereafter, missing her friends’ party because she can’t make it. A “Working Paper” of the Center for International Development at Harvard University by Erin K. Fletcher et al. (2017) suggests: Over the past four decades, India has experienced rapid population and economic growth, urbanization, and demographic change. Between 1990 and 2013, GDP growth averaged 6.4% …. Between 1994 and 2010, the fraction of women aged 15–24 attending any educational institution more than doubled (from 16.1% to 36%).

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However, despite this rapid economic growth, educational gains, and fertility decline, India’s women are conspicuously absent from the labor force. Female labor force participation (FLFP) rates remain low and have even fallen in recent years.

Among other critical points, they further add: On the supply side, Indian households often require that women prioritize housework and may even explicitly constrain work by married women …. Societal expectation of women’s role as caregivers and care-takers of the household often mean that women who seek work encounter opposition from their peers and families, leading to lower participation. (p. 3)

Beyond the glorified picture of the selfless mothers, and within the gambit of a plethora of Bollywood releases, which engage in subjects of women’s desire, drives, ambitions and sexuality, in this chapter I consider the question of the unaccounted responsibilities of a caregiver, as reconnoitered in length in Piku. In a latter sequence set in Kolkata (/ Calcutta), for example, as Rana and Piku go around in the city, they arrive at one of the most famous ‘ghats’ of Kolkata. Piku (and Rana, back to camera) receives a phone call (from her father) and she says, “yes Papa … crataegus … carboveg [Homeopathy medicines] … 6 to 7 drops”. She also adds, “yes, I am coming over”. Rana enquires (somewhat sardonically), as he bites into a ‘Roll’ (wrap, a local delicacy): “you don’t spend on doctors, isn’t it? Because you do your own treatments”. He further continues: “how old is your father? He must be seventy? … And, the way you are taking care of him, he is going to be around for another 20 years … as in … he is going to make it to 90! … So, in the next 20 years you are going to be 50! … You will be 50 as you continue to take care of your father.” At this point, Piku cuts in and declares, “one minute! Why are you saying all this? You know my situation, you know he is dependent on me … he cannot hear properly … his eyesight is weak … should I abandon him? How will he manage alone?” Rana murmurs, “I am not saying that … I haven’t abandoned my mother either … I hope realize that he is a selfish man”. The conversation comes to an end as Piku smiles and says, “if anyone wants to marry me …”, and Rana quickly chips in to comment: “they will have to adopt your 90 years old child!” Through this scene, and several others (as they undertake a road trip from Delhi to Kolkata), the film not only presents the troubled workspace and problematic work

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conditions of small-scale entrepreneurs (like Piku and Rana), it more importantly, offers a critical lens to revisit dysfunctional families (of Rana’s, Piku’s, her Aunt’s and Uncle’s), as it weaves into the structure of the narrative the gendered role of the caregiver—in which Piku relentlessly takes care of her aging father, while Rana is able to incise his responsibilities toward his mother and sister, although through a certain degree of tussle and self-will. In her interview to Anubha Yadav, Chaturvedi describes: For October, Shoojit … and I had a discussion on the selfless love that exists between a parent and child; he wanted to bring that theme into a love story …. When I was writing October I didn’t move for a good two or three months. … I have had a long, intimate relationship of nearly 30 years with hospitals because of my mother. I have lived and grown up hospitals, I know the peculiar hospital smell well. And Shoojit’s mother was in coma for three months. We both know what’s it is to be a caregiver. (Yadav 2021, pp. 242–43)

To further complicate the point, I recount what Chaturvedi had said during the interview conducted by me (in February 2020), with regard to the dynamics of gender, work, working hours, workspace, contracts, salary, and ‘leaves and breaks’. JC: I’m not yet a factory worker [or a motor] where in I could be dispassionate or detached from my written work … I’m trying to get there; … but, I’m not there, yet …. Therefore, it helps when there are, you know, people who give me a realistic time frame to work with. MM: Your screenplays are to be rich details in terms of the character sketches, the spaces they inhabit, their behaviors, speech, actions. JC: You know, somehow I feel that people are willing to give a certain kind of time for Biopics but not for a fiction, not for a fictional story because you assume that in a Biopic you have so much research to do, and material to study. But, believe me when I’m writing a fiction … in my mind I’m dealing with a range of material. It’s just that you don’t know about that material and the research but, I see what a Bhaskor [Piku’s father] is actually like …. Bhaskor’s life is a tapestry of material, which is at par to any other Biopic character. First, I’m rethinking that material, and then I’m deciding how to bring that material into the film. You still have to read, research and only then you can come up with the story, and what can be done with that material. Even when I’m

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writing a fictional character I’m first creating that research base. That part takes time. MM: Indeed, and your women characters are very complex—driven, desiring, troubled, anxious, angry, fragile and fallible—as in Vicky Donor, Piku or Gulabo Sitabo. I presume they come from your research and your range of work experiences, because they are complicated and rooted in a particular context. JC: When I gave Shoojit Vicky Donor’s script I knew he was invested in Ashima’s character as much as he was interested in Vicky’s character or Biji’s [grandmother] or Dolly’s [mother]. But, in a film a character can evolve only in a certain direction. For example, … in Piku there was a scene which Shoojit had shot—which he had just shot as a ‘safe take’ and … I was aghast when I saw it because I wondered why has this scene between Syed and Piku been inserted just before Bhaskor becomes sick …. So, in that version it is revealed in the morning that Syed was inside Piku’s room. Shoojit had taken a ‘safe take’ in which we see them inside the room, both of them are in the moment of passion and all that. It wasn’t written in the script but you know, still, since when you are on the edit table you never know when you might need an extra scene or a shot … that is why directors sometimes do what they do. So the scene was there, and our editor included it in the lineup, and I was like—‘you’re just ruining it! How can you show this, this is not Piku!’ So, Shoojit said ‘dekhte hain’ [let’ see] because maybe he knew that I knew he’d eventually not include it. Then, language is another issue … certain words are specific …. So, my argument is that, even if the larger audiences don’t get it but this is how it works …. It’s adding to the character of the film, probably audiences will go back home and find it out! … These are not creative differences; these are just a work process. And, sometimes a character is doing nothing, just sitting there, but, it is also important for the whole film. But you see … ultimately I … remind myself that a film is a directors’ medium! And, it’s collaborative work.

In the course of the road trip in the film Piku, Piku, Bhaskor and Budhan, driven by Rana in his car, reach Varanasi during the night. After they check into an ordinary hotel, a very exhausted Piku decides to tread alone, and later she sits, unaccompanied, on the ‘ghats’ of the tranquil river. Distant bells remind us of the Varanasi ambiance. Rana joins her soon, though, Piku states: “shall we sit here without talking—for a while?” Later, nevertheless, Piku enquires with whom Rana was arguing in the morning; and thereafter, they talk about driving, women’s liberation, and

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the political scenario elsewhere. Piku asks, “are you saying all this to make an impression upon me, or do you really respect women?” Thereafter, while Rana speaks ill about his mother and sister, Piku receives her father’s phone call—“yes, Papa? Okay, I am on my way”, she answers curtly. A bemused Rana inquires in his usual ironic tone: “tell me … are you his daughter?” To which Piku replies: “Yes, I am his daughter … and I am ten times more strange, weird, irritating, annoying”. The film Piku thus, charts the emotional map and the physical work of a caregiver, emphasizes upon the spaces where work (and drudgery) transpires, and signposts the fatigue and exhaustion involved with such (affective) labour. Likewise, Piku is neither a sorry nor a pathetic figure, nor she is crafted as a desexualized and silhouetted character. In fact, as in the case in Gulabo Sitabo, women in Chaturvedi’s film appear passionately entwined with work, family and self—typically fallible figures, fighting their everyday battles.

The Exterior and Interior(Ity) I am thinking through Chaturvedi’s interview (February 2020) in which she said the following in response to my queries about creative (and affective) labour, health, disease, unease, fatigue and aging: JC: See … the good part is that the process of writing is not predictable. It’s not that I’m expecting to write everyday … but you know when you are in the thick of writing and yet, you have not written for whatever reasons … it maybe simply—as you would know—women go through a certain biological graph, right? And, then you know that it’s just the damn hormones and you realize later that: ‘Oh that was the hormonal thing after all’! You know there’s a struggle sometimes, … I don’t know maybe it’s just me, but there are days when you’re just sitting there … and not doing a single thing that can take me closer to what I’m supposed to do, … I know I have to get up from the bed and have to go there on my table, … you know you’re doing everything else around it but not what you’re supposed to do, and it’s not that you don’t want to do! In fact, that’s actually what you really want to do but something is just not letting you do. You know, every month there’s a [menstrual] cycle … you go through a certain mood swings and you try to overcome that right and there. But, there are months when you cannot do anything for three or four days and there’s a gap in your work.

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Chaturvedi’s comment on menstrual cycle, women’s health, emotional graph, and will to work throws light not only on Piku, but characters such as Guddo, Fattu, and others in Gulabo Sitabo. For instance, in a palatial mansion in Lucknow, owned by Fatima (Fattu / Farrukh Jaffar), there lives a cluster of tenants, along with Fattu’s greedy husband Mirza (Amitabh Bachchan). Gradually others, inclusive of a politician (whose face is an officer named Gyanesh [Vijay Raaz], from the State Archeological Department), and a builder (whose representative is a lawyer named Christopher [Brijendra Kala]) join the fray—to seize the massive albeit dilapidated structure. Guddo (Sristi Shrivastava) is one of the tenants, and is the sister of Mirza’s primary opponent Baankey (Ayushmann Khurrana). She is completing her Under Graduate course (unlike Baankey, who runs a flour shop), seeking job opportunities, and is ready to take the risks. In the sequence that introduces Baankey’s family Guddo is seen leaning against the wall, her hands are clasped firmly around her waist, as she speaks about her future plans. She informs her elder brother that she is completing the Under Graduate course, and insists that she doesn’t want get married (“useless things”), she is happy living in their ‘own’ house, and wants to earn a living respectfully. In yet another scene, she is at the terrace, ‘romancing’ a man. Sheikhu, the domestic worker with a speech condition, keeps a vigil; however, she soon realizes that he has been watching her activities as well. Guddo, howbeit, remains nonchalant. Sheikhu smiles gleefully and raises three fingers, pointing out the man with whom Guddo was intimate a while ago. Guddo, with her hair left lose and her arm resting on the wall, says, “so? Got a third one! Didn’t have fun with the others”. To this, the man in question reacts and exclaims, “am I the third?” Guddo retorts, “if your male ego is hurt because of this you should leave … leave!” Meanwhile as the scenario becomes progressively tense, due the intervention of the State Archeological Department, Guddo finds a way to secure a job. In a subsequent scene, Guddo arrives at a cheap hotel in cycle rickshaw. Cut to Guddo and Gyanesh inside the hotel room, her hair is left lose yet again. She sits casually with her arms around her knees, although Gyanesh appears dejected and nervous. He in fact apologies—for failing to be sexual active—and speaks timidly, “I hope you are not offended.” Guddo replies: no! I get it … If your kids come to know about it, will they like it? Then she adds, in an unhesitant manner, “Kiss? There is no harm in a kiss.” As Gyanesh shies away from the kiss (suggesting that he has Pyorrhea), she quickly hands over her certificates, and demands a job at his

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Department. Guddo also reminds Gyanesh how he has been spared from committing a ‘mistake’. In parting, she hands over a brick from the mansion (for assessment), and suggests that he should get a dental treatment done. In time, though, Guddo impresses Christopher (the lawyer) and gets the job of his assistant essentially because of the sharpness of her mind and tongue. One may inquire about the function of Guddo’s character in the larger story. I contend that, amidst a bunch of failures (including the ineffectual attempts by Mirza and Baankey), and a number of futile actions, it is Guddo and the very matured Fattu, who finally achieve or retain their objects of desire—a job and the building, respectively. Furthermore, (the adventurous) Fauziya (who was Baankey’s partner) appears to climb the social ladder as she ultimately finds a suitable suitor. In the end, 95 years old Fatima / Fattu finds love and is able to safeguard the love of life—her house. As a confused Baankey wonders, “who elopes at this age?”, Guddo finds it as a corrective ending, despite the eviction of all the tenants and the families living the mansion.

Arriving at in-Between Spaces Interestingly Chaturvedi’s writing doesn’t develop either through pop-­ feminism or via alternative circuits and art house cinema networks.15 Rather, her plots explore middle-class subjects, and in most of the cases, they are couched in the aspirations of the male protagonists. Mary Harrod and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (2017) in their volume titled Women Do Genre in Film and Television flagged a new turn in feminist historiography as they accentuated the significance of ‘Women and the Silent Screen’ and ‘Doing Women’s Film and Television History’ conferences, the ‘International Women Film Pioneers Project’ of the Columbia University, ‘Women’s Film and Television History Network (UK/Ireland) and the initiation of the ‘Women and Film History International’ series at Illinois University Press. Such projects shift the focus to studies in women’s involvements in mainstream cinema (and Television), and draw attention to the “notorious obstacles that exist for women to accede to positions of power as creative artists in the commercial global media-sphere” (Harrod and Paszkiewicz 2017, p. 2). Also, the conspicuous absence of women’s work from empirical and narrative histories of cinema make the recent turn crucial and meaningful. Additionally, Harrod and Paszkiewicz especially mention Roberta Garrett’s (2007) research on the growth of self-­ reflexive films across Hollywood and independent filmmaking, including

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‘chick flicks’, which complicate unidirectional readings in ‘representation of women in cinema’, ‘films by women directors’ or ‘women centric films’ and so forth. Chaturvedi, for instance, mentions: JC: I wanted to be a painter. … I fought with my parents; … with my Dad especially … he was so against the idea of Bachelor in Fine Arts …. This is around 1991–92. … But, I joined the College of Arts and Crafts, Lucknow [University] …. I topped the entrance and a Professor pushed me into commercial art. So I joined advertising and photography … and later I joined advertising company as a visualizer—as an art director. However, … sometime later I became a copywriter. It just happened, over a time …; they needed [new] ideas … and I came up with a concept. … Piyush Pandey used to be our ‘Boss’ and he really liked my concept and the copy [writing]. … He was the one who said ‘why don’t you start writing’ … ‘because language is with you, and you have the ideas’. I mean, because I was from Lucknow I knew the mass language …. That went in my favour. Studying the details … I think has helped me a lot in my writing. The sense of colour, the sense of art, the sense of designing whether it’s Piku’s house or Vicky’s house in Vicky Donor or Ashima’s house in Vicky Donor or Vidya Iyer’s in October. … I feel I was really lucky because of my art background I could write and visualize …. The more I went for researches, the more I met people across the country, it just gave me the confidence that I can write about people. …. I went to Jabalpur, Bhopal or somewhere in Odisha or in Jharkhand, somewhere down the South, … I think that was becoming my research material to work on. … I had gone there to research because when you meet people for whom you’re writing, the consumers or the viewers, you realize that sitting in an AC office what I’m writing is completely opposite to what people are seeking.

Chaturvedi’s films thus, present a careful elaboration of communities, inclusive of certain clichés, eccentricities and peculiarities—for example, the ideation of the Bengalis (mostly educated middle-classes and the Bhadraloks), Punjabis (as in Vicky Donor), and the cultures and lingo of the Hindi heartland, as imagined in Gulabo Sitabo. On one hand, the drinking scene between Biji and Dolly in Vicky Donor, and the scenes concerning drinking and dancing (by the Punjabis) during Ashima and Vicky’s wedding, as well as several scenes with Piku’s Mashi (maternal Aunt, played by Moushumi Chatterjee) and Kaki (paternal aunt, Swaroopa Ghosh) produce a recognizable setting and function within the framework

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of what Madhava Prasad (1998) had described as the worldview of middle-­ classes16; on the other, the world of Fatima Mahal (located in Lucknow), characters such as Mirza, Baankey, Fauziya, Dulahin, besides Guddo and Fattu, demystify the ambiance of the erstwhile Muslim socials,17 as well as the generically mixed contemporary Bollywood films set in the B-towns of Northern (and Western) India. The women in the films scripted by Chaturvedi are unique in the way they understand their own sexuality (“it’s a need”, says Piku, at the point her Aunt inquires about her sex life), and are ardently attached to their own work.18 Dolly, for instance, runs a low-end beauty parlor, Ashima is a banker, Piku is an architect (and her father disapproves of women who marry without a reason), Shuili’s mother (in October), Vidya Iyer (Gitanjali Rao), is a Professor, also Shuili (Banita Sandhu) and her friend(s) were / are in the hospitality industry, and Guddo is an aspirant. In none of the stories ‘work’ is the problem of the film—rather women do what they can do. In comparison to several ‘women centric’ Hindi popular films in which a woman either wants to be an IAS Officer or a Pilot or a filmmaker or an Air-hostess and so on, within the fold of the films discussed in this chapter women struggle with family, familial (and patriarchal) structure, sexuality, longing and (mental) health. More importantly, they inhabit a world, which is crowded by a number of women—who have names, well etched out character traits, occupation, individual yearnings and failings. The nature of work as reflected in the said films seemingly incorporates a variety of meanings—job, effort, toil, slog, drudgery, grind, and fatigue. Therefore, I wish to conclude by recounting what Chaturvedi mentioned during our interview (in February 2020) to highlight the characteristics of film work, and understand ‘writing as work’. Chaturvedi said: MM: Following Vicky Donor did you quit your advertising job to become a fulltime writer? JC: No, No! I didn’t leave my job until I finished writing Piku. I continued because like you said there is no money at the writing stage. … I did get a token amount and that was fine with me because I just wanted to write the film and my job was there to support me financially. Neither I was sure if I could make a career out of writing, whether I am capable of writing feature-films in the long run. And you know, salary is a very important part of running a household. Now, you have studied, you have Graduated, you have come all the way to Bombay to work. MM: And, you have invested … JC: Yes, invested …

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MM: 10–20 years of your life. JC: Yeah, exactly! It was hard to let go a steady job, an established career. You know, from the time my Dad said that he would not support my [Art] college fees, since then I have never taken financial support from anyone. So, it was not possible for me to just leave a job and chase a dream, which offered no financial stability at that time. I am not that person. Yes, I have a dream but there’s also a real need because I know I’m not going to ask money from anyone. … So, I didn’t leave my job until I finished writing Piku. MM: So, did you sign any contracts for writing Piku? JC: For Piku yes, there was a contract with Rising Sun. But again it was unlike the rest. … mostly it is unofficial, and works on the basis of trust. But, you know, the problem is that people assume that while you are writing— ‘why would you need any money’? MM: Yes, since you are working from home. JC: You don’t have to pay the office rent, you are not travelling either …. And, if you’re married then all the more, it seems like that it must be some hobby! Okay, slightly more intellectual maybe since I’m a writer, … but, ‘why do you need money?’ …. But, even in an organization, that is when you’re working in an [media] office, you know that the guys at the same level are getting more salary than you are. … For women especially it’s hard to ask for money. MM: Yes, there is a social taboo, as it were. JC: Yes, there is a hesitation. … You know until the time I had the job I knew that there was a fixed salary coming home so I wasn’t so worried about what was my next source of income would be. Script writing brought in money at the writing stage or after the completion of the shoot or after release. … payments come in 4 or 5 parts. It’s not that I wasn’t paid or I was cheated or anything … but still payments are made in parts, and when you see it in comparison to what I was earning in advertising, it is nothing. It is nothing! It did take a while for me to get used to it. Also, now I had so much time … I was striving to make it into a disciplined writing time! … There’s a system in place when you have an office job. There’s a full-fledged system. … In case of writing there’s nobody to question or push me I started working in ‘96 and in 2015 when I left my office job, all these years I was in a box, I was living a very disciplined life, and suddenly I have so much time in my hand. I did go through an absolute sense of loss and purpose and all of that may sound very silly and ridiculous in relation to ‘women and work’ but being a writer in this industry … all this startles you, it unnerves you … you ask: ‘how do I begin, when do I begin, which place in the house should be my

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place to write where nobody will disturb me’. I didn’t have the luxury of going somewhere else to write. You know, nobody is paying me that much amount so that I can book myself in some hotel or even if somebody is paying me that much I will still not leave my house and go anywhere else because I have my personal life in parallel to my work, and I would like to find a perfect balance …. So it takes a while to get used to it. To find the rhythm of your work .

In the course of our conversation Chaturvedi underscores multiple concepts of ‘time’—the (historical) times, which we inhabit, the (clock) time required for work, the natural course of time (or cycles) and the experience of free and personal time. Time—as measured by the clock and the calendar—are intrinsically linked to the social histories of modernity and modern times, and to matters of labor, work (or working hours), technological apparatus, schedules, breaks, breakdown, and production, and what Debashree Mukherjee delineates as “machines and organisms, humans and nonhumans” (2020a).19 It also involves the subjects of speed of time and slowness of time. ‘Rhythm’, however, evolves via a musical analogy, and signifies pattern and progression. I, therefore, draw attention to the fact that it is beguiling to note how at the end of Chaturvedi’s films most of the fiery female characters find a rhythmic movement of work, and are able to sense the precarity and the pulse of the times. Acknowledgments  I am deeply grateful to Juhi Chaturvedi for sharing her thoughts with me, and to Bidisha Mukherjee, project assistant, for doing a meticulous transcription of the interview.

Notes 1. See Tejaswini Ganti Producing Bollywood. 2. Also, see Madhuja Mukherjee Voices and Verses of the Talking Stars, “The Shadow and the Arc Light”, “Speaking with Suhasini Mulay”. 3. See Neepa Majumdar Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! and Debashree Mukherjee “Notes on a Scandal”. 4. See Yasir Abbasi Yeh Un Dinoñ Ki Baat Hai: Urdu Memoirs of Cinema Legends, vis-à-vis Manto’s Stars from another sky. 5. See “Part I, The female star, traveling figures and transgressions” in Monika Mehta, Madhuja Mukherjee edited Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India. 6. See Feminist Media Histories’ 2018 volume (4[1]) on “labour”.

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7. Also see Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle. 8. Also see Neepa Majumdar “Gossip, Labor, and Female Stardom in Pre-­ Independence Indian Cinema”. 9. See Vicki Callahan Reclaiming the Archive. 10. Also see Sarah Niazi “White Skin/ Brown Masks” and Darshana Sreedhar Mini “Cinema and the mask of capital”. 11. Also see Shruti Narayanswamy “Sanitizing Cinema”. 12. Also see Madhuja Mukherjee “Hindi Popular Cinema and its Peripheries”, and “Flaneuse, Viewership, Cinematic Spaces”. 13. Also see Mahar, Karan. 2008. Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood and more popular publications such as Changemakers by Gayatri Rangachari Shah and Mallika Kapur and F-Rated by Nandita Dutta. 14. The project has been possible with the Research Support to Faculty Members, Jadavpur University-RUSA 2.0 (Ministry of Human Resource Development, India), 2019–2020 (extended to 2021), grants. 15. Also see Sanghita Sen “Breaking the Boundaries of Bollywood”. 16. Also see Madhuja Mukherjee “Photoshop landscapes”. 17. Also see Ravi Vasudevan “Film Genres, the Muslim Social, and Discourses of Identity c. 1935–1945”. 18. Also see Brinda Bose “Female Desire and Postcolonial Identity in Contemporary Indian Women’s Cinema”. 19. Also see Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath edited The Philosophy of Time.

References Abbasi, Y. (Trans.) (2018). Yeh Un Dinoñ Ki Baat Hai: Urdu Memoirs of Cinema Legends. New Delhi/ London/ Oxford/ NY/ Sydney: Bloomsbury. Bose, B. (1997). “Transgressions Female Desire and Postcolonial Identity in Contemporary Indian Women’s Cinema”. In Bishnupriya Ghosh, Brinda Bose (eds.). Interventions Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film. New York, Routledge, pp. 117–131. Callahan, V. (2010). Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History. Michigan: Wayne State University. Chapman, T. and Mishra, V. (2019). “Rewriting the Rules: Women and Work in India”, ORF Special Report 80. Dutta, N. (2019). F-rated: Being a Woman Filmmaker in India. Harper Collins India: New Delhi. Fletcher, E.K., Pande, R., and Moore, C.T. (2017). “Women and Work in India: Descriptive Evidence and a Review of Potential Policies”. CID [Center for International Development at Harvard University] Faculty Working Paper 339.

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Ganti, T. (2012). Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham: Duke University Press. Garrett, R. (2007). Postmodern Chick Flicks: The Return of the Woman’s Films. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Harrod, M. and Paszkiewicz K. (eds.). (2017). Women Do Genre in Film and Television. New York: Routledge. Mahar, K. (2008). Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Majumdar, N. (2005). “Gossip, Labor, and Female Stardom in Pre-Independence Indian Cinema: The Case of Shanta Apte”. In Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight (eds.) Doing Women’s Film History, Reframing Cinema, Past and Future. Urbana/ Chicago/ Springfield: University of Illinois Press, pp. 181–192. ———. (2010). Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!, Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–1950s. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Manṭo, S.H and Ḥ asan K. (1998). Stars from another sky: the Bombay film world in the 1940s. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Mehta, M. and Mukherjee, M. (eds). (2020). Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media. London/ NY: Routledge. Mini, D.  S. (2020). “Cinema and the mask of capital: Labour debates in the Malayalam film industry”. South Asian Film & Media Studies in South Asian Film & Media 11 (2): 173–189. Mukherjee, D. (2011). “Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Film Actress in Late Colonial Bombay”. MARG 62 (4): 54–65. ———. (2013a). “Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive”. BioScope 4(1): 9–30. ———. (2020a). “Somewhere between Human, Nonhuman, and Woman: Shanta Apte’s Theory of Exhaustion”. Feminist Media Histories 6 (3): 21–51. ———. (2020b). Bombay Hustle: Practicing Modernity in a Colonial Cine-Ecology. Durham: Duke University Press. Mukherjee, M. (2009). “Photoshop Landscapes: Digital Mediations and Bollywood Cities” Journal of the Moving Image 8: 50–72. ———. (2013) “Flaneuse, Viewership, Cinematic Spaces: The Site/Sight of Theatres, Engendered Structures and Alternative Art Projects.” Media Fields Journal 7 (http://mediafieldsjournal.squarespace.com/ flaneuse-­viewership-­cinematic/) ———. (2014). “Hindi Popular Cinema and its Peripheries: Of Female Singers, Performances, and the Presence/Absence of Suraiya”. In Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal and Parichay Patra (eds.). Bollywood and its Other(s), Towards New Configurations. Palgrave Macmillan: Hampshire, pp. 67–85.

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———. (ed.) (2017). Voices of the Talking Stars, The Women of Indian Cinema and Beyond. New Delhi/ Kolkata: Sage/ Stree. ———. (ed.) (2020a) “The Shadow and the Arc Light: Finding the female workforce in Bombay Cinema”. E-CineIndia, The Quarterly Film Journal of Fipresci-­ India, July-September 2020. (http://www.fipresci-­india. online/e-­cineindia-­july-­september-­2020/?fbclid=IwAR0BJbXKa9P9QAj9rGe UwZeZmxUbu-­K3xJU_s8gDKFnBgbNrk8TbyOXv11M). ———. (ed.) (2020b). “Speaking with Suhasini Mulay: A short story about a long strife”. Studies in South Asian Film & Media 11 (2): 225–243. ———. (ed.) (2021). “Shatranj ke khiladi: The Making of a Queer Figure”. Frontline 38 (22): 43–48. ———. (ed.) (2022). “Bodies in Waiting: Remapping gender, labour and histories of the Indian film industry (1930s-50s)”. Economic & Political Weekly, 57 (22): 60–68. Narayanswamy, S. (2021). Sanitizing Cinema: Women at Work in 1920s Bombay. Film History 33(1): 113–141. Niazi, S. (2018). “White Skin/ Brown Masks: The Case of ‘White’ Actresses from Silent to Early Sound Period in Bombay”. Culture Unbound 10(3): 332–352. Poidevin, R.L. and MacBeath M. (1993). The Philosophy of Time. London: Oxford University Press. Prasad, M. M. (1998). Ideology of Hindi Film. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sawhney, R. (2020). “Women at work: The cultural and creative industries”. Studies in South Asian Film & Media 11 (2): 167–172. Shah, G.R. & Kapur, M. (2018). Changemakers: Twenty Women Transforming Bollywood from Behind the Scenes. Penguin, New Delhi. Sen, S. (2017). “Breaking the Boundaries of Bollywood: Women in a ‘Man’s Industry” In Mary Harrod, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (eds). Women Do Genre in Film and Television. New York: Routledge, pp. 121–137. Vasudevan, R.  S. (2015). “Film Genres, the Muslim Social, and Discourses of Identity c. 1935–1945” BioScope 6(1): 27–43. Yadav, A. (2021) Scripting Bollywood: Candid Conversations with Women Screenwriters of Hindi Cinema. New Delhi: Women Unlimited (Kali Books).

CHAPTER 12

Queer Counter-narratives, Feminist Authorship, and the Inclusive Storytelling of Gazal Dhaliwal Namrata Rele Sathe

November 1998: Deepa Mehta’s film Fire releases in India to widespread controversy and protests regarding the depiction of a lesbian relationship between its protagonists. Motivations for the protests are varied, ranging from the culturally panicked to the factually incorrect. These include a fear that the ‘sanctity’ of the Indian family is in danger and that all same-sex relationships, let alone lesbian relationships, are alien to Indian culture (Patel 2002). Public outrage is fuelled by members of prominent regional and national political parties leading calls to ban the film and instigating acts of vandalism in theatres that are screening the film in various cities across India. February 2019: Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, produced by Vinod Chopra Films and directed by Shelly Chopra Dhar, releases in Indian theatres, raising no eyebrows (publicly) and barely causing a stir. The story— a comedy-drama revolving around a romance between two young women,

N. R. Sathe (*) Pune, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_12

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Sweety and Kuhu—is a mild box-office success, but its central love story does not create any outcry. The passing of 20-odd years between the release of Fire and Ek Ladki has seen a marked shift in the representation of same-sex romantic relationships on Indian screens. Films such as My Brother Nikhil (Onir, 2005), Dostana/Bromance (Tarun Mansukhani, 2008), Aligarh (Hansal Mehta, 2015), Kapoor and Sons (Shakun Batra, 2016), and Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan/Beware of this Love Match (Hitesh Kewalya, 2020) have generated public discourse about homosexuality in India and opened up a space for representational visibility of (male) same-sex relationships in Hindi cinema. Although this shift might not be a reliable indicator of the social and cultural attitudes towards homosexuality (and queer identities, in general) in India, which remain largely oppressive and discriminatory, it does indicate the willingness of mainstream Hindi cinema to produce such films and the increased receptivity of the audience to same-sex love stories. At the legal and policy level, homosexuality was decriminalized by the Supreme Court of India in September 2018. The law in question was Article 377 of the Indian Constitution, a vestige of colonial-era regulations regarding sexuality, that treated any ‘unnatural’ sex act  (including homosexuality) as a criminal offense. After a three decade-long court battle fought by gay and lesbian rights activists, which began in the late 1990s and continued until the verdict was delivered, the Supreme Court struck down the law and revoked its use to harass or arrest those in same-sex relationships. Within this changing socio-legal and media landscape, the work of Hindi film screenwriter Gazal Dhaliwal, a transwoman and LGBTQ+ activist, plays a significant role in promoting stories that focus on queer subjects and, thus, undoing the silence and invisibility around queer representation on-screen. Gazal Dhaliwal is a screenwriter and dialogue writer working in the Hindi film industry. Her credits include writing dialogues for films such as Lipstick Under My Burkha (Alankrita Shrivastava, 2016) and Wazir/Minister (Bejoy Nambiar, 2016). Most recently, she wrote the Netflix web series, Mismatched (2020) and a short film called Quaranteen Crush, which is part of the Netflix anthology, Feels Like Ishq/Feels Like Love (2021). This chapter examines two recent films written by Dhaliwal: Qarib Qarib Singlle/Almost Single (Tanuja Chandra, 2017) and Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga/The Moment I Saw That Girl (Shelly Chopra Dhar, 2019). Dhaliwal’s activist vision is evident in the stories of the main

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characters in these films: Jaya, a 35-year-old widow looking for love (in Qarib) and Sweety, a young woman struggling to come out as a lesbian to her family (in Ek Ladki). Additionally, I include a textual and thematic analysis of Qarib and Ek Ladki, in light of Dhaliwal’s own position as an out and vocal transwoman. I examine the two films for major themes dealing with acceptance and awareness around sexuality, deconstructing gender norms associated with femininity and masculinity, and their overarching message of inclusivity. To underscore the cinematic and cultural significance of Dhaliwal’s films, I pull from her public appearances and interviews to demonstrate how her critique of Hindi cinema’s lack of LGBTQ+ representation and her role as an activist for transgender rights plays into her storytelling in the two films. For a social and cinematic culture that under-represents and marginalizes its queer population, Dhaliwal is an important screenwriter in the canon of LGBTQ+ representation in Hindi cinema. An analysis of her films in this essay allows for a foray into larger issues concerning the inclusion of LGBTQ+ subjects into mainstream cinema.

Gazal Dhaliwal and the Significance of Counter-storytelling In a speech given at an event, Dhaliwal mentions that a variety of queer stories are still waiting to be told, such as “a romantic comedy about two girls who meet during the bhangra dance steps practice of a Big Fat Indian Wedding. Or the story of a huge, crazy family coming together after years to celebrate a child’s new birthday, when the child went through a sex change surgery. Or maybe the story of a cop solving a murder mystery along with his super hot constable-cum-boyfriend” (‘Telling the Right Story,’ 2015). One of Dhaliwal’s earliest public appearances was in 2014 on the social issues-based reality show, Satyamev Jayate/Truth Always Triumphs hosted by actor Aamir Khan. Dhaliwal featured on an episode titled ‘Accepting Alternative Sexualities,’ in a segment called ‘Born Again.’ In her interview, Dhaliwal speaks about her story of being born male and subsequently undergoing gender reassignment surgery in her early twenties to transition into a woman. “The gender of my soul was different from the gender of my body,” begins Dhaliwal, recounting her struggle with gender dysphoria. She mentions how she was bullied in school for her ‘feminine’ mannerisms, which she deliberately had to control. In another

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public talk, called “Telling the Right Story” (2015), Dhaliwal associates her experience of having to present as masculine with “hiding inside a prison.” She describes this as an extremely hopeless and alienating time in her life, where she hid behind a facade to avoid being branded a “freak”. Dhaliwal’s personal journey of transition shapes the feminist and inclusive themes of her films, providing an alternative to the dominant trope of heteronormative romance in popular Hindi films. I read Dhaliwal’s work as an example of counter-storytelling—a concept developed in the area of Critical Race Studies and social justice pedagogy. Delgado, in an early essay on counter-storytelling, argues that “outgroups” (marginalized groups) use their own stories for “psychic self-preservation” and as “a means of lessening their own subordination.” (1989, p. 2436). Delgado goes on to explain that stories by outgroups function “as a kind of counter-­ reality” (2412) that works towards “[reallocating] power” (2415). Building on Delgado’s original thesis, Solorzano and Yosso mention that counter-storytelling “can teach others that by combining elements from both the story and the current reality, one can construct another world that is richer than either the story or the reality alone” (2001, p. 475). In the case of representing same-sex relations on film, David Coon argues that “putting real stories onscreen is especially important when it comes to the experiences of LGBTQ people, given the harmful, misleading myths that have been told about them in the past” (2018, p.  44). Coon goes on to say that films about LGBTQ+ relationships are much more than a creative endeavour. Such films have “significant political value” because they are placed in a form that can “have the greatest impact in terms of advancing a social movement” (Coon 2018, p. 46). In a similar vein, Dhaliwal has argued in a public talk (‘Telling the Right Story,’ INKTalks 2015) that telling stories about the LGBTQ+ community via film is important to create awareness about those who are ‘misunderstood’ by society. She underlines the value of stories that do not mock or trivialize people’s identities, and instead promote a message of compassion and acceptance. Although there are no official estimates, numbers collated by activists suggest that about 8% of India’s population identifies as part of the LGBTQ+ community. However, popular Hindi cinema has historically refrained from exploring queer subjectivity and queer romance, apart from a few examples. Film scholars have, in the past, written about the homoerotic subtexts within popular Hindi films, especially with regard to male homosociality (Gopinath 2000; Kavi 2000; Rao 2000; Waugh 2001).

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These interpretations offer against the grain readings of deep on-screen friendships between men to argue that examples of such relationships deflect from directly representing homosexuality. Instead these bonds are portrayed as innocently (and more acceptably) homosocial, while leaving room for queer pleasures. Mainstream Hindi cinema has repeatedly privileged the youthful heteronormative romance in its storytelling practices resulting in the elision of other types of romantic relationships and experiences. Dhaliwal employs her storytelling skills to actively dismantle this reality and construct another where under-explored romantic obstacles (age in Qarib and sexuality in Ek Ladki) are brought into a mainstream context. These stories have far-reaching cultural and personal value. Translating stories of alternative romance and sexuality on film, as Dhaliwal mentions in her “Telling the Right Story” speech, has the power to “change hearts,” “save lives,” and give hope to those who feel different.

Feminist Authorship in Qarib and Ek Ladki In the course of both Qarib and Ek Ladki, we experience the interior worlds of Jaya and Sweety as they break out of their circumstances and attain self-fulfilment. Qarib and Ek Ladki come in the wake of films such as English Vinglish/English Etc. (Gauri Sinde, 2012), Queen (Vikas Bahl, 2014) and Dear Zindagi/Dear Life (Gauri Shinde, 2016), which focus solely on women protagonists leaving their comfort zone to go on a journey (in some cases literally travelling to far-off lands, as in Queen and English Vinglish) of self-discovery. These films often reduce other common tropes of Hindi cinema, such as the male romantic interest, to side acts, making the emotional growth and psychological emancipation of the films’ main lead central to the self-discovery plot. I read Qarib and Ek Ladki as examples of feminist storytelling based on their sustained interest and narrative investment in their female protagonists. This narrative strategy enables the films to focus on feminist themes such as societal and familial control of women’s behaviour and desires, women’s sexuality, and the experience of living as a woman in a patriarchal world. These textual features are backed by the extra-textual presence of Dhaliwal as the writer and filmmakers Chandra (Qarib) and Dhar (Ek Ladki) that allows for an examination of the films as authored by women. Chandra and Dhar have co-written the screenplay with Dhaliwal in the case of both films. Although Ek Ladki is Dhar’s first film as director,

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Chandra has a lengthy repertoire of films that centre on female protagonists, including Dushman/Enemy (1998), Sangharsh/Struggle (1999), Sur: The Melody of Life (2002), and Zindaggi RocksLife Rocks (2006). In her essay on feminist filmmaking, Lucy Fischer lays out certain criteria for what she terms “feminist forms of address” in cinema. Fischer mentions that for a film to be deemed feminist, one of the criteria is the subject matter and issues raised by the filmmaker and “their implications for feminist politics.” (2003, p. 37). Apart from this, notes Fischer, it is useful for us to ask questions such as: “is a woman allowed to be the narrative center or is her tale bracketed within a man’s story?” and “is a woman’s perspective rendered through her own eyes or the eyes of others?” (2003, p. 37). Fischer’s criteria are on the lines of what Joey Soloway, the writer of the Amazon  Prime series Transparent (2014–2019) has termed the “heroine’s journey in storytelling.” In a masterclass lecture given at the Toronto Film Festival 2016, Soloway defines the ‘heroine’s journey’ as a plot device in which the story is told from a woman main character’s point of view, adding that it can be used as an important political tool to instill empathy. We witness examples feminist storytelling in Qarib and Ek Ladki as Dhaliwal and the filmmakers situate us within Jaya and Sweety’s perspectives and immerse us in their journeys. Qarib follows Jaya (Parvathy Thiruvothu), a woman in her mid-­thirties. Jaya is attempting a second chance at finding love on a dating app after the death of her husband. Jaya’s ‘prison’ is the societal expectation that ties itself to widowed women, whose identity is defined by the tragedy that has occurred in their lives. We see this in how Jaya’s friends treat her: one of them introduces Jaya to her own husband as ‘the woman whose husband died.’ Jaya overhears another friend refer to her as ‘Stepney Aunty,’ after the colloquial term for a spare automobile tyre to imply that Jaya has no husband or children and, therefore, must have lot of spare time to babysit other women’s children. For Sweety in Ek Ladki, the feeling of being constrained is far more severe and literal. Sweety (Sonam Kapoor Ahuja), deeply aware of her sexuality and preference for women, has no means of conveying this to her family who repeatedly pressure her to get married. When her family suspects that she is in a secret relationship with a man, they forbid her to go outside the house. Her brother threatens her with violence and also destroys her phone. Sweety is completely silenced by her family and the only safe outlet for her desires is a journal.

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When we are invited into the lives of Jaya and Sweety, we are offered an insight into their struggles, but also into the areas in which they possess agency. For instance, at the start of Qarib, we witness a montage of Jaya’s daily routine, which involves work, daily chats with her younger brother, and being by herself at home. Although she does not have a companion, she is shown to live a relatively comfortable and happy life. She also often breaks the fourth wall to confide in her ‘husband,’ represented by the gaze of the camera. Along with her husband, we also become her confidantes and privy to her secrets. Sweety in Ek Ladki uses her journal as a creative outlet. The journal, which Sweety has been maintaining since childhood, records all her thoughts and feelings, from her joy at having a crush on a girl in school to  her sadness when her love is not reciprocated. Sweety writes about her sense of alienation after she is bullied by her classmates when they realise she is ‘different’ and likes girls instead of boys. Dhaliwal’s storytelling in both films stays with the women, detailing their subjectivity outside of any romantic relationships with men, including us in their journey of personal growth. The search for self-fulfilment for Jaya and Sweety is in defiance of family and societal expectations that dictate conventions of marriage, gender socialization and sexuality. Jaya and Sweety learn that they need to shun binding traditions and break stereotypical rules of how women should behave. This underscores Dhaliwal’s overarching message of individual freedom and inclusivity, which is most prominently evident in Jaya and Sweety’s rejection of what their families and society expect from them and an acceptance of their own choices. Moreover, the gaze of both films, as an aspect of directorial authorship, supports Dhaliwal’s writing by highlighting its feminist themes. We are made to identify with the subjective experiences of Jaya and Sweety, as the films foreground their responses to the people around them. The emotional worlds are presented to us without the impulse to exploit, privileging empathy rather than objectification. The off-screen contribution of Dhaliwal’s writing weaves in with the respective directors’ interpretation of Jaya and Sweety’s stories, thereby exemplifying the idea of collaborative feminist authorship between the writer and director.

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Boxes and Closets: The Constraints of Heteropatriarchy The central message of Ek Ladki is conveyed in a gender-flipped adaptation of a Romeo and Juliet-esque love story, in which Sweety and her partner Kuhu (Regina Casssandra) play the lead characters. The play is written by Sweety’s friend Sahil (Rajkumar Rao), a playwright by profession, who decides to help her by staging the play in her home town, Moga (in Punjab). The play is meant to create awareness in its audience via its anti-homophobia message and get Sweety’s family to accept the truth about her identity. At a crucial point in the play’s story, when Sweety’s stage-family mock her relationship with Kuhu and proceed to separate them, the stage goes completely dark. The spotlight comes on to reveal Sweety trapped and suffocating in a glass cage, crying and pleading with everyone to let her out. Dhaliwal references the metaphor of a cage in her ‘Telling the Right Story’ talk, when she mentions that she wanted to commit suicide as a teenager, unaware that the distance she felt between her body and her identity was due to gender dysphoria. She mentions that she found it impossible to fit herself into the “box of normality” made up of societal norms of gender behaviour. In Ek Ladki, the glass cage, an obvious metaphor for the oppression faced by queer people in Indian society, and Sweety’s genuine distress and pain at being trapped inside it eventually convince her father of her inner struggle. The love story in Ek Ladki, within and without the play, normalizes same-sex relationships and encourages acceptance of queer subjects in society. However, an underlying theme in both Ek Ladki and Qarib extends Dhaliwal’s example of the “box of normality,” which questions traditional notions of gender, sexuality, marriage, and companionship. Qarib and (to a much greater extent) Ek Ladki show how heteronormativity, in collusion with patriarchy, regulates sexual and romantic behaviour in ways that is detrimental to individual desire and freedom, especially for women. In a broader context, both films also make a case against how commercial pressures might prioritize youthful man-woman romances in film storytelling, thus marginalizing alternative and queer experiences in cinematic representation. Theorists of gender and sexuality have argued that heteronormativity, like patriarchy, is socially constituted and affects people’s sexual as well as social lives. Wiegman (2007, p. 218) states that heteronormativity joins

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forces with the gender binary as the “means by which bodies became naturalized into two-part pairs … in sexual and social contexts, as male and female.” Wiegman goes on to explain that this system is the “reason for all kinds of social discipline, from sexual divisions of labor to sexual prohibitions” (2007, p. 218). Thus, heteronormativity is institutionalized within practices and regulations that influence gender normative behaviours. One of the foremost scholars of sexuality, Chrys Ingraham coined the term “heterosexual imaginary” to describe the operations of heterosexuality as a social phenomenon. Ingraham argues that the “heterosexual imaginary is that way of thinking which conceals the operation of heterosexuality in structuring gender and closes off any critical analysis of heterosexuality as an organizing institution” (1994, pp.  203–204). Recognizing heteosexuality as an operating force behind the gender binary, says Ingraham enables us to see this system “as institutionalized and hegemonic, as organizing the division of labor, and as instrumental to capitalism and patriarchy” (1994, p.  209). Similarly, Jackson cautions against the dangers of “abstracting sexuality from the social” as “sexuality, as well as gender, is fully social; sexual practices, desires, and identities are embedded within complex webs of nonsexual social relations” (2005, p. 17). We see examples of how gender socialization is embedded within heterosexual ordering of women and men in Ek Ladki. For instance, Balbir (Sweety’s father) secretly wants to become a chef and start his own catering business. But his mother forbids him to go into the kitchen or watch cooking shows as she believes these types of jobs are for women (“janaaniyon waale kaam”). Flashbacks reveal that Sweety’s brother Babloo (Abhishek Duhan) has always been given preferential treatment over Sweety (a larger share of special sweets made on festival days, for example). He is also controlling and aggressive—displaying a textbook version of toxic masculinity—shouting at and being verbally abusive towards Sweety on several occasions. Rich (1980), in her highly resonant essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,’ has shown how heteronormativity has functioned to control women’s sexuality. Rich argues that women’s relationships outside of heteronormative connections with men are looked at with suspicion and, historically, have been “crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise” (1980, p. 632). Moreover, a cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality to “control of consciousness,” have been used to “[convince] women that marriage, and sexual orientation towards men, are

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inevitable, even if unsatisfying or oppressive components of their lives” (Rich, 1980, p. 640). Marriage, therefore, acquires primacy over all other types of relationships in a woman’s life, and her experience outside of that is negated. For example, in Qarib, we see Jaya’s mother asking her to meet prospective men for marriage. Jaya’s friend advises her against being single for too long, hilariously adding that she might become a virgin again. Jaya reluctantly joins a dating app, on which most of the men she meets send her sleazy text messages. She is aware her actual age might count against her on the app and, therefore, lies about it, listing her age as thirty-three instead of thirty-five. When she finally meets Yogi (played by Irrfan) on the app and agrees to go on an impromptu road trip with him, she tells random strangers that they are cousins to avoid any awkward questions about their relationship. Jaya’s eagerness to establish that Yogi and she are cousins reflects the societal taboo against an unrelated and/or unmarried man and woman to be found together in public spaces. Ek Ladki satirizes this obsession with marriage, in keeping with its comedic tone. Yet, in revealing the absurdity of marriage-related match-­ making, the film alludes to far more sinister ways in which the sexuality of young people is policed in India. When Babloo suspects a relationship between Kuhu and Sweety, he tells his family that she is in love with Sahil, who is a Muslim. Sweety’s father explains to Sahil that he has nothing against Muslims and has several Muslim friends, but he is against inter-­ religious marriages. Balbir’s reasoning is the Indian version of the “I have many Black friends” defense, often used by white people to deflect from their racist beliefs. Babloo, on the other hand, pretends to take Sweety’s side in the matter, pushing for a quick marriage to Sahil, secretly hoping that she would forget about Kuhu. Ek Ladki exposes two levels of prejudice prevalent in Indian society—religion and sexuality—and suggests that accepting an interfaith marriage would be more palatable to Sweety’s family rather than acknowledging the truth about her sexuality. Reinforcing heteronormativity through traditions and prejudices around marriage alliances ensures that, in India, young people’s romantic and sexual life is stringently controlled. Young people are often coerced (and sometimes readily accept) early ‘arranged’ marriages, never having explored or questioned their sexuality within relationships not expected to culminate in marriage. As Shamira A.  Meghani suggests, the “rarity of independent living in adulthood and expectations of marriage” (2015, p.  65) that uphold compulsory heterosexuality do so at the expense of

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queer alternatives. This social reality further exacerbates the marginalization of queer relationships. Tied to such biases is a paternalistic attitude towards women’s sexuality, as demonstrated by feminist scholars Tanika Sarkar (1998) and Uma Chakravarti (1993), which associates familial purity with the control of women’s sexual freedom and rights. In recent times, argue Bose and Bhattacharya, “issues of gender and sexualities are often foregrounded as chief markers of identity […] to be taken as synonymous with Indian” (2007, p. xi). This particular socio-political milieu is extremely averse to the “dissident sexual subject” (Bose and Bhattacharya 2007, p. xvii). As a result, queer sexuality appears to threaten normative forms of national identity. The ignorance towards and dismissal of same-sex relationships in India is closely linked with the broader issue of sexual freedom. The silence around questions of desire and sexuality in mainstream public discourse pathologizes romantic and sexual relationships that do not conform to the man-woman binary. In spite of homosexuality being decriminalized in India, same-sex relationships continue to be placed in a peripheral bracket, while heteronormativity and heterosexuality are considered default social arrangements.

“Mere Liye Toh Yehi Normal Hai”: Ek Ladki as Queer Cinema Ek Ladki situates itself within the canon of romantic films in Hindi cinema by alluding to one of its most famous examples: 1942 A Love Story (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1994). The film is an iconic tale of forbidden love set in 1942, the year in which Mohandas Gandhi called for the end of British rule in India and galvanized the Indian freedom struggle. The film 1942 tells the story of Rajeshwari, the daughter of a freedom fighter who falls in love with Narendra, the son of a sycophantic supporter of the British in India. Ek Ladki draws on several elements from 1942: Anil Kapoor, the actor who plays Narendra also plays Sweety’s father, Chopra who produced and directed 1942 is the producer of Ek Ladki, and the title is a direct reference to the first line of 1942’s most popular romantic song, “Ek ladki ko dekha toh.” Ek Ladki, therefore, is completely self-aware of its intertextual connection and obvious references to 1942. Apart from these instances, which

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can be easily identified by anyone who is familiar with both films, Ek Ladki also shares some thematic similarities with 1942. Like Ek Ladki, 1942 incorporates the idea of  young lovers needing to break away from the traditional beliefs of family and society, resulting in the happy triumph of individual desire and freedom over parental control. The main characters in 1942 are involved in the staging of Romeo and Juliet, another allusive nod to a story about young people of opposing factions falling in love with each other. Sahil’s play in Ek Ladki, in which Sweety and Kuhu play the protagonists, also borrows this idea from Romeo and Juliet. In her discussion of Deepa Mehta’s Fire, Patel connects Fire to the long-lasting Hindi cinema genre of the “trials and tribulations of difficult love” (2002, p. 229). Patel continues, [in] that genre, heteropatriarchy of a sort is the ground for the disruptions provoked by desire and the resolutions offered for those provocations. Rarely does that triangle go awry, lodging desire in places of sexed sameness. (2002, p. 229)

I follow Patel’s argument in placing Ek Ladki and 1942 within this same lineage. However, like Fire, Ek Ladki causes further disruption, compared to its predecessor 1942, in its portrayal of a love story between two women. In its multi-layered intertextuality (1942, Romeo and Juliet, even Fire), Ek Ladki plays around with the common tropes of Hindi cinema to recast them into the still uncommon story of same-sex romance. By paying homage to 1942, Ek Ladki extracts queer pleasures from a non-queer film by remaking the film’s heteronormative love story. Aaron (2004, p. 5) posits that “queer” is a critical concept that “encompasses the non-fixity of gender expression and the non-fixity of both straight and gay sexuality.” He suggests that to be queer “means to be untethered from ‘conventional’ codes of behaviour” (Aaron 2004, p. 5). Particularly within cinema, argues Aaron, queer refers to a “critical intervention, cultural product and political strategy” (2004, p.  6). This process, according to Aaron, involves “[reappropriating] mainstream genres and formats [to defy] the sanctity of mainstream cinema history” (2004, p. 4). Ek Ladki’s various allusions to earlier texts underscore the intertextual aspect of counter-storytelling, wherein dominant ideologies are questioned and shown to be lacking in the universality they project. Ek Ladki consistently brings our attention to the heteronormative (and heteropatriarchal) preoccupations of Hindi cinema romances, such as

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1942, by creating scenes and situations we have seen in countless films and queering them. Sweety meets Kuhu at a wedding celebration—an oft-used setting for the start of a romance between a Hindi cinema hero and heroine. Sweety’s family hopes to match her with Kuhu’s brother, but Sweety and Kuhu fall in love with each other instead. Ek Ladki deploys this set-up scenario in cinema (and in real life), visually coded as a meeting place for the hero and the heroine, to subvert the trope and audience expectations. Where Sweety is shy, Kuhu is more forthcoming about her instant attraction to Sweety and reveals that she likes women. While Sweety’s family members are oblivious to her relationship with Kuhu, both women deepen their connection in secret meetings and wanderings in Sweety’s hometown Moga. In another instance of reappropriation, Ek Ladki samples the basic tune of the song “Ek ladki ko dekha” from 1942 and gives it a queer undertone. The 1942 song represents a quintessential occurrence in Hindi cinema, wherein Narendra, after having fallen in love with Rajeshwari at first glance, proceeds to serenade her beauty. When we first hear the song in Ek Ladki, it appears when Sahil meets Sweety. Sung by a male singer, the song appears to convey Sahil’s emotional state, as we witness him falling in love with Sweety. In typical fashion, the camera’s gaze replicates the hero’s as Sahil finds himself transfixed by Sweety. However, the song later reappears in the film when Sweety and Kuhu’s clandestine relationship is already underway, reflecting their mutual attraction towards each other. The gaze of the song’s lyrics, which initially belonged to Sahil, is now transferred to both Sweety and Kuhu as an expression of their love. In Ek Ladki, we have a film that makes its heroine’s feelings, turmoil, gaze, and interiority visible to the viewer (but not to her family) to give us a multidimensional queer protagonist. At a crucial moment in the film, when Sweety decides it is time for her to repudiate her family’s plans for her marriage, she confesses to Sahil that Kuhu is her ‘true love.’ The scene is set in a Gurudwara (the place of worship for the Sikh community) lending a degree of sanctity to Sweety’s confession. Sahil, baffled by Sweety’s feelings for Kuhu, asks her how she can be in love with a girl as he thinks it is not ‘normal.’ Sweety goes on to explain to Sahil that these emotions have been normal for her since she was a very young girl: “Mere liye toh yahi normal hai (this has always been my normal),” she says. This scene is followed by an extended flashback sequence when we meet Sweety as a young teenager, experiencing the excitement of first love. Sweety tells Sahil that the name of her first crush was ‘Gurwinder,’ playing

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on the ambiguity of gender-neutral Sikh first names. In a lovely moment, depicting how the larger-than-life romances of Hindi cinema can be a medium through which we interpret our own feelings, Sweety watches the 1990s blockbuster hit Hum Aapke Hain Koun…!/ What do I Mean to You...! (Sooraj Barjatya, 1994) and imagines herself and Gurwinder in the lead roles as brides. Sweety writes a letter to Gurwinder, expressing her feelings but, unfortunately, her efforts end in heartbreak: Gurwinder already has a boyfriend. Things get worse when Sweety’s classmates discover her ‘love letter’ and begin to bully her for it. Here, the film goes to great lengths in showing us the isolation and distress experienced by a child, such as one in Sweety’s circumstances, who is bullied. Sweety folds back into herself, revealing her pain to no one except her journal. She is ostracized and laughed at by her classmates and does not have a single friend. In her journal, she repeatedly prays for her ‘condition’ to be ‘cured.’ Later, Sweety tells Sahil, she meets a friend, who she finds just like her (“mere jaisa”). This unnamed friend, may or may not have been gay, but is a boy who does not present as traditionally masculine. Sweety and the boy quickly become friends, but this friendship also does not last long. Babloo, Sweety’s brother, compels Sweety not to play with the boy, suggesting that he is ‘dirty’ and uses the word ‘hijra’ (a word that popularly refers to India’s transgender community) as a slur to describe the boy. Once Sweety also comes upon Babloo hazing the boy, forcing him to remove his shirt and walk ‘like a girl.’ Besides creating a fleshed-out heroine, I argue that these flashback scenes perform a pedagogic function. Sweety’s backstory provides both the characters in the film and its audience with a potential learning curve, which takes them from the point of homophobia or doubt to compassion and understanding. Sahil, to whom Sweety is narrating her story, becomes a stand-in for the ideal compassionate audience member, initially skeptical, but ultimately non-judgemental and willing to learn from Sweety. In this, he is also a foil for the imposing, close-minded Babloo—the embodiment of heteropatriarchy in the film—who expresses his masculinity by berating Sweety for her sexuality and being violent towards those who do not conform to traditional gender roles. This educational aspect, although not essential to queer cinema or a marker for a ‘good’ queer film, in the case of Ek Ladki, works as the counter-storytelling aspect of the film. The film’s inclusive ideology is distilled in the play that is staged for the entire town of Moga during the climax of the film. Initially marketed to the town as a ‘comedy’ love story between two women, the play directly

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confronts its queer storyline within the first few minutes, shocking some of the audience members into leaving in disgust. In a melodramatic ending, the characters played by Sweety and Kuhu are pulled apart from each other and Sweety is locked up in a glass cage. Balbir, who had earlier decided to boycott the play along with the rest of Sweety’s family, comes into the theatre at this point. Balbir has had a change of heart after reading Sweety’s secret journals and decides to show his support by attending the play. The line between representation and reality blurs for Balbir as he is enraged by what he sees on stage: Sweety in a glass cage. Balbir goes on to break apart the cage and beat up Sweety’s on-stage father for locking her up. This real-life family drama has a softening effect on some of the audience members as the camera pans to the faces in the audience tearing up and smiling at the happy ending. We also see a young girl in the audience, smiling to herself, possibly identifying with Sweety’s character and her queerness. The sequence ends with Balbir embracing Sweety and Kuhu and exclaiming to his daughter, “We are so similar. Just like me, you also like ladies!” Sweety’s decision to go ahead with the play, despite opposition from her family, forms a key moment in the formation of her selfhood. Sweety stands up to her father by telling him that she feels disappointed in him for not being able to understand her. She also asserts that it is important for her to participate in the play, not only for herself, but also for those who, like her, live closeted, invisible lives. This point in the film empowers Sweety into completely accepting her identity and, by extension, advocating for queer identities in general. The film, thus, foregrounds Sweety’s story, but alludes to the broader prevalence of LGBTQ+ identities and their open expression. Ek Ladki uses the tropes of popular Hindi cinema romances—love songs, meetings at weddings, family drama—and reworks these to promote its anti-homophobia ideology. In this, it is unique (like its recent counterpart, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, which depicted a love relationship between two men) in its portrayal of same-sex love in a popular format, as it does so without positioning itself as niche or ‘indie.’ Additionally, the film steers away from other popular cinema pitfalls in representing gay people or same-sex love that often rely on stereotypes to convey an anti-homophobic stance (such as Dostana). Dhaliwal’s storytelling, therefore, works on a social as well as cinematic level, as Ek Ladki

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remains acutely aware of its sociological function in advocating for queer identities beyond their presence in Hindi cinema.

Love in the Time of Queerphobia One of the ways in which Ek Ladki deploys its inclusive worldview is through the character of Chattro, a caterer who befriends Sweety’s family and later forms a romantic attachment to Balbir. Chattro (played by 1990s’ superstar actress Juhi Chawla, in her characteristic buoyant style) is a divorced woman who owns a catering business. In one insightful conversation with Balbir, Chattro justifies her decision to divorce her husband after several years of marriage. She tells Balbir that once her children had grown up, the relationship between her and her husband quickly dissolved, prompting her decision to separate from him. She also adds that learning from her own experience with marriage, she has told her children that it will be entirely their choice who they marry or whether they marry at all. In Chattro’s character and her words, the film takes a stand against toxic and controlling familial relationships, advocating for autonomy of children from their parents. In Qarib, which dwells on sensitive subjects such as looking for romance in one’s 30s, the death of a partner and loneliness, Yogi’s friendship provides Jaya a support system that is independent of marital (and any other) socially ‘acceptable’ relationships. Embedded in the light-heartedness of both films is, ultimately, a call to argue for the value of individual identity, to seek autonomy from outdated and impractical social norms, and to imagine alternative relationship arrangements to heteropatriarcal man–woman bonds revolving around marriage and family connections. This is a consistent trope in the films written by women screenwriters working in the Hindi film industry today that include Kanika Dhillon (Manmarziyaan/Heart-Wishes, 2018; Judgementall Hai Kya/Are You Judgemental?, 2019; Haseen Dillruba/My Beautiful Lover, 2021), Juhi Chaturvedi (Piku, 2015), Anvita Dutt (Bulbbul, 2020; Phillauri, 2017) and Alankrita Shrivastava (Lipstick Under My Burkha, 2016; Dolly, Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare/The Shining Stars of Dolly and Kitty, 2020). The aforesaid films offer us a diverse group of female protagonists who fiercely reject traditional femininity in favour of charting the course of life on their own terms. These screenwriters are not shy of representing

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women as sexually brazen, messy, and at times, indulging in actions which might be considered morally questionable. Dhaliwal extends this manner of representing womanhood in what, I argue, is a distinctly queer vision of looking at individuals and relationships. Chatterjee explicates the political impact of the queer subject thus: “[the queer] political subject emerges against an already existing structure or system, and carries with it an alternative imagination of transformation” (2018, p.  39). Jaya and Sweety are this type of transformative (queer) subject in Dhaliwal’s two films, pointing towards the significance of queer representation and themes in mainstream cinema and their role in social dialogue and change. Dhaliwal highlights the link between representation and social change not only in her films but also in her public talks where she speaks in favour of queer inclusivity in mainstream cinema and the need to push people out of their comfort zones via queer storytelling. Freeman (2007) shows how traditional family and kinship orient towards a “technique of renewal” dependent on the domestic labour of women. However, Freeman goes on to argue, such types of kinship bonds also reproduce “cultural force” when they “[recreate] and [recharge] bodies toward ends other than labour, such as play, love, and even violence” (italics mine) (2007, p. 298). This cultural force, by extension, also primes people to accept heteropatriarchal systems as naturalized beliefs and undertakes all means (coercive and/or violent) to maintain these systems. As a result, women like Jaya, who are looking to find love a second time, are relegated to a life of loneliness and lack of support. Similarly, those like Sweety, who are queer, are forced to live their entire lives in a metaphorical glass cage. However, in Qarib and Ek Ladki, Dhaliwal prompts us to question the family, marriage, and gender-related conventions we accept and encourages us to imagine freeing alternatives in their place. Consequently, in Qarib, in spite of being very different from each other, Jaya and Yogi decide to give their relationship a chance without the mention of marriage or any permanent, binding commitment. In Ek Ladki, Sweety’s family (barring Babloo) does come around to accepting Kuhu as her partner and the film’s ending suggests that Sweety might move to London to pursue a degree in Art and be with Kuhu. Halberstam mentions, in an essay titled “Queer Alternatives to Oedipal Relations,” that conventionally defined “family ties” often take “precedence over random (even if intense) associations.” (2007, p.  317). She adds that the notion of longevity attached to family relationships “renders

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all other relationships meaningless and superficial,” even when families are estranged (Halberstam 2007, p. 317). Doyle argues in ‘Between Friends’ how a “feminist ethic” and “queer sensibility” can open up possibilities for friendships between women and men, which go beyond the presence or absence of sexual desire (2007, p. 329). This is of vital significance—as Dhaliwal herself mentions, such stories “save lives”—in a culture that largely stigmatizes queer relationships, discriminates against transgenders, and treats any kind of sexual or gendered liminality with mockery, suspicion, or disdain. These cultural beliefs are evidenced in the prevalence of practices such as conversion therapy that young gay people are coerced into by medical professionals and parents, the regular reports of lesbian couples committing suicide, and young couples being harassed in public places by self-appointed protectors of ‘Indian’ culture. Moreover, a lack of clear laws and policies that protect the interests of those in gay and lesbian (or even live-in) relationships produces a society that recognizes and glorifies only those connections that exist by virtue of marriage between a man and woman. Perhaps this is why, even in a film like Ek Ladki that wants its protagonists to have a happy romantic ending, sends them off to London because the possibility of living out their lives as a couple in India with ease seems far-fetched. However, personal stories such as that of Gazal Dhaliwal, which she deftly channels into her film writing, invites us to a glimpse of a world unbound from conventions and full of happiness and hope.

References Aaron, M. (2004). ‘New Queer Cinema: An Introduction.’ In: M.  Aaron (ed). New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 3–14. Bahl, V. (2014). Queen. Viacom18 Motion Pictures, Phantom Films. Barjatya, S. (1994). Hum Aapke Hain Koun…!. Rajshri Productions. Batra, S. (2016). Kapoor And Sons. Dharma Productions. Bhatkal, S. (2014). ‘Accepting Alternative Sexualities.’ Satyamev Jayate. Aamir Khan Productions. October 19. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ZOicQppaqnk. Accessed on 15 July 2021. Bose, B. & Bhattacharyya, S. (2007). ‘Introduction.’ In: Bose, B., Bhattacharyya, S. (eds). The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India. Seagull Books, Calcutta, pp. ix–xxxii.

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Chakravarti, U. (1993). ‘Conceptualizing Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class, and State.’ Economic and Political Weekly 28 (14): 579–585. Chandra, T. (1998). Dushman. Vishesh Films. ———. (1999). Sangharsh. Vishesh Films. ———. (2002). Sur – The Melody of Life. Pritish Nandy Communications. ———. (2006). Zindaggi Rocks. Anuradha Prasad. ———. (2017). Qarib Qarib Singlle. Zee Studios, JAR Pictures. Chatterjee, S. (2018). Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects. Routledge, Oxon and New York. Chopra, V. V. (1994). 1942: A Love Story. Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Coon, D.  R. (2018). ‘Mythgarden: Collaborative Authorship and Counter-­ Storytelling in Queer Independent Film.’ Journal of Film and Video 70 (3-4):44–62. Delgado, R. (1989). ‘Storytelling for oppositionists and others: a plea for narrative.’ Michigan Law Review 87 (8): 2411–2441. Dhaliwal, G. (2015). ‘Telling the Right Story’. INKtalks. January 23. INKtalks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpUDiHJjgZg. Accessed on 15 July 2021 Dhar, S. C. (2019). Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga. Vinod Chopra Films. Dharmadhikari, N. & Khurana, A. (2020). Mismatched. Ronnie Screwvala. Doyle, J. (2007). ‘Between friends.’ In: Haggerty, G. E., McGarry, M. (eds). A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies. Blackwell Publishing, Victoria, pp. 325–340. Fischer, L. (2017). ‘Feminist forms of address: Mai Zetterling’s Loving Couples.’ In: K. L. Hole et al., (eds). The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender. Routledge, Oxon and New York, pp. 36–46. Freeman, E. (2007). ‘Queer belongings: kinship and queer theory.’ In: Haggerty, G. E., McGarry, M. (eds). A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies. Blackwell Publishing, Victoria, pp. 295–314. Gopinath, G. (2000). ‘Queering Bollywood: alternative sexualities in popular Indian cinema.’ Journal of Homosexuality 39 (3-4): 283–297. Guptan, A.D. (2020). Bulbbul. Clean Slate Films. Halberstam, J. (2007). ‘Forgetting Family: Queer Alternatives to Oedipal Relations.’ In: Haggerty, G. E., McGarry, M. (eds). A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies. Blackwell Publishing, Victoria, pp. 315–324. Ingraham, C. (1994). ‘The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist Sociology and Theories of Gender.’ Sociological Theory 12 (2):203–219. Jackson, S. (2005). ‘Sexuality, Heterosexuality, and Gender Hierarchy: Getting our Priorities Straight.’ In: C. Ingraham (ed). Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise, and the Paradox of Heterosexuality. Routledge, New York and Oxon, pp. 15–37.

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Kashyap, A. (2018). Manmarziyaan. Eros International, Colour Yellow Productions, Phantom Films. Kashyap, T., Arun, R., Aslam, D. et  al. (2021). Feels like Ishq. Seher Aly Latif, Shivani Saran. Kavi, A. R. (2000). ‘The Changing Image of the Hero in Hindi films.’ Journal of Homosexuality 39 (3–4): 307–312. Kewalya, H. (2020). Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan. T-Series, Colour Yellow Productions. Kovelamudi, P. (2019). Judgementall Hai Kya. Balaji Motion Pictures, ALT Entertainment, Karma Media and Entertainment. Lal, A. (2017). Phillauri. Fox Star Studios, Clean Slate Filmz. Mansukhani, T. (2008). Dostana. Dharma Productions. Mathew, V. (2021). Haseen Dilruba. Colour Yellow Productions, T-Series, Eros International. Meghani, S. A. (2015). ‘Global Desires, Postcolonial Critique: Queer Women in Nation, Migration, and Diaspora.’ In: J. Medd (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 60–75. Mehta, D. (1996). Fire. Kaleidoscope Entertainment, Trial by Fire Films. Mehta, H. (2016). Aligarh. Eros Entertainment, Karma Pictures. Nambiar, B. (2016). Wazir. Vinod Chopra Films. Onir. (2005). My Brother Nikhil. Sanjay Suri, Vicky Tejwani, Onir, Raj Kaushal Patel, G. (2002). ‘On Fire: Sexuality and its Incitements.’ In: R.  Vanita (ed). Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. Routledge, New York and Oxon, pp. 222–233. Rao, R.  R. (2000). ‘Memories Pierce the Heart: Homoeroticism, Bollywood-­ style.’ Journal of Homosexuality 39 (3-4): 299–306. Rich, A. (1980). ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.’ Signs 5 (4): 631–660. Sarkar, T. (1998). ‘Orthodoxy, Cultural Nationalism, and Hindutva Violence: and Overview of Gender Ideology of the Hindu Right.’ In: Pierson, R.  R., Chaudhari, N. (eds). Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, pp. 166–181. Shinde, G. (2016). Dear Zindagi. Red Chillies Entertainment, Dharma Productions, Hope Productions. ———. (2012). English Vinglish. Hope Productions. Shrivastava, A. (2017). Lipstick Under My Burkha. Prakash Jha Productions. ———. (2020). Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare. Balaji Motion Pictures and ALT Entertainment. Netflix. Sircar, S. (2015). Piku. MSM motion Pictures, Saraswati Entertainment Creations, Rising Sun Films. Soloway, J. (2016) ‘The Female Gaze.’ TIFF Talks. September 11. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=pnBvppooD9I. Accessed on 15 July 2021.

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CHAPTER 13

“Rosy Ki Khwaheeshein”: Scripted Romance and Acquaintance Rape in Alankrita Shrivastava’s Oeuvre of Female Desire Shuhita Bhattacharjee

In this chapter I study the work of Alankrita Shrivastava, with a focus on her films Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016), and Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (DKCS) (2020), and her web show Bombay Begums (2021), to understand how her cultural productions explode the politics behind the scopophilic representation of female sexual desire by invoking certain widely marketed and frequently censored genres of erotic expression and then exposing their disturbing social underbelly where sexual violence resides. I also delineate her centrality within the post-2010 rise of the new Indian Independent (Indie) cinema to show how her exposition of censored desire and uncensured rape is located within a generically defined trajectory of female-centred protest. In Lipstick Under My Burkha, the desires of the four primary female characters is embedded into a titillating narratorial voiceover drawn from erotic pulp fiction,  and  in Dolly

S. Bhattacharjee (*) IIT Hyderabad, Sangareddy, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_13

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Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare, Dolly and Kajal’s expressions of sexual desire are constantly juxtaposed against the scripted telephone sex catered through dating apps, in one of which Kajal is employed. Shrivastava’s agentive female characters, however, rupture these commercialized pulp sexual narratives and the fetishized figures of their heroines, replacing them with a far more problematic female voice of desire that speaks the truth about acquaintance sexual violence—subject to legal indifference and the result of our misogynist sexual culture (Francis 1996; Pineau 1989; Fraser 2015; Viki et  al. 2004; Kahan 2021)—in all its various (unregulated/unrecognized) formats, whether marital rape, intimate partner sexual violence, sexual harassment, or intrafamilial sexual abuse. With reference to sociological and legal scholarship (McGregor 2005; Santhya et al. 2007; Anderson 2010; Conly 2004), I discuss how these works portray the distressing and unlegislated reality of acquaintance sexual violence—revealing the complex nature of sexual consent (which can be partial, subjective, and temporary), the varieties of nonconsensual sex (which can be unwanted/unwelcome even when not forced, and psychologically coercive even when not physically imposed), and the grimmer impact of acquaintance assault as compared to stranger rapes (Drakulich 2015). This mordant critique is lodged in the new Indian Indie current which, as critics have noted, spells the demise of the archvillain and modifies the predictable template of the familiar ‘heroine,’ replacing existing gendered prototypes by demolishing the ‘romantic hero’ and projecting instead the figures of the sexually desirous woman and the acquaintance rapist. As such, I will suggest that this intervention by the female protagonists into the existing scripts of marketable sexuality represents the larger subversion that this composer-filmmaker stages within mainstream Bollywood portrayals of romantic love and  female sexuality. Implicitly, Shrivastava’s works also fracture the masculinist nature of media production setups—a field that has registered frequent sexual harassment cases and scandals both internationally and nationally—to replace (the desire for) romance with (the achievement of) rights. Lipstick Under My Burkha (LUMB) is a film that  met with censure from the moment of its release.  The  CBFC labelled it too “lady-­ oriented”—a euphemism for its depiction of raw female sexuality—which triggered the middle-finger campaign where, following the film’s publicity posters, the film’s lead female actors held up a lipstick (“a code for erotica and fantasy” and female desire; Ghosh 2019, p.  332) so that it aligned with their raised middle finger, implying the obvious irreverence of this

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gesture in response the institutional censure of their film. LUMB tells the story of Usha Parmar, Rehana Abidi, Leela, and Shirin Aslam, all of whom are located in Bhopal and strive to contest their fate through the expression of their individual sexual desires. Usha, a woman in her late 50s or early  60s, secretly enjoys reading popular erotic novels and discovers a passion for a young swimming instructor with whom she engages in phone sex. Leela negotiates the turbulence between an exciting lover (Arshad) and a dull fiancée (Manoj) who promises no escape from the humdrum small-town post-marital prospects. The  burkha-clad  Shirin excels at a secret sales job without the knowledge of her disapproving husband, Rahim, who works for long periods of time in Saudi Arabia and only returns for brief spells during which he forces sex and unwanted pregnancies upon his wife. Rehana labours inside her parents’ tailoring shop, a reality she hides from her fashionable college friends in front of whom she abandons the burkha, seeks celebrity as a singer, and courts the attentions of a boy from the college band(Dhruv). Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (DKCS) tells the story of Dolly and her husband Amit who have no sexual compatibility, and Kitty (or Kajal) who seeks a job at Red Rose App, a dating company that sells telephone sex, after being molested by Amit. Dolly tries to seek passion in Usmaan, a food delivery person, and Kajal in Pradeep, one of the clients of the dating app. Pradeep turns out to be a fraud with an existing marriage. The film ends dramatically with the death of Usmaan and with the birth of a friendship between the cousins (Dolly and Kajal) founded on admissions of disturbing truths. The continuing strand of radical feminist subversion that connects all of Shrivastava’s work is interestingly suggested in Bombay Begums through the carefully chosen episode titles, each of which refers to canonical works of feminist literature. ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves,’ ‘The Color Purple,’ ‘The Bell Jar,’ ‘The Golden Notebook,’ and ‘A Room of One’s Own’ reference works by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, and Virginia Woolf respectively that deal with a whole range of representations such as that of the mythological wild woman, the reality of African American women’s systematic domestic sexual abuse, repression-induced female clinical depression, episodes of acquaintance (date) rape, twentieth-­ century sexual liberation and women’s movements, and the patriarchal structuring of society, education, and the arts. Bombay Begums is the story of a group of central female characters: Rani—the powerful CEO of the Royal Bank of Bombay, Fatima—the high-ranking executive fighting the

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pressures of pregnancy unsuccessfully, Shai—Rani’s step-daughter who faces rejection in her infatuation with Imran and discovers affection for her step-mother, Ayesha—the new girl in Bombay who gets sexually assaulted by a high-ranking executive (Deepak Sanghvi) she admires, and Lakshmi Godbole (Lily)—the sex worker who tries to extort money and stability out of Rani in order to set up a better life for her son. Scholars like Gohar Siddiqui have analysed the work of Alankrita Shrivastava to establish that she represents the new Indian Independent cinema that rose to prominence after 2010 a development that had important structural implications for the representation of female desire, sexual violence, and women’s rights. The template of the new Indian Indie and the conditions that birthed it are crucial for the way they define the subversive directions of filmmakers such as Shrivastava. Studying this genre in detail through a monograph and then an edited collection, Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram offers a useful map on which to plot Shrivastava’s work. Devasundaram notes that a “foundational transformation” has taken place in the field of Indian cinema “through the emergence of a new wave of urban independent films since 2010” (Devasundaram India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid 2016, p.  1), further observing that “the prodigious abundance of Indie films … are now a normalised feature of India’s annual cinematic output” (Devasundaram Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood 2018, p. 1). This “new filmic form, currently alluded to as new Indian ‘Indies’” arises from the nation’s current turbulent state—“a tumultuous neoliberal restructuring characterised by a commitment to consumer capitalism, foreign multinational investment and an inexorable thrust towards a global free market economy,” “punctuated by a paradoxical retrenchment of right-wing Hindu religious and nationalist ideology” (Devasundaram 2016, p.  2). Even while arising from within these currents, “filmmakers … use independent cinema to combat the combined repressive forces of socio- cultural orthodoxy and politico-­ religious dogmatism.” (Devasundaram 2018, p. 2). In these indie films, the push “to articulate alternative, secondary and tertiary narratives that challenge the status quo and ruling power becomes paramount” (Devasundaram 2018, p. 2). This genre fractures the “meta-hegemony” of Bollywood—a term Devasundaram coins to explain the predominance of Bollywood within India along with a simultaneous subservience vis-a-­ vis Hollywood (Devasundaram 2016, p.  4). Toppling the Bollywood supremacy and its formulaic pattern, Devasundaram explains that “the new Indies narrate micro-narratives – the minority and alternative stories

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of nation excluded from Bollywood film representations” (2016, p.  2). “Compris[ing] of polymorphous, heterogeneous and individual strands that converge in their unique ability to present parallax or unconventional perspectives of modern India,” the indies offer “a non-Bollywood’s-eye view” (Devasundaram 2018, p. 3). Explaining the unique historical trajectory of the Indian Indies, Sudha Tiwari notes that these films continue “the legacy of the New Cinema movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s, in a new avatar,” sharing “the [same] cinematic agitation and anger against established structures and status quo [that was] exhibited by the films of the 1960s and ‘70s” which were state-funded through NFDC and FFC (Tiwari 2018, pp.  40–1). However, as  Tiwari observes, there has been a crucial shift because while the “elementary definition of an Indie film gestures towards a low-­ budget film by small studios, made by filmmakers independent of commercial film establishments,” and while the state-funded New Cinema was indeed “truly independent of the commercial film establishment, to the extent of posing a strong opposition to it,” the new “Indie cinema of the 2000s may be independent of the state, but is totally at the behest of market forces,” being  funded by commercial establishments in a post-­ liberalization India  (Tiwari 2018, pp.  40–41). Thankfully, despite these Indie filmmakers’ dependence on the market—“on national/international private and corporate bodies for production, distribution and exhibition”— “this has not yet led to any significant compromise on the form and content of these Indie films” (Tiwari 2018, p. 41). In fact, as Tiwari explains, the Indies are unapologetic about this dependence, “not averse to taking funding and distribution assistance from corporate bodies or the government,” because of the larger moral purpose underlying its filmmaking— the “mak[ing of] films that tell alternative stories it thinks must be told” (Tiwari 2018, p. 41). Gohar Siddiqui notes how Alankrita Shrivastava, as an Indian Independent filmmaker, draws on the possibilities of this channel to critique the construction of femininity in mainstream Indian cinema. Siddiqui identifies an earlier shift from the representation of conventional Indian womanhood to the New Woman of the post-­ liberalization decades (1990s), and then the later shift that registered with the post-2000 Indian Independent films. In the earlier phase, corporatized post-liberalization Bollywood emerged “a crucial player in the representation of the New Woman”—the “construction of new womanhood … intensified since the 1990s,” producing the “New Woman [who was] … a consuming and laboring subject in a capitalist economy as well as a female

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citizen and a member of patriarchal institutions like the nation-state and family” (Siddiqui 2021, p.  81). Regarding the later shift  that Sangita Gopal calls the “new cinematic order” or “New Bollywood” (Gopal 2011, p. 2; qtd in Siddiqui 2021, p. 81), Siddiqui notes that “post-2000 [the] economic landscape shifted in favor of independent filmmakers, resulting in several hatke/alternative women-centric films” (Siddiqui 2021, p. 81). This “space created for niche cinema then allow[ed] for filmmakers like Shrivastava to make socially conscious feminist films like LUMB, which self-consciously play with the tropes of new womanhood to visibilize the conflict between empowerment and containment” (Siddiqui 2021, p. 81). Devasundaram notes how “the Indies [serve] as a bastion for strong female roles both behind and in front of the camera” to the extent that “[s]everal Indies could be classified with confidence as ‘F-Rated’ (female rated)—a moniker traceable to Bath Film Festival Director Holly Tarquini’s coinage for films featuring a female director, scriptwriter and actors” (Devasundaram Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood 2018, p. 3). Occupying this space of ‘F-Rated’ Indian indie cinema, Shrivastava’s work harnesses the radical potential offered by the template not only in the two films that she has directed but in the web show that she has produced, co-directed, and co-written—which, for the purposes of this chapter, I will consider a part of her Indie oeuvre, despite its variant format, because of the similarity of independent funding channels  and subversive feminist  agendas. Shrivastava uses the Indie format to foreground polemical issues strategically silenced in public and mainstream cinematic discourses on sexuality—i.e.  female sexual desire and acquaintance rape. The unapologetic asseveration of sexual appetite in Shrivastava’s oeuvre takes place through some of the most well-known but socially marginalized scripts of sexual intimacy—erotic fiction and telephonic sex-talk. In a shocking twist, these erotic scripts are then overturned to expose the reality of sexual violence beneath the appearance of love.

Expressing Desire: The Power of Female Sexual Agency It is perhaps Shai’s voiceover that most succinctly expresses the urgency of female sexual desire in Shrivastava’s work: “Some women secretly aspire to be queens. Lie about their desires. I don’t want to lie mummy” (Bombay Begums; emphasis added). The theme is treated at length in LUMB where

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the template of an erotic novel is adapted into a cinematic voiceover that strings together the lives of the four central female characters—Usha Parmar, Rehana Abidi, Leela, and Shireen Aslam. Defined and united by their erotic fantasies, these characters speak eponymously through Rosy— the titular character of the dog-eared  romances that Usha Parmar, or “Buaji” (Aunty), devours secretly as we move through the film. The narrative leaves us in no doubt about the centrality and celebratoriness of female desire as it opens defiantly with this manifesto: There is that moment that arrives in every girl’s life when her desire to becomes a woman gets awakened. Rosy’s desires were also blooming like the rose. Outside the cage of life, faraway dreams were making Rosy restless. And in the blooming garden of her body, her youth was pricking her as a thorn.

Rosy, apparently singular but effectively representative of all the female protagonists, is defined by her sexual longing and her lack of access to consumption, both material and sexual—the intertwining of which is also emphasized from the start. As Rosy’s story is narrated—the erotically charged woman, desperate in her sexual loneliness—the visual that appears  is of the burkha-covered Rehana smuggling a lipstick out of a clothing store, secretly changing into snazzy clothing at her college washroom, and finally making a campus appearance sporting a fresh coat of the stolen item. The unapologetic and reckless effort to secure and consume market items in order to enhance one’s appeal and satisfy one’s desire is a persistent strand in the film. The woman’s longing for sexual intimacy, within the framework of fashionable consumption, is endorsed by the running narrative: Rosy would stand behind the bars of her window, a pair of binoculars glued to her eyes, watching the shining lights of the city. Jeans-clad girls, hugging their boyfriends closely, would roam around on motorcycles openly. Their throbbing sounds would unleash Rosy’s fantasies.

The second character, Shireen, is similarly entrenched in market consumption patterns, invested in rising through the ranks of the job she holds and determined to peddle the household appliances that she is assigned to sell to customers through door-to-door marketing. Just after we see her close a sale for a ‘pest-control gun’ to a homemaker, she has to

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rush home because her irate husband calls. The narrative at this point conjoins sexual and material desire, embossing her (or rather Rosy’s) bodily longing over material craving through a reference to the “shop” and the accompanying image of a street lined with shops : The curtains were thick. No one could see Rosy in the dark. Rosy’s screams could not be heard amidst the cacophony of the street. And the doors to Rosy’s shop would close even before opening. Rosy was incarcerated in a closed room of a rundown down—all alone with her young, colourful desires. Only the shadows of men reached her window. It felt like her body’s thirst would never be quenched. Because the key to her locked door had been lost for ages.

Rosy’s tale of yearning  continues  as Usha heads to the swimming pool—where she would soon discover her throbbing passion for the swimming instructor—and sits by the side of the splashing waters reading one of  her romance novels and melting desirously  into the heroine (Rosy). The camera zooms in to show Usha secretively devouring the book and the narration continues: Today was the first rain of the monsoons. And the drops of youth were calling out to her. The tempest within Rosy’s body was more frightening than the storm outside. Rosy was fully drenched in the flood of desire. Her white kurta [long shirt] had turned transparent. Each and every inch of Rosy’s body was soaked in the drops, and it was as though she was drowning in the tornado of lust. Her binoculars were slipping from her hand. In the opposite window, the new tenant was showering—completely naked.

Later in the night, we see her read more about Rosy’s pulsating desire for the tenant: “Rosy wanted to shower with him. She wanted the tenant to shampoo her thick hair with his hands. She wanted his slippery fingers to incite her youth.” As the film progresses, Usha slips into the daily habit of calling the swimming instructor, speaking to him anonymously as ‘Rosy,’ initiating phone sex, answering his eager questions about herself with the promise that he could always see her in his “lipstick dreams,” and eventually masturbating to the sound of his lascivious words. This wild sexual desire is depicted with the most abandon by the fourth protagonist, Leela, who wishes to break free of the small town and escape to Delhi alongside her boyfriend (Arshad), with whom she engages in

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passionate sex, even partially filming themselves in the act to enhance the sexual thrill. In DKCS, Radha Yadav, or Dolly, develops an attraction for Osmaan— the delivery person for an online food delivery app (Ippy)—and his disarmingly honest ways. This involvement, that finally culminates in an episode of passionate lovemaking, emancipates Dolly from the accusations of sexual frigidity that she had internalized and of which she had spoken to Kajal in a critical scene: “I’m frozen … You know how they say in English—frigid. I do not feel anything. If anyone tries to put it inside it pains, and I am never in the mood.” Having discovered her right and her ability to seek or enjoy sexual pleasure through her relationship with Osmaan, Dolly defiantly removes from her bedroom all the stockpile of oils and lotions recommended as cures for frigidity (“Japanese Oil” bottles), and declares to her husband in a moment of fulfilling self-discovery, “I am not frigid.” Dolly’s cousin Kajal, whose screen name on the dating app where she is employed is Kitty, is disappointed and cheated by her love interest, Pradeep. Her intimacy with him is rough, unfulfilling, and anti-­ climactic for her. In a shocking twist, Kajal approaches DJ Gurjar Teja for sexual gratification—a man whom she had seen pleasuring her friend, Shazia, during a night of raucous love-making when they had all been sharing the same bedroom. Startling the audience into recognizing the untameability of her desire, she unflinchingly seeks out the one man from whom she hopes to derive not love or romance but sexual pleasure. In a culminating moment of the film, both women are seen deriving their much-awaited sexual pleasure in partners of their choice—Dolly with Osmaan and Kajal with DJ Gurjar—whose candid sexual purpose in their lives lie outside frameworks of not only conjugality but also romance. As if to enshrine this realization through art, the end of the film shows a carnival where an acclaimed artist (Damayanti) unveils her massive magnum opus, an art installation titled and resembling the ‘Yoni’ (vagina) in view of a large audience in the middle of the celebrations. Challenging this spectacular creative literalization of the principle of female desire (“the metaphoric feminine,” as Damayanti announces), the installation is attacked by right-wing political goons attempting to raze to the ground what they consider “an offence to Indian culture.” In Bombay Begums, sexual desire is once again briefly but strongly endorsed through the character of Shai when media outlets are shown maligning Rani for her sexual adventure with Mahesh Rao. As Rani’s step-­ son, Zuravar, calls her a “slut” and “the most fucking immoral person,”

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accusing her implicitly of shaming the family through her escapades, Rani turns to Shai expecting only the worst kind of mordant disapproval. Instead she is greeted with substantive moral support, albeit delivered with complete indifference: “It’s a free world. You can sleep with whoever the fuck you want.” Shai’s narratorial presence throughout the web show also  consistently proclaims  the biological principle as the governing logic  undergirding sexual desire—extricating  it from the morality discourse and reinstating it within the organic and physiological. Her teacher explains in class, as Shai looks coyly at the object of her infatuation, Imran, and later proceeds to stain her skirt red to attract his raw sexual attention: Love is a mere chemical reaction in the body. The human body is designed to ensure that we, as a species, grow and multiply…. Males, naturally, instinctively find women more attractive when they are fertile. Especially when they are ovulating… In fact, some studies show that males think their mates smell the nicest when they are in the most fertile phase of their menstrual cycle.

However, as I will show in the following section, the perils of such boundless passion remain undeniable for the fearless woman who dares to venture forth  only to be greeted by lovelessness, sexual disciplining, or sexual violence.

Prohibitions of Desire, Impossibility of Love, and the Reality of Rape The free expression of female sexuality is met with several kinds of censure and ridicule in Shrivastava’s work. For instance, in DKCS, Dolly is checked in her  uninhibited display of desire and tamed into appropriate conjugal  subservience.  After her secret outing with Osmaan, she initiates sex with her husband when he returns  and mounts him  boldly in what is shown to be her first attempt at rekindling their passion. The societal reproval of such frank and assertive female desire  becomes immediately obvious as her husband turns her over and proceeds to mount her, symbolically crushing her attempt at agentive sexuality—a move that leads her to withdraw from the act and sends him off to his routine masturbation. As Shai says in Bombay Begums—ostensibly about the custom of ‘karva chauth’ but with a wider metaphorical import—offering a commentary on society’s censorship of female sexual expression and its

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simultaneous validation (and even valorization) of male sexual aggression: “Hungry women, all of us. The men, of course, have their bellies full. How is our hunger going to benefit the men we love.” Defying the cultural embargo on female desire, Shai asks angrily: And why should anything be forbidden anyway? I don’t like that the world blames Eve. Wasn’t she free to eat the fruit she found most juicy? … There’s a beauty and a madness when Eve steps out of her body and slowly watches her heart breathing, loving, breaking…, forgetting that the forbidden fruit is poisonous.

Furthermore, sexual satisfaction, as a conventional template of tender love, is both evoked and rejected in LUMB.  During Shirin and Leela’s intimate chat, the film reveals how sexual satisfaction often proves to be chimera-­ like,  meaningless and unattainable. Leela, who had just been harshly rebuffed by her lover in a manner unfaithful and disrespectful to the many intimate moments and conjugal dreams they had shared together, vents to Shirin while heading towards a choiceless arranged marriage. As she does a bikini wax for Shirin at her parlour, Leela watches Shirin well up with tears  and pauses to ask with intuitive insight, tender concern, and tragic self-identification: “He [Rahim] never touches you lovingly down there, no? Has he ever kissed you till date? … You know where our fault lies? We see too many dreams.” Rani is also greeted with this loveless abyss when, in one of her final conversations with Mahesh Rao, she realizes that Mahesh had also imagined their relation to be a sexually manipulative one where Rani derives professional favours in exchange for intimacy. When she reminds him that she had never asked him for any favours, not even to get herself the position of the CEO, he answers shrewdly: “But it didn’t hurt that you were seeing me … You know its advantages.” Stunned and dismayed, Rani corrects him: “Actually, for me, this was just about you.” Lamenting such loveless suffering, Shai announces—seemingly about Rani’s (queen’s) ‘karva chauth’ (ritualistic ‘fasting for love’) but actually about women’s unreciprocated love and unmerited agony: “Love is a lonely pursuit. And if queens have to suffer for their love too, where does that leave us, mere mortals?” Instead of a romantic hero who reciprocates the woman’s pulsating passion and offers her engaging romance—of the kind scripted into and promised by erotic novels or telephonic sex-chats—what the film is the

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impossibility of such equality of desire. In place of this romantic promise what emerges is the ubiquity of acquaintance rape—a form of sexual violence characterized by some specific advantages of access and authority on the part of the assaulter, and very particular kinds of trauma and debilitation for the survivor. The studies on acquaintance rape observe how it has typically been received with less seriousness, socially as well as legally, resulting in a larger number of acquittals of the rape accused. Scholars attempt to redress this injustice by reinstating acquaintance rape as equivalent to stranger rape, both in numbers and seriousness. Works by Peggy Reeves Sanday, Leslie Francis, Lisa M. Cuklanz, Jody Raphael, and Joan McGregor fall under this category. The legal challenges surrounding acquaintance rape are highlighted in this body of secondary scholarship. Studies observe that the law “still grapples with a woman’s ‘yes’—what it means and how it should be defined,” and “never is the murky nature of consent more evident than when a woman indicates that she agreed to some sexual activity on the occasion of an alleged rape”—which is a significant factor in the case of acquaintance rapes (Acquaintance Rape and Degrees of Consent 2004, p. 2341). In a legal sense, a “limited notion of consent” is problematic (as opposed to the otherwise mainstream “notion of generalized consent”), and this makes acquaintance rapes, such as marital rape, difficult to prosecute (p. 2341). Such scholarship not only emphasizes how acquaintance rape is a legitimate form of sexual violence that must receive the kind of social and legal censure that is typically reserved for stranger rape cases, but also highlights how our misogynist sexual culture is particularly responsible for the ambiguity surrounding acquaintance rape jurisprudence. McGregor argues that consent is a performative, not a mental state, and that (sexist) laws that require showing both force and absence of consent for conviction need to be replaced with a template that can envision and prosecute nonforcible yet nonconsensual sex—a concept essential  for understanding acquaintance rape (McGregor 2005). Michelle J. Anderson argues that while rape in the American imagination is by a (Black) stranger in an unsafe public space, the “typical rape in the United States”—and by extension elsewhere—is inflicted in the vast majority of cases by “acquaintances and intimate partners,” and is carried out through a combination of “verbal coercion and pinning,” unaccompanied by a “valiant physical resistance on the part of the victim” (Anderson 2010, pp. 646–647). Dan M. Kahan argues that cultural cognition—or “the tendency of individuals to conform their perceptions of legally consequential facts to their defining group commitments”—defines the way

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acquaintance rapes are perceived, and “cultural predispositions have a much larger impact on outcome judgments than do legal definitions,” resulting in the understanding of acquaintance rapes as not the kind of legitimate crimes that stranger rapes constitute (Kahan 2021, p. 729). Viki, Abrams, and Masser study a group of people noting how individuals with high levels of benevolent sexism attributed less blame to acquaintance rape perpetrators and vice versa (Viki et al. 2004, p. 295). Further analysing the problem of benevolent sexism, Fraser notes that the epidemic of acquaintance rapes is largely ignored today. Sexual violence is understood only in the context of “misogyny” but the “other facets of sexism, including ostensibly ‘benevolent’ sexism (or chivalry)” is ignored for the role it plays in “normaliz[ing] this violence” (Fraser 2015, p. 141). Leslie Francis’s Rape on Trial draws on Lois Pineau’s article (1989) and notes how the problem surrounding the prosecution of  acquaintance rapes is because of the prevailing idea of consent that “is entangled in a number of mutually supportive mythologies which see sexual assault as masterful seduction, and silent submission as sexual enjoyment” (Francis 1996, p.  6). The ‘silent submission’ being typically characteristic of acquaintance rapes,  the survivor’s  ‘sexual enjoyment’ is often  easily derived from it in social and legal arguments. Therefore, this secondary literature not only establishes the legal discrepancies that problematize acquaintance rape convictions but also investigates how our sexual culture is responsible for the ambiguity surrounding this category of crimes. By and large, it concentrates on establishing the equal gravity of acquaintance rapes when compared to stranger rapes, and therefore on broadening out our gendered understanding of ‘consent,’ ‘force,’ and ‘desire’ in order to bring acquaintance rape within the legal and conceptual purview already in place for stranger rapes. Located against this backdrop of socio-legal perception, true even for the most progressive echelons, the contribution of Shrivastava’s work is paramount because of how it stages acquaintance rape to demonstrate that it is in fact not equivalent to stranger rape, both in the circumstances that lead up to it and the trauma that results from it. The unique situations that surround acquaintance rape are rarely emphasized in secondary scholarship. One example is Sarah Conly who cites the famous debate surrounding Alec’s rape/seduction of Tess in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, noting how scholarship has been divided on whether Tess was raped or seduced by Alec who, after being repeatedly refused sexual access by Tess, is found to have secured it on one final occasion when Tess was fatigued

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and asleep. While the detail is intentionally excluded by Hardy, leaving the text ambiguous in its sexual and ethical implication, Conly argues that even if we consider that we lack the knowledge of this specific evening, we still have “no reason to think that she has undergone a change of heart, even if at this moment she stops resisting.” Conly’s culminating argument surrounding this discussion is that not just “physical force or the threat of physical force” but “psychological force” is a very real  mode through which rape is inflicted (Conly 2004, p. 97). Drakulich addresses the understudied aspect of the impact of acquaintance rape on its victims, problematizing the assumption that stranger crimes are more fear- or concern-inducing than acquaintance crimes (Drakulich 2015). In fact, based on the responses collected, Drakulich suggests that acquaintance sexual assaults evoke more concern—or as I am demonstrating with respect to Shrivastava’s work—more anxiety and trauma. Alankrita Shrivastava’s oeuvre performs crucial socio-cultural work in this field by portraying a whole range of issues significant for acquaintance rape—the deep trauma that results from acquaintance rape, the ubiquitous rhetoric of love and the societal validation of male aggression (or society’s equating of this with male love) that obfuscates women’s right to complain in these cases, women’s dilemmas in framing their responses during acquaintance assault because of their societal conditioning to be docile and all-­ yielding in socio-personal relationships. Shrivastava examines the most prominent sub-sets of acquaintance rape—marital rape where rape becomes an extension of wifely/motherly duty, sexual harassment where the power dynamics of the situation disqualify the woman from even the ability to voice consent (or the lack thereof), and intimate partner rape where the crime is obfuscated by the rhetoric and dream of ‘love.’ One of the most eviscerating varieties of acquaintance rape and among the most outrageous lacunae of the Indian legislative system is marital rape (Stellina and Raste 2006; Santhya et al. 2007; Editorial 2013)—a composite sexual crime that is shown (or suggested) in detail throughout Shrivastava’s work. In the most direct case, Shirin Aslam is brutally raped by her husband multiple times in DKCS. The depiction of this crime is designed to highlight the futility of female sexual assertions in other parts of the film. For instance, one of the first occasions where we witness this assault, or its aftereffects, is in the form of Shirin’s damaged sexual health and scramble for a doctor’s check-up. Interestingly, it follows one of the most explicit assertions of female sexual appetite and the self-sufficiency of the woman when it comes to satisfying it. In this passage, the eponymous

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lead of the romance novel, Rosy, unsatiated by her male lover, turns to masturbation: The lane would become quiet at night. Wearing a thin nighty, Rosy would lie down on the bench adjoining the window, and would close her eyes and watch her secret dreams. Clasped to the Prince’s body, she is flying in a plane among the stars. Inside the plane, the Prince is kissing every inch of Rosy’s body with his wet lips. Engrossed in these fantasies of the Prince, Rosy would stroke her own body, keeping the pillow over her face to stifle her screams.

This narration shows the listlessness of all four women as they awaken to the incarceration of their desires—Rehana who had just been chastised by her parents for dancing openly in public, Usha who had realized her unacceptability as a sexual partner both to men younger than and the same age as her, Leela who had been reprimanded by Usha for her sexual misadventures with her lover and had been pushed into a  more practical  engagement, and Shirin who had just been raped by her husband despite her complaint of how much it hurt and burnt during intercourse. Immediately following this fantastical account of Rosy’s lonely yet fulfilling self-gratification, and demolishing its unrealistic promise of gender equality, a distraught Shirin is shown opening a box that contains several files of emergency contraception and popping an I-Pill. Shirin’s trajectory of repeated marital rape, serious sexual infections, unplanned pregnancies, and multiple abortions is etched in all its grim violence for the viewer. Both Shirin’s doctor and her immediate superior at her sales job warn her against the repetition of this pattern to guard against serious medical danger and to facilitate her advancement at her job. When Shirin tries to verbalize her pain at the forced sex, Rahim taunts her for what he calls a new sensation that she had suddenly developed now that he has returned from Saudi Arabia. On another occasion, when she attempts to persuade Rahim to use a condom, and lies about how she had procured it (in the hope of bypassing his anger at her ‘shamelessness’ in buying it from a store), he continues to rape her after throwing the condom aside. In the most disturbing sequence, Rahim vents his rage after finding out that Shirin has a secret job by violently raping her for “trying to be a man”—turning her over and penetrating her anally while lashing out the injunction, “You are the wife, do no try to become the husband.”

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While the remaining examples in Shrivastava’s work are not portrayed explicitly as marital rape, they are depicted suggestively to indicate how the encounters are founded on disinclination or disrespect, a legitimate template for understanding nonconsensual sex—as ‘unwanted’ if not ‘forced’ (Santhya et al. 2007, p. 124). Dolly’s sexual approach towards her husband is suggestive of her complete unwillingness, and though Amit withdraws ultimately at her lack of sexual response, his repeated efforts to engage her sexually, his refusal to recognize the problem, and the final imposition of the allegation of frigidity upon Dolly suggests the arc of toxic masculinist aggression in the face of female sexual disinterest. The range of assault is extended to include the assault on faith and the abuse of trust within intimate relationships. Even Rani’s marital sex with her husband, Naushad, is shown to end with Rani’s sense of betrayal as her husband continues to climax time and time again with orgasmic iterations of his dead wife’s name. As such, the full and necessary framework of human rights—the right to safe sex, the right to sexual health, and the right to safety from marital rape—are foregrounded to awaken the audience’s horror, indignance, and conscience at a form of acquaintance rape that is mired in the impossibility of protest, both because of the societal expectation of wifely love/duty as well as the routine, silent, and seemingly unremarkable nature of this violence. Outside of marital rape, other forms of acquaintance rapes are represented, including ones that centre on the erosion of romantic and sexual trust such as in the case of sex elicited  on false assumptions. In a brief moment, we witness the abusive nature of sexual intimacy carried out on false pretext or in half-clarity when we see Namrata, who the film suggests is Dhruv’s ex-girlfriend, rising from the hospital bed—suggestively after having an abortion—and weeping profusely at the sight of the Facebook update on Dhruv and Rehana’s relationship. A similar abuse of trust is suggested in Lakshmi Godbole’s relationship with Haider, a married man who visits her from Dubai and sleeps with her on promises of love and a new married life in Dubai. Towards the end, Lakshmi is disillusioned to discover that he intends to stay in his existing marriage while continuing his sexual liaison with her in secret by setting her up in a different part of Dubai, away from his primary conjugal living unit—an arrangement that her son also finds distasteful. More overtly, Kajal’s first sexual encounter stages this sexual dishonesty and the abuse of sexual emotion. As she passionately consents to sexual caresses  with Pradeep at the start, her disinclination midway through the encounter becomes painfully evident when

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her declaration of love for Pradeep is not reciprocated by him until after she expressly requests it. Even in the middle of the act, he continues to call her “Kitty”—Kajal’s screen name in the dating app that represents to Kajal only a commercialized, sexual fetishization of herself. Pradeep barrages her with the most cruel insult when, pausing for a brief moment, he derisively asks if she has any other “client” (of the dating app) on her mind. Shattered and demeaned, Kajal’s face amplifies the emotional and physical pain that she experiences and the burden of the sexual act that she feels obligated to complete. As he climaxes with indifference towards her, she stares into the distance with evident disbelief, indignance, and agony on her visage, and then leaves the place after washing the stained bedsheet with his assistance. The violence of such intimate partner abuse is projected in all its perilousness and brutality through Leela’s relationship with her boyfriend which veers between Arshad’s sexist imputations of her ‘excessive’ sexual appetite—what has conventionally been labelled ‘nymphomania’ in misogynist pseudo-scientific discourse since the nineteenth century—and direct threats of sexual attack. After Leela’s turbulent breakup with Arshad, that follows her mother’s setting up of her marriage with a financially stable man, Leela tries to woo Arshad back by suggesting a bright future in Delhi, away from the small town of Bhopal, and by proposing sex. Surprisingly, Arshad expresses indifference and disgust at his long-time partner (“I can’t take your nonsense anymore”). Not only does he attempt to shame her through a sexist slur, saying that she was “always … all about sex,” he even aggressively threatens gangrape as punishment: “If you want it [sex] so much there are four more boys outside I can call.” Another most visible representation of acquaintance sexual assault in Shrivastava’s work is to be seen in Amit’s attempts to sexually molest Kajal. The film even opens with this disturbing visual where Amit tries to inappropriately touch Kajal as she poses for a photograph with Dolly’s family at a carnival. Soon after, we see Kajal, forced to live at her sister’s place because of her shortage of means, eyeing her bedroom door nervously as she prays before bedtime. The threat looms over her palpably throughout the film, and we witness her visible discomfort as he tries to grope her secretively while in the presence of others. While Dolly tries to deflect and deny this truth when Kajal confides in her, the film climaxes with Dolly’s unflinching allegation towards her husband: “You tried to touch Kajal, that was wrong.” When Amit tries to equate it with Dolly’s extramarital relationship, she responds by categorically clarifying the principle of

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consent and highlighting the sexually violent nature of his act: “It [my relationship] was consensual.” This issue of consent is portrayed most powerfully in Bombay Begums, which provides a sustained engagement with the theme of acquaintance sexual violence through the depiction of workplace sexual harassment. When Lakshmi, the eye witness to Ayesha’s assault at the hands of Deepak, registers this complaint to the senior administration of Deepak’s company, and when Rani and Fatima proceed to interrogate the visibly traumatized and petrified Ayesha, Lakshmi vouches for the veracity of the incident beyond all alleged suspicions, implicitly referring to her traumatizing experiences as a sex worker: “[It is] not possible [that I misread the situation], because I hold a PhD in non-consensual sex.” The actual episode is portrayed in quick flashes in the show, suggesting more than demonstrating. Deepak offers to drop Ayesha home and then assaults her in his car— kissing, groping, and then fingering her vagina, before forcing her to gratify him with her hand and/or mouth, saying to her as she struggles, “You’re such a tease, I could feel your eyes on me all evening.” The emotional trauma that follows acquaintance rape—the feelings of self-­ debasement, helplessness, betrayal, and disillusionment—are shown in sensitive detail. Ayesha washes herself vigorously that night to cleanse herself from her own sense of pollution, and thereafter withdraws into a shell, shutting down all communication channels, suppressing the incident altogether, and even denying its reality when it is brought forth by Lakshmi, ultimately reaching out to an anonymous person (Karuna Vishwanathan) who admits to a similar experience in the company. Shai’s voice says in the background: “Sometimes what we want is to push it all away. To forget, to pretend that it never was. But the memory---it stays alive inside of us, like a living, breathing thing.” The condescension, anger, and disbelief with which everyone treats the incident—from senior management (Rani, Fatima) to Deepak’s wife (Nalini)—is portrayed in excruciating detail to highlight the systemic corruption that surrounds workplace sexual harassment. Ayesha is frequently barraged with questions by Rani and Fatima in an attempt to intimidate and guilt her into withdrawing her complaint. In a final twist, the most shocking revelation is made by Rani herself. She is shown feeling disturbed while being recorded at a press interview with her legendary mentor—Pradyuman Jamwal, where he boasts about the working equation he had always enjoyed with his protégé, Rani. He recollects that he was “quite the taskmaster” and that it was “Rani’s hunger that made her such an asset” because “she always said yes” to working late

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nights and weekends—“whatever [he] … needed her to do, she took it in her stride.” Visibly uncomfortable, Rani concludes: “If I didn’t, I would be in trouble.” Shaken out of denial and indifference, she first confesses to Shai in a poignant moment of traumatic recollection that she had been sexually assaulted by her boss when she had “just joined JDR bank,” was “relatively new in Bombay,” and had felt like she must obey when her “boss expected [her] … to spend time with him after work.” She breaks down, confessing her horror and pain to Shai:  And then he started touching me. When it happened for the first time I was very confused. I was very scared but I thought that’s just the way it is. I wanted success, at any cost…. So I kept shut…. But then it didn’t stop! It just went on and on and on … It was horrible, Shai. I can still feel his breath on my face. I can still feel him inside me. There’s not a single day when that nightmare doesn’t come back to haunt me.

Empowered by the female and familial solidarity offered by Shai who strokes her head as she crumbles into tears, and fully cognizant of the trauma that acquaintance sexual assault can inflict on its victim, Rani defiantly announces at a press conference that she was sexually harassed by Pradyuman and that with the arrest of Deepak this circle of silent victimization must end. She declares: “But now no more. It is time for us women to come together and raise our voices and say no to sexual harassment.” Bringing the continuing discussion of acquaintance sexual violence in all of her work to a definitive end in this final episode of her latest cultural production, Shrivastava cements the necessity of caution and protest. Voicing the urgent need for larger human concern, pragmatic strategy, and ethical intervention surrounding this issue, Rani tells Shai: “Shai I want you to tell me if any of the boys at the party touched you inappropriately … If you do remember later, you must tell me… I want you to know that you don’t have to do anything to please a man.” In its final summation, Shrivastava’s works posit the community of suffering sisterhood as a source of consolation and strength to women who have been individually victimized. Each of Shrivastava’s cultural productions culminate with a moment of female solidarity where disparate or disagreeing characters bond in a silent realization of collective suffering, victimization, and power. At the end of LUMB, the dishevelled and dishonoured Usha sits surrounded by the other three disgruntled female characters, all disillusioned but relentless in their pursuit of “lipstick waale

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sapne,” or “Lipstick Dreams.” As Rehana discredits the promises held out by these dreams, deriding the suggestion that their lives could ever be like Rosy’s, Usha reminds them that though false these narratives give women the strength to dream. The film ends with this community of women, sprawled out on the floor, laughing and smoking, while Rosy’s narrative drops the curtain: “Rosy jumped out beyond the threshold. The key to the locked-up dreams were after all within her heart.” In DKCS, a little before the end, we see Dolly and Kajal bond over their recognition of men who cheated and violated them, Amit and Pradeep, drinking and then cuddling into a peaceful nap in a moment of quiet partnership that gives them the strength to pursue their own independent paths. In the latest and the most finished treatment of this theme, Shai’s voiceover suggests that suffering is perhaps even constitutive of womanhood and of the all-­ too-­familiar female survivorship, a source of strength for women who brave the scars and develop the power to survive it. As the show ends, the blood from (violent sexual) wounds and menstruation is drawn into a common metaphor and Shai’s final illustration shows multiple women with a channel of blood flowing through and connecting them, echoing the previous scene where Rani’s menopause coincides with Shai’s first period. Rani talks about her period to Shai, welcoming her into the trajectory of angry suffering and defiant vocal protest: “It’s a long journey— mine is on its way out.” To this Shai responds, “I guess you’ve passed it on to me.” Shai’s guiding voiceover sums up: “To own my life means to own my wounds, to let the blood flow. To wear my scars with pride and survive.”

References No Author (2004). ‘Acquaintance Rape and Degrees of Consent: ‘No’ Means ‘No,’ but What Does ‘Yes’ Mean?’. Harvard Law Review 117 (7): 2341–2364. Anderson, M.J. (2010). ‘Diminishing the Legal Impact of Negative Social Attitudes Toward Acquaintance Rape Victims’. New Criminal Law Review: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 13 (4): 644–664. Conly, S. (2004). ‘Seduction, Rape, and Coercion’. Ethics 115 (1): 96–121. Cuklanz, L.M. (1995). Rape on Trial: How the Mass Media Construct Legal Reform and Social Change. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Devasundaram, A.I. (2016). India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid. Routledge, Oxford and New York.

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Devasundaram, A.I. (ed) (2018). Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution. Routledge, Oxford and New York. Drakulich, K.M. (2015). ‘Strangers, Acquaintances, and Victims: Victimization and Concern About Crime Among Women’. Sociological Forum 30 (1): 103–126. Editorial (23 March 2013). ‘Marriage and Rape’. Economic and Political Weekly 48(12):7–8. Estés, C. P. (1992; rpt. 2022). Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Random House, UK. Francis, L. (1996). Date Rape: Feminism, Philosophy, and the Law. Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania. Fraser, C. (2015). ‘From ‘Ladies First’ to ‘Asking for It’: Benevolent Sexism in the Maintenance of Rape Culture’. California Law Review 103 (1): 141–203. Ghosh, A. (2019). ‘Curiosity, Consent and Desire in Masaan (2015), Pink (2016), Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016) and Veere Di Wedding (2018)’. In: Sengupta, S., Roy, S., Purkayastha, S. (eds). ‘Bad’ Women of Bombay Films: Studies in Desire and Anxiety. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 331–343. Gopal, S. (2011). Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema. University Press, Chicago. Kahan, D.M. (2021). ‘Culture, Cognition, and Consent: Who Perceives What, And Why, in Acquaintance-Rape Cases’. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 158 (3): 729–813. Lessing, D. (1962; rpt. 2014). The Golden Notebook. Fourth Estate, London. McGregor, J. (2005). Is It Rape? On Acquaintance Rape and Taking Women’s Consent Seriously. Ashgate, Aldershot. Pineau, L. (1989). ‘Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis’. Law and Philosophy 8(2): 217–243. Plath, S. (1963; rpt. 2019). The Bell Jar. Faber and Faber Limited, London. Raphael, J. (2013). Rape Is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim Blaming Are Fueling a Hidden Acquaintance Rape Crisis. Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago. Sanday, P.R. (1996). A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial. University of California Press, Berkeley. Santhya, K.G., Haberland, N., Ram, F., Sinha, R.K., Mohanty, S.K. (2007). ‘Consent and Coercion: Examining Unwanted Sex Among Married Young Women in India’. International Family Planning Perspectives 33(3): 124–132. Shrivastava, A. (2016). Lipstick Under My Burkha. Balaji Motion Pictures, ALT Entertainment and Star Synergy Entertainment. ———. (2020). Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare. Balaji Motion Pictures and ALT Entertainment. Netflix. ———. (2021). Bombay Begums. Endemol Shine India and Chernin Entertainment. Siddiqui, G. (2021). ‘New Womanhood and #LipstickRebellion: Feminist Consciousness in Lipstick Under My Burkha’. In: Anwer, M., Arora, A. (eds).

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Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies, .Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, pp. 79–91. Stellina, J. & Raste, M.S. (2006). ‘Rape and Marriage: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future’. Journal of the Indian Law Institute 48(2): 277–284. Tiwari, S. (2018). ‘From New Cinema to New Indie Cinema: The Story of NFDC and Film Bazaar’. In: A.I.  Devasundaram (ed). Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution, .Routledge, Oxford and New York, pp. 25–45. Viki, G.T., Abrams, D., Masser, B. (2004). ‘Evaluating Stranger and Acquaintance Rape: The Role of Benevolent Sexism in Perpetrator Blame and Recommended Sentence Length’. Law and Human Behavior 28 (3): 295–303. Walker, A. (1982; rpt. 2022). The Color Purple. Penguin Books, New York. Woolf, V. (1929; rpt. 2015). A Room of one’s Own. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

CHAPTER 14

Women at a Distance: Gender Politics and the Past in Bhavani Iyer’s Writings Tanushree Ghosh

David Lowenthal in his 2015 book The Past Is a Foreign Country Revisited observes, “Attachment to the past is inescapable. Dependence on recognition is universal. Concern with what has been in-built into our bones and embedded in our genes” (p. 86). While the well-known screenwriter duo of “Salim-Javed” holds celebrity status in the annals of Hindi cinema, contemporary women screenwriters are making history by ushering in a paradigm shift in storytelling: who the story will be about, how it will be told, and for whom. Counted among names such as Juhi Chaturvedi, Alankrita Shrivastava, and Reema Kagti, Bhavani Iyer is part of a quiet revolution in the Hindi film industry: women writing stories that position women front and center as legitimate subjects and active protagonists. The writer of films, such as Black (Bhansali 2005), Swami (Acharya 2007), Guzaarish (Bhansali 2010), Lootera (Motwane 2013), and Raazi (Gulzar 2018), as well as TV series, like 24 (D’Silva and Deo 2013–2016), Kaafir (Nair 2019), and Breathe: Into the Shadows (Sharma 2020), Bhavani Iyer’s work

T. Ghosh (*) University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_14

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presents viewers with female characters who are—in her words—“strong, flawed, brave, vulnerable individuals” (Iyer 2021).1 As Iyer points out in an interview, her progressive upbringing has ensured that feminism remains an inextricable part of who she is as a person (Iyer 2021). For that reason, although sometimes vexed by the formulaic representation of women in mainstream Bollywood, Iyer’s attempt, even while working within the purview of commercial cinema, is to write women as complex, sometimes flawed, but layered characters who do not simply exist in service of their male counterparts. In this chapter, I consider a few key films from the screenwriter’s oeuvre that offer the chance to understand the transformative impact of women screenwriters on the cinematic representation of gender, especially femininity. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the dynamics between a return to the past and the representation of femininity in Iyer’s writings. Post-liberalization Hindi heritage cinema seems to be working towards the consolidation of traditional gender identities by imagining a certain version of the past. Revolving around historical stories and legends, films, such as Bajirao Mastani (Bhansali 2015), Padmaavat (Bhansali 2018), and Baahubali, the Beginning (Rajamouli 2015), Baahubali 2, the Conclusion (Rajamouli 2017), Manikarnika (Ranaut, Jagarlamudi 2019), Kesari (Singh 2019), Panipat (Gowariker 2019), and Tanhaji, the Unsung Warrior (Raut 2020), heritage films employ costume, dialogue, and mannerisms to configure forms of femininity that are distanced from the present. This distance often allows heritage cinema to gloss over the complex cultural discourses as well as the many fractures and dissents that shape femininities in India. In contrast to contemporary heritage cinema, Bhavani Iyer’s adapted scripts for films, such as Black (2005), Lootera (2013), and Raazi (2018), offer a more critical and nuanced mode of approaching past events and figures. In my chapter, I explore how Iyer’s adaptations are potentially—using Claire Monk’s phrase—“post-­heritage” even as they work within the conventions of popular Hindi cinema (2001, p. 7). I further examine how formations of gender in Iyer’s adapted scripts functions as sites that generate plural understandings of femininities as well as non-normative ways of “doing gender.”

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I An integral part of film-making, screenplay is often effaced in discussions of technical expertise or directorial choices regarding a given film. Although scholarship on the art, process, and practice of screenwriting is fairly recent, there is consensus that a discussion of screenwriting makes sense “[…] only within a particular industrial and geo-cultural environment. It is the rationalization of a mode, or a paradigm, of practice; a collection of perceived norms that make sense together, for those involved in developing a screen idea, in that time and place” (Macdonald 2011, p. 5). So, in the Hindi film industry, while distinct people may be credited for the screenplay, the idea for the screen is discussed collaboratively and by multiple people involved in the process, such as the screenwriter, producers, director, actors, and others. The established conventions, genre, expectations, and practices of this group generate the “screen idea,” and Ian Macdonald suggests that the screenplay should be considered one form of documenting the collaborative process and as a dynamic framework for the filmmaking team (p. 5). Further, in contrast to the “math” of 64-scene screenplays with a prescriptive sequence of “introduction, exposition, inciting incident, false climax, true climax, reversal, and denouement,” screenwriting in Hindi cinema seems more aligned with the traditions of oral storytelling that is improvisational and collaborative (Millard 2011, p. 145). As Rosie Thomas points out in “Bombay Before Bollywood,” film production even up to the 1990s would sometimes begin with the casting of a “star” and the process of “narration,” that is narrating the story to the said star(s), would be an integral part of the process (2013, p. 204). As a relative newcomer unused to the ways of the Hindi film industry, Bhavani Iyer too acknowledges the shock of seeing the singular, unified screenplay created in solitude become a shared, adaptable document: I entered his [Sanjay Leela Bhansali] home, which is where he used to work from those days, and I saw almost a dozen people, assistant directors, the DoP, executive producers, music composers, all sitting with their copy of the script – MY script – some of them making notes on their copies. My heart sank to my stomach, I realized at that moment that the script, the story, the characters that I had lovingly named and created and given oddities and flaws to, they were no longer mine. (Iyer 2021)

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The collaborative process aside, the need to recognize screenwriters for their labor is only recently beginning to be acknowledged. Legend has it that Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar hired someone to stencil their names onto film promotional billboards that did not mention them. To add another layer of complexity to the normative erasure of screenwriters: it becomes even more difficult to assert the existence of a text in the face of spectacle-driven heritage pieces. Both the popular and critical responses to heritage films, such as Padmaavat, Panipat, and Tanhaji, often emphasize costuming, sets, cinematography, and other visible aspects of the film, quite effacing the central role of the screenplay in how the story is told. In this chapter, I would like foreground Iyer’s contributions to screenwriting, especially how her screenplays engage with a distant or the more recent past in ways that encourage viewers to critically engage with the depicted time period, characters, and themes. While Iyer’s body of work is substantial and diverse, traversing both cinema and web series, I will be focusing on Black, Lootera, and Raazi as a way to highlight Iyer’s thoughtful reconstruction of the past and the progressive modernity imbued in how she writes gender, body, sex, and love. The act of reconstructing a certain version of the past in a heritage film is also an act of invention connected to cultural memory, which offers commentary on the present and its preoccupations (Vidal 2012). The investment in authenticity—the desire to establish the on-screen world as something that actually existed in the past—is at once a definitive desire of heritage cinema, and is simultaneously entwined with the sociocultural preoccupations of the day. The past two decades of Hindi cinema have witnessed a renewed interest in heritage cinema. Starting with Lagaan (Gowariker 2001), films, such as Bajirao Mastani (2015), Padmavat (2018), and Baahubali, the Beginning (2015) and Baahubali 2, the Conclusion (2017), have found commercial success and often critical acclaim. Most of these films have used the aesthetics of period drama (costuming, mise-en-scène, setting) to offer spectacular representations of an imagined past. Robert Burgoyne defines the “dual focus” of the historical cinema— “the juxtaposition of the old and the new”—“the powerful sense that what is being rendered on-screen is not an imaginary world, but a once existing world that is being reinscribed in an original way” (2008, p. 11). In other words, because there is always the realization that what is being represented on screen is an attempted recreation of what could have existed, the heritage film is heavily invested in authenticity and in its act of

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reconstruction/retelling of the past. Among international film cultures, the British film industry has been the most prolific in its production of heritage TV shows and films so much so that Claire Monk notes that heritage-film criticism “has become as effective a commodity in the academy as heritage films have been in the cinema” (British Historical Cinema 2015, p. 2). Heritage cinema becomes the site where the intersections between cultural identity and the historical past become visible. Often focused on the lives and stories of the aristocracy or at best the upper middle class, heritage cinema remains limited to revisiting certain versions of the past that are class or race bound. Besides their selective visions of a certain society or culture, such cinematic reconstructions fetishize the past as spectacle. Film scholars have noted the different implications of a look back at the past that is channeled through nostalgia. Andrew Higson, for instance, argues that despite being asked to identify with the struggles and experiences of characters featured in the period dramas, the heritage film invites viewers to engage in a visual appreciation of past opulence recreated within the film: “The representations of the past offered by the heritage film carry a glaring contradiction between form and narrative: the past is displayed as visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively by these films” (Higson 2006, p. 91). Higson critiques “the heritage impulse” in which the “critical perspective is displaced by decoration and display…a fascination with style displaces the material dimensions of historical context. The past is reproduced as flat, depthless pastiche, where the reference point is not the past itself, but other images, other texts” (2006, p. 95). Building on Higson’s concept of “heritage space” (emphasis on heritage sites and lavish decor), Belen Vidal notes the ideological effects of mise-en-scene: “The heritage film would thus encourage a nostalgic look back to the certainties and the visual splendor of the national past” (Vidal 2012, p. 9). Tana Wollen also points out that “nostalgic screen fictions” can co-opt collective memory to suit a politically conservative agenda: reconstruction of a national past based on a reactionary vision of the past (1991, p. 11). John Corner and Sylvia Harvey reiterate: “Behind every use of ‘heritage’ … there is necessarily a sense of an inheritance which is rhetorically projected as ‘common’, whilst at the same time it is implicitly or contextually closed down around particular characteristics of, for instance, social class, gender, and ethnicity” (1991, p. 49).

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One can see two dominant ideas emerge around the genre of heritage cinema/period drama: one, the nostalgic look at the past that often simplified and flattens it, offering the past up for pleasurable visual consumption. Two, heritage cinema tends to offer a certain version of the past that has ideological consequence. In the British film industry, one of the most prolific producers of Heritage cinema, films have constantly gravitated to Victorian and Edwardian historical moments. When we turn towards Hindi cinema, we see the predominance of stories set in the pre-British past. With the notable exception of Lagaan, Hindi films have mostly revolved around plots that pre-date British presence, such as Mughal-e-­ Azam (Asif 1960), Taj Mahal (Sadiq 1963), Jodha Akbar (Gowariker 2008), and even the more recent films, like Bajirao Mastani (2015) and Padmaavat (2018). In Hindi cinema, the cultural cache that characterizes British heritage is replaced by the “event film” nature of the period drama, which intends to draw audiences back to the theaters. Even so, the Hindi heritage film depends on the fetishism of the past as a visual object: to look, sometimes, sans context. The past that Hindi cinema seems to gravitate towards the most—I have previously mentioned that the partition and the colonial period seem to be largely absent from the screen—the medieval era. And, although the turn towards medieval aristocracy, particularly the Mughal royalty, allows filmmakers to indulge in a tremendous amount of pomp and pageantry onscreen, the stories have relied on idealized representation of aristocratic femininity. The “asexual and antiseptic” representation of Indian women as “the ‘chaste’ woman as wife and mother,” to use Shoma A. Chatterji’s words, drawn from scriptural and mythological representations of ideal femininity, continues to be the definitive trope in heritage cinema (2013, p. 180). In contrast to the “event” heritage film, the smaller-budget, low-key period drama offers the chance to engage with the past with more nuance and complexity. Often, this kind of period drama relies on immersive affect instead of spectacular wonderment and features a female protagonist, such as Umrao Jaan (Ali 1981), Sardari Begum (Benegal 1996), 1947 Earth (Mehta 1999), Zubeida (Benegal 2001), and Water (Mehta 2005). The intersection of gender with the past complicates the consumerist and/or ideologically conservative gaze. Claire Monk suggests that the focus on women’s life stories, in fact, generates an active female spectator who identifies with the women represented on the screen (1996, p. 13). This particular mode of critical engagement disrupts nostalgic tendency to

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memorialize the past and is allied with what Monk has termed “post-­ heritage” consciousness (2001, pp. 9–10). Bhavani Iyer’s screenplays for period dramas, such as Black, Lootera, and Raazi offer a similar blend of reconstruction of key time periods in Indian history combined with a focus on feminine subjectivity, which I would argue puts pressure on the hegemonic and idealized versions of femininity one often sees in Hindi heritage cinema. Black, Lootera, and Raazi also use sets and costuming as a way of situating viewers in specific historical pasts. Black uses the old Viceregal lodge, now the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, as the McNally home; the snow scenes filmed around colonial buildings offer a 1960s’ world and evoke visual nostalgia. The setting is in keeping with Helen Keller autobiography from which this film is reportedly inspired. The jazz band playing at a party in the McNally home, the poster of Chaplin’s The Kid playing in a theater as Michelle and Mr. Sahai walk past, the cobblestone street, the neo-Gothic architecture of the Christ church in Shimla all capture the feel of a 1960s Anglo-Indian city. On the choice of 1950s Bengal as the setting for Lootera, Iyer remarked, “I think it was a little organic…the decision to set it in post-independence India, and then setting it in West Bengal. We both love Bengal. Vikram’s mom is Bengali; my fiancé is Bengali. I have a fascination for the language, the culture, the ethos of Bengalis. So, it worked very beautifully” (Making of Lootera 2013). Costume choices play a significant part in evoking visual nostalgia. Pakhi as a mid-century bhadralok Bengali girl captures the essence of 1950s style with her brocade blouses paired with plain sarees, traditional sarees, such as Banarasi and Chanderi, and traditional Bengali jewelry while Varun’s look, complete with pomade, high-waisted baggy trousers, and plain shirts seems to channel Dev Anand from Jaal (Dutt 1952), C.I.D. (Khosla 1956), and Baazi (Dutt 1951). The use of the Itachuna Rajbari, an eighteenth-century palace near Kolkata, as the zamindar’s haveli is also in keeping with the use of heritage sites to evoke visual nostalgia. While Raazi does not aim for visual opulence, the emphasis remains on historically accurate set design and costume. Raazi recreates the markets of 1970s Rawalpindi in Malerkotla, Punjab; various members of the crew, including the director, Meghna Gulzar, and the production designer, Subroto Chakraborty, mention the painstaking details, such as the addition of block-painting, hand-painted banners, weathered facades for the market scenes, recreating sets, and using vintage cars to increase the period

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feel of the film (Creating 1971  in 2017, 2018). The film also positions itself within the cinematic tradition of films, such as Haqeeqat (Anand 1964), Hindustan Ki Kasam (Anand 1973), and Border (Dutta 1997), which represent past military conflicts, such as 1971 war between India and Pakistan or the 1962 Sino-Indian borders skirmish, combining viewer nostalgia for the past with nationalistic rhetoric. In the following sections I explore how instead of scripting a return to a fetishized past, Iyer writes stories set in the 1950s Calcutta, 1960s Shimla, and 1971 Kashmir and Pakistan in ways that foregrounds the inner lives of the female protagonists—Michelle in Black, Pakhi in Lootera, and Sehmat in Raazi—even as they are surrounded by the mise-en-scene of period drama certain to invoke viewer nostalgia.

II In Black and Lootera, Iyer’s female protagonists are productively understood through a disability studies approach. While some key moments in the film seem heavily inspired by William Gibson’s 1956 play The Miracle Worker and Arthur Penn’s 1962 film adaptation of the same, such as the dinner etiquette scene, the screenplay for Black shows both innovation and courage by breaking the taboo surrounding the representation of disabled female bodies on-screen and subverting the trope of victimhood that surrounds female disability in mainstream Hindi cinema in the rare occasions that it is made visible. Disability studies scholars have critiqued the limited and often toxic ways in which disabled characters and disabilities have been represented in cinemas across the world. Benjamin Fraser points out: […] disability has been harnessed for exploitation by narratives—filmic, literary, or otherwise—that reaffirm the denigrating discourse of disability as lack from the perspective of a medical model or as a product of an ableist imaginary. Nor should we ignore that disability has been systematically differentiated from a socially and politically constructed able-bodied or neurotypical form. It may be relevant to keep in mind, too, that narratives of disability—filmed or otherwise—rarely incorporate sexuality, preferring a sanitized image of platonic or amorous love instead. (2007, p. 6)

Disabled bodies routinely serve as a “vehicle of sensation” (Snyder and Mitchell 2006, p. 163) related to trauma and threats to able-bodiedness.

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Disability in Hindi cinema too has been represented variously as a source of comedy, as punishment, and as disease that must be cured. Irrespective of how it has been employed in the plot, disabled characters remain in service to the able-bodied, and disabilities depends on the normative understanding of the mind and body for its significance and meaning. Sanjukta Ghosh points out that the tropes found in Western cinema abound even in Hindi cinema, but they are “indigenised by grounding them in Hindu scriptures and social practices” (Joyjeet Pal (2013; qtd. in Ghosh 2007, p. 2). Ghosh further points out that characters with physical, intellectual, or even psychiatric disabilities are often cast as foils for the protagonist to “highlight the idealized body, to provide comic respites in an action or a suspense drama or to indicate their heroic status by ‘rescuing’ the disabled” (p. 3). When it comes to the intersections between gender and disability, a clear representational difference may be noted in the way men and women with disabilities are portrayed on screen. The fetishization of the aestheticized and desirable female body is so normative that women with disabilities are rarely found on screen and when represented, the disability almost never detracts from their on-screen function as the objects of desire. One only has to examine characters, such as Rajni in Barsaat Ki Ek Raat (Samanta 1981), Pooja in Khuddar (Durrani 1994), Priya in Mann (Kumar 1999), or Supriya in Kaabil (Gupta 2017), to notice the use of disability to heighten the vulnerability of the female character and to emphasize her dependence on the male lead of the film. Unlike their male counterparts, women with disabilities seldom achieve self-sufficiency and the focus of the filmic narrative is never on the journey of that character towards self-reliance (Mohapatra 2012, p. 127). In both Black and Lootera, Iyer portrays female protagonists who struggle with their disabilities, but are not defined by their condition. Michelle in Black grows from a deaf and blind child, unable to communicate and prone to fits of rage due to the consequent isolation and frustration, to a well-balanced and compassionate adult, who is not only able to take care of herself but also capable of nurturing those in need, such as her beloved teacher. From a child who flies into rages when she does not get her way, who walks around grabbing food from any and all plates and dishes on the dining table, and who is tremendously frustrated at not being able to communicate and not being understood, Michelle matures with her teacher’s help into a confident and vibrant woman who, when asked at a college admission interview about why she wants to study, replies, “I want to

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study and learn so that I may live with dignity, with independence and to be alive” (Iyer 2005a). Michelle asserts her personhood at several points in the filmic narrative, most notably her interjection to correct a professor’s ableist phrasing of an idea by pointing out that she did not need her eyes to dream. Through just a couple of pivotal scenes wherein Michelle expresses desire for sexual companionship, Iyer’s screenplay radically deviates from the usual representations of female sexuality in Hindi cinema. Very often absent from the representation of femininity in Hindi cinema, women articulating sexual desire are rare and found only in the binary of married love or vilified as having a flawed moral character. Iyer depicts these moments of a disabled woman acting on her bodily urges and emotional needs with poignancy and dignity. A young Michelle ruminates about her growing awareness of Mr Sahai’s physical proximity to her, “A new mystery was arising; all touches seemed new. In my life, there was no one other than you, teacher. So, I started thinking about a new kind of relationship between us. Did I have the right to think this way?” (Iyer 2005a). This element of Michelle’s characterization presents the exploration of sexuality as a usual element in an adolescent protagonist’s journey towards adulthood. Feeling lonely and lacking after her sister’s wedding, Michelle asks her teacher to kiss her; she expresses fear that she will never experience any kind of physical intimacy with a man. Even as Michelle’s actions, which include trying to force a kiss with Mr Sahai, seem taboo as they rupture the neat boundaries between the teacher as a father figure and student as a child, the film does not denigrate Michelle. Instead, we see a sympathetic treatment of both Michelle’s impetuous actions and Mr. Sahai’s shock and despairing acquiescence, which highlights the pathos rather than eros in that interaction. “I am suffering,” Michelle tells Sahai; “I am aware of how suffocated you feel,” he answers kindly, modeling for viewers how to empathize with the protagonist and placing her words and actions with a framework of compassion and understanding (Iyer 2005a). Despite the removal of time, place, and even dialogue, audiences are meant to sympathize with the complex and strong-willed Michelle as the filmic narrative tracks her evolution from a student to a teacher, from a dependent to a caregiver. While the heritage film aspects of Black may have been muted for some to have missed it, Lootera makes no bones about its heritage feel. The presentation of the haveli, the use of jatra, vintage fashion, appliances, and cars, as well as the cabin in Dalhousie, the colonial summer retreat, all

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create a newly-independent 1950s India, only just beginning to grapple with its modernity. It is not surprising that the film begins with a discussion of the introduction of electricity to the traditional house still reliant on oil lamps juxtaposed with the social shifts in the newly independent India. Iyer’s screenplay navigates the visual splendor of the past, but highlights the vulnerability of Pakhi as a woman who is betrayed in love. Iyer remarks: While adapting O.  Henry’s ‘The Last Leaf’ as Lootera, the story I found myself wanting to tell was a story of love and betrayal where art and the painting of the ‘last leaf’ would be the glue that held the story together. Everything else then just got built from that foundation. A love like that, so deep and self-destructive isn’t something you would find in our present day, our definition of love is very different. So, the setting and the period for the story automatically aligned themselves accordingly. I love Bengal and the 1950s when India’s independence was in its infancy was a very potent period. There were several sociological and political events of significance, like the Zamindar Abolishment Act, electricity reaching many small towns and villages in Bengal and I saw how I could use all of these in making the story utterly significant to the times and rooting it to our world and ethos. (Iyer 2021)

However, the film combines two unlikely stories: the heist tale and O. Henry’s tragic short story, “The Last Leaf.” The story about a conman pulling off a heist in Lootera is complicated with the introduction of Varun and Pakhi’s love affair. Pakhi’s introduction is complex: her vulnerability is immediately highlighted through an episode of asthmatic attack; her father worries about Pakhi’s recurrent, potentially fatal, struggles with this health condition. However, the focus in her characterization is not so much on her disability, but on her privilege. Pakhi’s social location allows her to act recklessly, often without considering the wellbeing of others around her. She forces the chauffeur to let her drive the car, gets into an accident, and immediately pins it on him. She tries to intimidate Varun into not mentioning the accident or the driver and pours scalding coffee on his hand when he badmouths the “novice” driver who had rammed the car into his bike. While not all these actions are not necessarily negative or harmful, the overall impression of Pakhi is that of a self-centered young woman, spoiled by the privilege of her class status and the affections of her over-indulgent father. Pakhi’s social privilege is placed in the context of the abolition of the

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zamindari system and the restructuring of landed aristocracy that had maintained an exploitative relationship with tenants who lived and worked on their land. For Varun’s characterization as a conman and the heist plotline, Lootera makes multiple references to the 1951 Dev Anand-Geeta Baali starrer, Baazi, directed by Guru Dutt. The recurrent reference to Baazi in Lootera function as a homage to the bygone era of Bombay noir and evokes nostalgic cinephilia, but it also consolidates the model of amoral and acquisitive masculinity typically found in heist movies. John Hanich, for instance, discusses how in heist films audiences root for heroes who pursue financial gain, but also love “the adventure of testing their skills, foregrounding their expertise and showing off their savoir faire” (Hanich 2020, p. 307). In these films, masculinity is also constructed as what Michael Kimmel terms a rejection of the feminine (2009, p. 185). Varun’s characterization is within a similar paradigm: his primary social bonds are primarily homosocial: his gang/family, his uncle and brothers. Much like Madan played by Dev Anand in Baazi, who is forced into a life of crime due to his indigent circumstances, Varun is an orphan fostered by a Fagin-like Uncle Bajpai, who raises young boys to be conmen and maintains an unrelenting control over their lives. However, instead of celebrating the male protagonist pulling off a long con, or even rooting for an apt bloody punishment to a life of crime, as is often the case in the noir genre, the narrative focus in Iyer’s screenplay remains on a shattered Pakhi and the consequences of Varun’s deception. The effect of this juxtaposition is to center the feminine consciousness at the center of a hyper-masculine plot and thereby destabilize heteronormative expectations. When both Varun and Pakhi meet again at the cabin in Dalhousie, they have lost definitive parts of their identity: most members of Varun’s gang, including Uncle Bajpai, have been arrested by the police or have gone into hiding while Pakhi’s father has passed away and having lost most of her wealth, she lives like a recluse in a place devoid of networks of kinship and privilege. Along with the tremendous sadness of missed opportunities and the bitter recollection of betrayal and hurt, this meeting also proves to be transformative for both characters as they finally communicate with complete honesty and act authentically. In response to Pakhi’s outburst about Varun’s betrayal, he says, “You will not understand. You have not seen anything. You have lived with luxury and protection. You will not understand” (Iyer 2005b). While Pakhi comes to understand the exigencies of

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economic deprivation that define Varun’s actions, the evolution of Varun’s character is even more significant. If masculinity, as Michael S. Kimmel terms, is coded as a “relentless test” (2009, p. 185) which involves a continuous movement away from the feminine, then Varun in this film journeys towards it. Both literally and symbolically, Varun turns away from a life of acquisitive aggression and individualistic self-preservation, typically coded as masculine, and intentionally occupies the more feminine role of a caregiver. Refusing to yet again abandon Pakhi, he returns to nurture her back to health and emotional well-being. Viewers see Varun cooking, chopping food, making fire, and tending to Pakhi’s fever. Interestingly, the film does not end with the heteronormative marriage plot, but with an act of sacrificial self-­abnegation: Varun erases his self in an attempt to heal Pakhi’s wounded psyche. He tells her: “Jo tum ji rahi ho yahaan vah tumhaari zindagi nahin hai… uss aakhri ek patte ke saath zindagi jodkar rakhi hai, jo sahi nahin hai… vah tumhaara tota nahin hai” [The life you’re living here is not meant for you. You have wrongly linked your life to the last leaf on that tree. That leaf is not your parrot (callback to the story of the king whose life depended on his beloved parrot)] (Iyer 2005a, b). Instead of escaping certain death at the hands of the police, Varun ignores his own bullet wound to climb up the tree, which Pakhi has been staring at every day, to tie a painted leaf on its branch. As a result of his sacrifice, Pakhi, who had been using her disability as a way to hasten her end, embraces life with more fortitude.

III One of the most significant items in Iyer’s body of work, Raazi (2018) is an adaptation of Harinder Sikka’s novel, Calling Sehmat (2008). Iyer’s adaptation, co-written with the film’s director, Meghna Gulzar, departs from Sikka’s novel at several points, but most crucially reimagines Sehmat’s character in ways that interrogates the genre of the spy thriller as well as the tendency in Hindi cinema to fetishize and glorify past military conflicts, especially those with Pakistan. Iyer comments on the process of adapting the novel for the screen: […] when Meghna Gulzar approached me to adapt Harinder Sikka’s ‘Calling Sehmat’, after reading the book, I found my truth in the characters of Sehmat and Iqbal and how they were almost doppelgangers of each other, in two countries. Both were bound by familial duty and a sense of patriotism

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that they have inherited from their respective fathers. The original story is more a saga about Sehmat and begins with her parents’ love story and ends with her journey into spiritualism. But what I took away was the potential to tell within the framework of the characters a story of the futility of war and its unsung casualties. (Iyer 2021)

Harkening back to the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971, the core narrative of both Sikka’s book and Iyer’s screenplay revolves around Sehmat, the young Kashmiri girl married, who follows her father’s footsteps in spying for India by even marrying into a Pakistani military family. But, instead of the paranoia and toxic cultural stereotypes that characterize the genre of the spy thriller in general, Iyer’s adaptation takes the less typical path of centering a civilian experience and the feminine sphere of the domestic in a plot of national security and counter-measures based on espionage. This paradigm shift puts pressure on the genre of the spy thriller and its dependence on certain stereotypical formulations of masculinity and femininity. The most popular and best-selling genre of the twentieth century, the spy thriller was a male-centric genre. Eric Sandberg observes, “The amateur spy would get involved for the thrill of it, as a test of his skills and prowess; the mid-century agent would have more cogent ideological rationale, but national anxieties were crystallized in plots revolving around a certain formulation of masculinity” (2018, p. 543). With roots in cold-­ war jingoism and hostility, the spy thriller relies on the battle of wits between the action-hero and an easily categorizable villainous enemy. Women in such narratives are relegated to the positions of either passive collaborators or hypersexualized femme fatales. By placing a young woman at the centre of military conflict and international espionage, Sikka’s novel and Iyer’s adaptation both realign the ways in which viewers might engage with such a genre. However, Iyer’s screenplay makes key changes at the level of characterization, especially Sehmat and Iqbal, as well as plot which encourage viewers to acknowledge the human cost of war and the complicated connections between femininity and nationalism. Geeta Vishwanath observes, The female spy in war narratives is resonant of the sexualized and manipulative character associated with the Mata Hari image. Women are generally represented as victims in war films, not as agents. Women’s pacifism is privileged in most narratives and her militancy is acceptable only if it is in the interest of the nation. (2014, p. 98)

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In the depictions of the female spy in Indian and world cinema, the characterization has tended towards hyper-sexualization. Cinematic female spies, such as Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me (Gilbert 1977), Nikita in La Femme Nikita (Besson 1990), or Bridget Fonda in the Hollywood reimagining of Nikita in The Point of No Return (Badham 1993), all use their physical attractiveness as a sheath for their potential deadliness. This trope is visible even in Hindi cinema although films featuring female spies have been far and few. For example, in Chetan Anand’s 1973 spy thriller, Hindustan ki Kasam, Mohini, a rather bland woman, transforms into Tahira, a glamorous singer and radio presenter, to travel across the border and find vital information that would help Indian Air Force during the 1971 Indo-Pak war. Or, for instance, in the more recent “Bollywood” spy film, The Hero: Love Story of a Spy (Sharma 2003) wherein Reshma (a Kashmiri Hindu village girl raised in a Muslim household) is trained as a spy and sent to Pakistan to extract information, the focus remains on her beauty that masks her actual spy work. Sikka’s novel too repeatedly emphasizes Sehmat’s “sensuousness,” sometimes directing a male gaze too insistently on her appearance. For instance, her description at the night of the party in Sikka’s novel almost casts her as a femme fatale: Dressed carefully and strategically for the occasion, she looked stunningly beautiful. The GOC could not take his eyes off her the entire evening. She had draped her exquisite body in black crepe. The subtle lines of her long flowing gown accentuated her curves and the neckline, and though demurely cut, it was sensational. (p. 58)

Iyer’s adaptation describe Sehmat as “looking pretty and polished—but uncharacteristically provocative in her attire” (Iyer and Gulzar 2017) that remains true to the essential tonality of Sikka’s novel, but focuses more on her internal experience of that event rather than how she appeared to the men around her. In the film, Alia as Sehmat wears a white saree instead of a black gown; the only uncharacteristic elements being her heavier makeup, especially a deep red lipstick, and her sleeveless blouse. In line with Vishwanath’s observation about the female spy’s active role—itself a subversion of gender roles as scripted in Hindi cinema and the prescriptively passive role ascribed to women—is subsumed under a discourse of nationalism. Additionally, the atypical gender role combines with a necessarily a hybrid space as far as religious identity is concerned.

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Sikka’s novel spends a considerable amount of time on the interreligious relationship of Sehmat’s parents or her love affair with a Hindu collegemate to emphasize a cultural syncretism symbolic of India’s multiculturalism. Although Iyer’s screenplay maintains the name of Sehmat’s Sikh mother as is, Sehmat learns patriotic zeal for India and takes up the path of spy work because of her Kashmiri Muslim father; the filmic narrative feels no need to dilute Sehmat’s Muslimness. Iyer also emphasizes Sehmat’s tender nature and her queasiness at the sight of blood, that add a layer of vulnerability. Instead of a physically dexterous and always cool and collected Sehmat of the novel, Iyer’s characterization of Sehmat highlights her state of panic when situations seem to unravel which foreground her humanity and personhood even as the work she is involved in demands that she subsumes even her most intimate emotions and actions in the service of the state. For instance, when Sehmat is faced with the grim alternatives of being discovered as a spy and compromising the Indian intelligence operation or silencing Ahmed, Sikka emphasizes her commitment to the cause and her predatory ruthlessness: “Sehmat’s steely hands gripped the wheel and her brilliant-blue eyes shone, looking at the vulnerable servant like a jungle cat looks at its hapless prey” (p. 74). “I am sorry, Abdul, but you have to go. My country comes first,” she murmured before pressing her right foot on the gas pedal (p. 74). The novel condones the murder as an act of patriotism, but the film leaves it morally ambiguous. Iyer’s screenplay highlights Sehmat’s visceral reactions of shock and anguish at having committed this act of violence: 114. INT. SYED HOUSE—SEHMAT’S BATHROOM—NIGHT Sehmat enters the bathroom, shuts the door and dismantles the Morse unit. She hides it in the flush tank of the commode. She takes off her clothes, shoves them at the bottom of the laundry hamper and steps into the shower. Leaning against the tiles, her shoulders finally slump and she breaks into sobs. The enormity of what she’s done sinks into her. CUT TO: 115. INT.  SYED HOUSE—SEHMAT & IQBAL’S BEDROOM—NIGHT Dressed in her nightgown, Sehmat moves to the bed and lays down, staring vacuously into space. The sound of the sickening crunch of bones as she drove the Jonga over Abdul plays in her head.

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She lets out a gasp, shaking uncontrollably now. (Iyer and Gulzar 2017)

Sehmat’s guilt at having been forced to kill Abdul overwhelms her and affects her physically. Even as viewers root for Sehmat’s safety and success, the film does not minimize the horror of the murder. Iyer’s rendition does not rely on the tropes of a heritage war film to minimize the moral implications of Sehmat’s actions, but instead shows the burden of nationalistic duty placed on individuals that has them act counter to their ethical selves. The stakes of Sehmat’s tussle between the public and the private appear most starkly in her relationship with her husband, Iqbal. Perhaps, to minimize readers’ discomfort at Sehmat’s duplicitous behavior in her marriage, Sikka’s Iqbal is described as lacking confidence and intelligence. There is no mention of intimacy between Sehmat and Iqbal which would be expected in a marriage. When Sehmat negotiates a better position for him under General Amir Khan, Sikka describes Iqbal as “watching nervously from a distance” and sweating profusely while watching his confident spouse handle a difficult social interaction (p. 60). At another point, Sikka writes, “He could neither fathom the depth of her poetry, nor muster sufficient courage to ask her” (p. 60). Iyer’s screenplay shines when it explores the complicated relationship between two people who come to like each other personally, but find themselves at ideological loggerheads. Iyer’s screenplay describes a moment of intimacy that foregrounds the couple’s affection for each other: “Iqbal is lying beside Sehmat, spreading her hair across the pillow like Medusa’s. Sehmat meets his gaze, their affection for each other, palpable” (Iyer and Gulzar 2017). There are several moments such as this one that insist on the mutual love and respect Sehmat and Iqbal have for each other. The effect of such a representational choice is to show viewers that Sehmat sacrifices her personal happiness and marriage for her country, that Iqbal is not an expendable person for her. The conflict between the personal experience of love and marriage and the public discourses of duty and nationalism comes to a point of crisis when Sehmat’s identity as a spy is discovered and Iqbal dies in an explosion engineered by the Indian intelligence intended to eliminate Sehmat to prevent her arrest, which would have compromised the mission. While the novel scripts Sehmat’s celebratory return as a patriot happy to have served her nation, Iyer’s screenplay foregrounds the intersections between femininity and nationalism and the burdens placed on Sehmat due to the appropriation of her private life—her body and emotions—by demands of

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national security. Shocked to learn that her superiors in the Indian intelligence had engineered Iqbal’s death, and that she had been the actual target of the same attack, Sehmat cannot contain her outrage: She screams in rage and grief, and grabs at Mir. Mir holds onto her. MIR Jung mein aisa hi hota hai Sehmat. Kai beqasoor maare jaate hain. Lekin jung mein sivai jung ke, aur kuchh maaine nahin rakhta. Koi maaine nahin rakhta. Na tum, na main, koi nahin. [Such things happen in war, Sehmat. Innocents die. But during war, only the war matters. Nothing and no one else. Not you. Not me. Nobody.] Mir holds Sehmat as she shakes uncontrollably. SEHMAT Nahin samajh aati aapki duniya! Na rishton ki qadar hai na jaan ki. Iss se pehle ki main poori tarah aap jaisi bann jaaun, mujhe iss sab se nikalna hai! Apne ghar jaana hai… Mujhe ghar jaana hai… [I don’t understand your world. Relationships don’t matter, nor does life. Before I become completely like you, I need to get out of this. I want my home. I want to go back home.] (Iyer and Gulzar 2017)

Iyer’s screenplay also does dwell on Sehmat’s contributions to saving SS Vikrant and the war for independence in East Pakistan. While these achievements are noted, the focus remains unflinchingly on the human toll of these conflicts. The emotionally shattered and desolate Sehmat that we are left with at the end of the film remains an uncomfortable reminder of the human cost of the long and painful history of conflicts and aggression between India and Pakistan. Nested within the twin genres of war movies and the spy thriller, Iyer’s screenplay returns to the past to offer a version of the past that is fraught with tension and complexity and refuses easy binaries of self and other, nation and enemy.

Conclusion In response to a question about rendering the past into a form that manages to attract viewers, Iyer comments: I would like to believe that we all love stories of the past. There is a romance about an era that you no longer can physically access. Recreating a world that you can only imagine in your head is a great challenge. I love history and research deeply and it gives me the greatest joy to imbue them into any

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story I tell. […] The point of connect for an audience of today watching a story set in the past is the story itself. Once they connect to the story, everything around the story is just garnish. (Iyer 2021)

It is perhaps Iyer’s ability to narrate the past in ways that are relevant and identifiable to the contemporary viewers that makes her storytelling bypass the clichés that beset a lot of period dramas. Instead of simplistic nostalgic engagement with the past although the “romance” of a bygone era—to use her words—is still very much present, Iyer’s screenplays offer audiences the possibilities of critically considering the connections between the past that they view and the present that they inhabit. I have explored in this chapter the myriad ways in which Iyer’s screenplays have put pressure on established film genres and traditional representations, which routinely privilege a certain permutation of hegemonic masculinity, to offer more progressive ways of representing femininity on screen as well as reimagining gender relations in more egalitarian forms. While I have concentrated in this chapter on Iyer’s contributions to Hindi cinema, her contribution to TV shows, such as Kaafir and The Empire, show a similar consciousness at work. The web-series Kafir (2019) tells the story of a woman who accidentally crosses over from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir into India and is imprisoned for several years as a suspected militant. Iyer’s writing emphasizes the humanity of the individual caught in the midst of personal and national vendettas. Her most recent work, the opulently produced, web-series Empire (2021), is an adaptation of Alex Rutherford’s novel series, Empire of the Moghul (2009–2015), and highlights the experiences of the women as key players in statecraft.

Note 1. I interviewed Bhavani Iyer for the purposes of this chapter. All quotes from Iyer unless indicated otherwise are drawn from her interview (unpublished) with the author of this chapter.

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———. (2005b). “Lootera.” Screenplay. https://www.filmcompanion.in/fc-­ pro/download-­the-­script-­of-­lootera/. Accessed on 15 May 2021. Iyer, B. (2021). Interview by Tanushree Ghosh. 14th June, 2021. Unpublished. Iyer, B., Gulzar, M. (2017). “Raazi.” Screenplay. https://www.filmcompanion. in/wp-­content/uploads/2018/09/Raazi-­Final-­Script.pdf. Accessed on 15 May 2021. Jagarlamudi, R.K. & Ranaut, K. (2019). Manikarnika. Zee Studios & Kairos Kontent Studios. Junglee Pictures (2018). Creating 1971 in 2017. Dharma Productions. May 15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7fB75C11gQ. Accessed on 15 July 2021. Kimmel, M. (2009). ‘Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity’. In: P.  F. Murphy (ed). Feminism and Masculinities. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 182–99. Khosla, R. (1956). C.I.D. Guru Dutt Films. Kumar, I. (1999). Mann. Maruti International. Lowenthal, D. (2015). The Past Is a Foreign Country Revisited. Cambridge University Press, New York. Macdonald, I. (2011). ‘Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea’. In: J. Nelmes (ed). Analyzing the Screenplay. Routledge, London, pp. 44–68. Mehta, D. (1999). 1947 Earth. Anne Mason & Deepa Mehta. ———. (2005). Water. David Hamilton Productions. Millard, K. (2011). ‘The Screenplay as Prototype’. In: J. Nelmes (ed). Analyzing the Screenplay. Routledge, London, pp. 142–157. Mohapatra, A. (2012). ‘Portrayal of Disability in Hindi Cinema: A Study of Emerging Trends of Differently-Abled’. Asian Journal of Multidimensional Research 1(7): 124–132. Monk, C. (1996–97). ‘The Heritage Film and Gendered Spectatorship’. Close up: the Electronic Journal of British Cinema. http://www.shu.ac.uk/services/ lc/closeup. ———. (2001). ‘Sexuality and Heritage’. In: Vincendeau, G. (ed). Film/ Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader. British Film Institute, London, pp. 6–11. Monk, C. & Sargeant, A. (2015). British Historical Cinema. Taylor and Francis, Florence. Motwane, V. (2013). Lootera. Balaji Motion Pictures. Nair, S. (2019). Kaafir. Alchemy Films. Pal, J. (2013). ‘Physical Disability and Indian Cinema’. In: M.E.  Mogk (ed). Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and Television. Mcfarland, Jefferson, NC, pp. 109–130. Penn, A. (1962). The Miracle Worker. Playfilm Productions. Rajamouli, S.S. (2015). Baahubali: the Beginning. Arka Media Works.

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———. (2017). Baahubali 2, the Conclusion. Arka Media Works. Raut, O. (2020). Tanhaji. T-Series Films & Ajay Devgn FFilms. Sadiq, M. (1963). Taj Mahal. A.K. Nadiawala. Samanta, S. (1981). Barsaat Ki Ek Raat. Shakti Samanta. Sandberg, E. (2018). ‘“A Terrible Beauty is Born”: Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, the Spy Thriller and Modern Identity’. English Studies 99(5): 538–553. Sharma, A. (2003). The Hero: Love Story of a Spy. Dhirajlal Shah. Sharma, M. (2020). Breathe: Into the Shadows. Abundantia Entertainment & Amazon Prime. Sikka, H.S. (2008). Calling Sehmat. Konark Publishers, Delhi. Singh, A. (2019). Kesari. Zee Studios. Snyder, S. & Mitchell, D. (2006). Cultural Locations of Disability. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Thomas, R. (2013). Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies. State University of New York Press, Albany. T-Series (2013). Making of Lootera. May 7. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_hs6yeO91-­4. Accessed on 15 July 2021. Vidal, B. (2012). Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation. Wallflower, London. Viswanath, G. (2014). The “Nation” in War: A Study of Military Literature and Hindi War Cinema. Cambridge Scholars Publisher, Newcastle. Wollen, T. (1991). “Over Our Shoulders: Nostalgic Screen Fictions for the 1980s.” In: Corner, J., Harvey, S. (eds). Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. Routledge, London, pp. 178–193.

PART IV

Spatio-Temporal Specificities

CHAPTER 15

Marginalizations and Repressions in Vijaya Mehta’s Pestonjee and Hamidabai ki Kothi Smita Banerjee

Vijaya Mehta (1934–) is a well-known name in the annals of Indian New Wave cinema and theatre. Baroda-born and Bombay University-graduate, she trained with the doyen of Indian theatre Ebrahim Alkazi (1925–2020). She is known for her contribution to the experimental and radical impulse in Marathi theatre of the 1960s. Her collaborations with playwrights such as Vijay Tendulkar (1928–2008) and Mahesh Elkunchwar, her production company Rangayan, are well-documented (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1995, p.146; Thoraval 2000, pp. 201–203). Her stint as Chairperson of NSD and NCPA1 has cemented her place in the history of Indian theatre. She also acted in some of the well-known New Wave films such as Govind Nihalini’s Party (1984) and Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug (1981) as well as appearing in few of her directorial ventures such as Rao Saheb (1985), and Hamidabai ki Kothi (HBK, 1987). She has been described as one of the key women filmmakers from western India (Thoraval 2000) alongside Sai Paranjpye and Kalpana Lajmi. She has directed a total of seven films and

S. Banerjee (*) Delhi College of Arts & Commerce, Delhi University, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_15

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tele films (two feature films, Rao Saheb and Pestonjee [1988], and five tele films: Smritichitre [1982], Shakuntala [1986], Haveli Buland thi [1987], Hamidabai ki Kothi [1987], and Lifeline [1991) TV series). Navigating between theatre and cinema, Mehta is an important New Wave feminist auteur.

The Indian New Wave, Feminist Politics, and Auteurism Briefly, the contours of the Indian New Wave can be described as a ‘commitment’ to a different narrative engagement with realist cinema that positioned itself against the mainstream commercial cinema. Eschewing the melodramatic form and escapist spectacle of the commercial product, the proponents of this kind of cinema flourished in the 1970s and 1980s with overtly political and social films that exposed the many ills plaguing the nation at the time (Dasgupta 1983; Vasudev and Lenglet 1983; Vasudev 1986; Thoraval 2000; Gokulsing and Dissanayake 1998). Thoraval provides a succinct summary of the contexts and politics of the Indian New Wave as it attempted to break away from the ‘stultifying’ ‘clichéd’ ‘commercial films that drew on melodrama and the much-debased star system to craft ‘meaningful cinema’. Gokulsing and Dissanayake (1998) define this impulse as expressing ‘artistic’ vision and term it as artistic films. For Vasudev, the term demands not only differentiating between the narrative function of these films which focused on ‘real characters’ and the problems of lived life, but crucially is also tied to the discourse of ‘good cinema’ that was interestingly possible due to state funding and financial support (1986). Despite multiple terms that have been used to define the New Wave in the Indian context, the crucial feature that underlies the films identified as New Wave cinema is a ‘neo-realist style that uses verisimilitude in terms of characterization and mise-en-scene with close attention to representing minutiae of lived life without exaggeration associated with the commercial films. Mehta herself sees her cinematic lineage as closely aligned with this trajectory of Indian cinematic history. She also underscores the intersections and segueing of her theatre craft and aesthetic political vision as informing her cinematic oeuvre, “When I made films much later, parallel cinema made by Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal attracted me. I see my films as an extension of my theatre” (Pawar 2017, n.p.). A perusal of her

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filmography and theatre productions is a good indicator of her artistic vision and commitment to a feminist political gaze. From her first theatrical production of Bertolt Brecht to her first telefilm Smritichitre, based on the life of Laxmibai Tilak2 to her films, Rao Saheb, tackling widow remarriage, Hamidabai ki Kothi (HBK), with its focus on the vanishing tawaif tradition, Pestonjee analysing incompatible marriage, Mehta has consistently helmed projects that have foregrounded important feminist concerns; women’s lives, choices, identities marriages, domesticity, sexualities, gender politics, and repressions etc. Feminism as a movement has a diversity of approaches and concerns. However, all kinds of feminisms engage in subversions and resistances vis-­ a-­vis patriarchal constructs despite different geographical and historical socio-political contexts. Within the context of South Asian feminist scholarship, many feminists have argued that it is imperative to situate and historically differentiate women’s experience from the region. Accepting that the feminist discourse that has held sway over academia is of ‘western’ first-world impulse, they have posited that ‘other’ experiences should and can be ‘read’ differently (Loomba and Lukose 2012; Mansoor 2016; Menon 2020). Concurring with this position Menon has rightly noted the ways in which we need to accommodate these changing contours of feminist interventions. She says, The precondition of any feminist politics a usable category of ‘woman’ has proved to be difficult to construct, even proposed to be impossible, given the ‘problem of exclusion’. It is a widely known that the anchoring of a ‘stable category of woman’ was constructed from the perspective and understanding of the white woman. (2020, p. xxv)

This perpetuated the exclusion of other experiences, agency, and knowledge of women from other histories and geographies. This understanding of incorporating difference (Menon 2020, p. xxv), works with the premise that cross-cultural histories of women’s lives have to factor in the varied differences and material conditions. The key concern then for a feminist politics is the following: acknowledgement and acceptance of difference that can capture the range of varied and diverse experiences of women which despite eschewing singular and universalizing impulse can lead to a position of solidarity which feminists of different persuasion still subscribe to.

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Mehta’s feminist authorial voice is mobilized through the optics of “gender frame” “that defines all social relations” (Ridgeways 2009). My excavation of Mehta’s auteurist feminist politics that informs the reading of marginalization is a way of engaging with this necessity of acknowledging difference. Her women characters are deeply individualistic, caught in the interstices of repressive structures, yet they exemplify remarkable resilience to challenge those structures. Moreover, it also needs to be noted that Mehta’s auteurist voice emerges in her ability to question and critique the normative constructions of gender politics. In her delineation, she not only destabilizes patriarchy through her focus on women’s marginalization and repressions but also turns her gaze on mechanics of power. Thus, she is able to unmask and destabilize patriarchal oppressions, question gender politics and gender performance. We now acknowledge that gender is performative; that both women and men perform normative gender associations. Notions of masculinity or femininity are not stable or fixed.3 They impact and constrain men and women, not equally but certainly can result in repressions of their desires tied to their sense of self. The films under discussion are complex texts that show her ability to explore gender marginalization which are inextricably interlinked with politics of repression and power dynamics, which is also visible in the way men get marginalized. In interesting ways her feminist authorial gaze explores cross-gender issues via the tropes of marginalization and repression. Let me now turn to her own positions on her ideological commitment to her feminist politics which is premised on an inclusive humanist philosophy, evident from her interviews and memoir. In various interviews Mehta has consistently spoken about her deep convictions regarding women and their abilities to battle their circumstances and not get cowed down. Her upbringing and education, and her family’s close connections with the progressive socialist politics and leaders such as Annie Besant, M.N. Roy, ideas of Anna Karve and Phule enabled Mehta to become committed to a vision of social transformation which imagined an egalitarian social fabric. Her experience of working closely with Jai Prakash Narayan has also aided her in her ideological commitment to social causes.4 I was born in the thick of the Independence movement and Gandhiji was a great force in our lives. My grandmother was a tough woman looking after a family of 21, my mother was widowed when I was six and she brought us all up single-handedly, never crying over her fate. In fact, she learnt to read

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and write after her marriage and loved to read …My whole generation of women were created in this climate, not just me. (Ganesh 2013, n.p.)

Thus, her deep investment in documenting women’s life experiences that defined her artistic vision, both in theatre and films is closely aligned to her personal politics deeply embedded in a humanist philosophy. She exemplifies Carol Hanisch’s statement, “the personal is political” (2006). Commenting on her career trajectory, she says that she has enacted the roles of 80 women characters and directed 60 of her plays showcasing independent women who despite their marginal status given their socialization within patriarchy and constricting familial circumstances emerge as strong women who lived their life on their own terms and did not let their circumstances trap them (Gulati and Bagchi 2005, p. 199).5 Mehta is very conscious of differentiating her feminist politics from the Anglo- American brand of feminism. She explains, I got an opportunity to go to the US…It was the peak of the Feminist movement. … I just found it appalling that women were wearing men’s clothes. Does equality mean looking like men? I had seen such strong women back home. Without uttering a word of feminism, they stood to change many things within tradition itself by their sheer inner strength. (Ganesh 2013, n.p.)

Mehta’s observations about American feminism not being applicable for her situatedness in her Indian context, her awareness and acknowledgement of the lasting influences of grandmothers, mothers and mothers-­ in-­law (Gulati and Bagchi 2005) make her interestingly contemporaneous for not only her own times but also for our times as well. Thus, I see her biography as exemplifying a deconstruction of western feminist hegemony that underlies the arguments of contemporary feminist scholars cited above. Her feminist cinematic praxis embodies this engagement with destabilizing gender associations. It is also pertinent to make some comments on how I consider auteurism central to the idea and ideal of feminist film practice and deploy it to understand Mehta’s place in this discourse. I am aware of the skeptical stance of feminist film scholars against the “cult of the author especially in relation to Hollywood cinema” (Chaudhuri 2006, p. 58), due to the multiple ways in which mainstream and the commercial enterprise of film making masks the layers of labour, especially with regard to women

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personnel. Notwithstanding these skeptical interventions, I am influenced by Kaja Silverman’s (1988) position regarding women’s space and gaze that needs to be foregrounded for the cause of feminist politics. She acknowledges that women personnel are subjected to marginalization given the fact that both mainstream and art house narrative cinema celebrates the cult of the auteur which largely is dominated by men. She proposes the idea of the female voice that could be a productive trope to engage with an enabling concept of female authorship, the speaking voice of the film maker discerned in the characterizations which can be cross-­ gender. Silverman argues that Barthes’s dictum pronouncing the ‘death of the author’ will be a disservice to the feminist cause as it will deny women their rightful claim to be recognized as creative contributors, as authors with a voice which is a source of authority. The critiques against auteurism notwithstanding, I think framing Mehta’s oeuvre within this discourse is productive as it enables an examination of her politics of feminism as well as commitment to ‘meaningful’ cinema, the Indian New Wave movement. Following this idea, I shall discuss Mehta’s auteurist cinematic vision and style later in the chapter. First, I summarize the plots of the two films under discussion.

Pestonjee and Hamidabai ki Kothi Pestonjee (1988) narrates the story of two Parsi men, Firoz and Pesi Pestonjee. The film focuses on the relationship and their lives. The trials of Firoz and smooth-talking flamboyant Pesi are juxtaposed with the attempts at finding the right kind of Parsi girl to marry. In a plot twist both Firoz and Pesi are shown the same girl, Jeroo, an attractive piano-playing girl who has been brought up in Aden. Firoz remains confused about the match, while Pesi goes ahead and marries Jeroo. The plot meanders through Firoz’s point of view as he is the principal narrator and commentator on the lives and situations of the other characters. Sketched as an eccentric, rule-bound, straightforward, upright bachelor, Firoz is transferred to an outlying office in Bhusawal. He continues to look after Pesi’s financial affairs from Bhusawal, and we get to know about Jeroo’s pregnancy from the letters exchanged between the two friends. Five years pass and on a holiday visit to Bombay, Firoz is shocked to discover Jeroo and Pesi’s rocky marital relationship. Pesi’s intimacy with another Parsi widow, Soona Mistry is also revealed to his friend. Firoz is furious with Pesi on Jeroo’s behalf and accuses his friend of hurting his wife and turning her

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into a shabby, unkempt shrill housewife, who’s burdened with caring for her paralytic father and who had a miscarriage, while her husband has found love and solace with Soona who is a lawyer and is helping the couple with a complicated family property dispute. The film soon reaches its dénouement with news of Pesi’s sudden death and Firoz’s discovery of the financial collapse faced by his family. It is also revealed that Soona Mistry paid for Pesi’s funeral arrangements and death ritual ceremonies, but she is not allowed to participate as the ‘other’ woman and Jeroo presides over as the bereaved widow and inherits all the property as the court case gets decided in Pesi’s favour. Jeroo realizes her dream of a good life and goes back to her piano, while Firoz too learns something significant about life and love on his visit to Soona’s home to pay her back. Soona hands over Pesi’s last testament to Firoz and he discovers that Soona has had a child with Pesi. Hamidabai ki Kothi was adapted as a television film in 1987 from a very successful Marathi play. Written by Anil Barve, the story revolves around an ageing tawaif, courtesan Hamidabai and her impoverished life of destitution brought about by diminishing work. Hamidabai is an old-­ world tawaif who believes in the purity of her craft of singing and refuses to pollute it with either technology or film songs. Clutching to her ideals, she brings her kothi and its occupants, Saida, a young tawaif and her retainer Sajjad, Saida’s lover and a middleman, and Baharwala, the servant, to a life of poverty. Set in the late 1950s to early 1960s period, the film draws upon the notion of purity of music, art, and zubaan, through characters who are literally and figuratively inhabitants of the margin: the residents of the kothi. The trope of marginalization applies to both men and women in this space, as they are denied any possibility of traversing towards ‘respectability’ or a respectable life outside of this kothi. Matters come to a head as Shabbo, Hamidabai’s daughter is forced to leave her hostel due to non-payment of her fees and moves back into the kothi. We get to know that Khan Saheb, Hamidabai’s patron, an iconic singer and Shabbo’s father, though he never acknowledged her, is dead and therefore Hamidabai no longer receives her monthly stipend. Deprived of any regular or occasional source of income, Hamidabai refuses to let Saida sing Hindi film songs to draw customers. She also stoutly refuses to let her kothi degenerate into a dancing salon thereby holding onto her status as a bai, tawaif of accomplishment and repute. She still commands a great deal of respect as a courtesan of the bygone era as is evident from the interest shown in her by a young AIR producer, Binay Babu who wants to do a

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programme on Khan Saheb’s life and legacy and interviews Hamidabai. Hamidabai tells him that she refused offers of recording her songs on the gramophone as she wants to preserve the purity of her voice and not make it reproducible through a ‘bejaan’, lifeless, mechanical voice. She wants to be remembered through only the trace, the memory of her real live singing voice. Shabbo who has been raised in Pune struggles to adjust to a different way of life in the kothi and becomes aware of the differences that cannot be bridged despite her education and upbringing away from the kothi. She is attracted to Binay, who reciprocates her feelings and she begins to dream about marriage to him. After Hamidabai’s death, Shabbo is forced to accept that Binay will not be able to marry her as he is not confident of societal acceptance. Faced with financial ruin and sexual threats from the local men, Shabbo is forced to accept the neighborhood goon Lukka’s proposal and marries him. Eventually Lukka finds it impossible to inhabit her world of respectability as she wants him to leave his petty crime-related work. The couple who has nothing in common soon face more trouble as Lukka’s rival dada, the neighbourhood goon becomes powerful and ensures his marginalization. He loses his henchman, his business, and his standing in the locality. Faced with an impecunious state, he decides to convert the kotha into a dancing salon. Horrified at the prospect, Shabbo sets fire to the kothi and perishes in it.

Narrating Marginalization and Repressions: Women, Marriages, and the Home Both films focus on the experiences of women from two marginalized communities: the Parsis6 and the tawaifs.7 Marginalization as a term can be understood as a politics of exclusion that places people on the fringes that represses their sense of self and “others” them (Nigam 2014). It implies … processes or tendencies where people can be excluded from all forms of rights or opportunities, acting as … a delimiter for opportunities and availability of resources for the excluded groups. People who are marginalized occupy the edges, fringes and do not find any place in the center of the cultural and political affairs. By implication, it means that they are relegated to a lower social standing. Marginalization generally operates at three levels: individual, community and global. At an individual level, it signifies an individual’s exclusion from any meaningful participation in the political and

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social affairs. At the community level, it implies pushing the entire community to the periphery. (Ailawadi et al. 2020, p. 3)

The discourse of marginalization is inextricably linked to the discourse of oppression (Freire 1996). For women, the most obvious exclusion and delimitation of opportunities for fulfilling desires tied to notions of selfhood occur within patriarchy as it imposes ‘normative’ gender expectations, hegemonically circumscribing them within familial spaces: as married women, as mothers, as widows and so forth. Feminist scholars have drawn attention to the inescapable link of the space of the home to women’s sense of self. This containment within the home is tied to the separation of the public and private which relegates women to the private sphere of the home. Relegated to this space of domesticity, women are expected to derive selfhood through the idea of a well-ordered home that provides shelter, refuge and is the site of the domestic goddess.8 They are presumed to ‘find fulfillment’ through domestic duties, wifehood, and motherhood. In Pestonjee and HBK the narrative critically examines all of these concerns as explorations of marginalization and repression are evoked through the marital and domestic lives of the women characters, tied to the claustrophobic and inhospitable space of the home. Marriage emerges as a very important issue in Mehta’s auteurist vision.9 In her memoir she has drawn attention to her own widowhood, remarriage, and many other women’s widowhood and troubled marriages that she saw in her family. She also makes an illuminating comment on herself when she acknowledges that despite her independent streak she realized soon after her widowhood that she wanted a man in her life to enable her to sustain her emotional integrity (Gulati and Bagchi 2005, p.  198). It is the frank admission of her vulnerability and this candid honesty that emerges very consistently in her cinematic explorations where we see the women in the two films desire or reject matrimony in their attempts to give meaning to their lives. For Jeroo, marriage deteriorates into a trap as her dream of becoming a concert pianist is thwarted after marriage. Her music and her obsession with a ‘tidy ghar’, become contentious issues when we see her getting irritable as her household chores and Pesi’s clutter drive her to become a nagging wife. She is also fearful of pregnancy and does not feel that motherhood is a normative function that she should embrace simply because she’s expected to as a married woman. Ruth Vanita notes that the marriage between Jeroo and Pesi results in untold misery and suffering for Jeroo as she turns into a cantankerous unkempt shrew who screams at Fuiji and is

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struggling to manage her household single-handedly, including looking after her paralyzed father. In her opinion this portrayal is a “brilliant study of a woman destroyed by the compulsions of an unsuitable marriage… eroded by the stresses of domesticity and bondage to an uncaring husband represents a drama enacted in the lives of many women” (1990, p.  2). Soona despite being a wealthy widow and professional lawyer is subjected to moral opprobrium as she embarks on multiple affairs and defies ‘accepted’ widow-like behavior of renouncing pleasures; she is also ‘denied’ her reproductive right to motherhood as she’s a widow. She’s judged harshly by Firoz who feels she’s a seductress who enticed Pesi to abandon his married wife to a life of misery. In HBK too women desire marriage but their spatial and cultural locations force them to repress those desires; both Shabbo and Saida harbour aborted dreams of marriage. Marital experiences appear either inimical or they remain chimeras as we see these women live their quotidian lives. The most poignant cinematic unpacking of the marginalized woman is visible in HBK as it narrates the vicissitudes of ‘othering’ encountered by the old Hamidabai and her young daughter. Mehta’s Hamidabai is far removed from the depiction of the usual romanticized figure of the courtesan made popular through literature and films. Her kothi is a lone survivor of the erstwhile courtesan tradition, characters lament the bygone times when the lane would resonate with the music of 700 sarangis (stringed musical instrument). Fallen on hardship Hamidabai is marginalized in her declining years as her patron dies, her loss of singing voice implies her non-productive cultural marginalization in her household, and her uncompromising stance against film music10 further ensures her economic marginalization. Saida too is on the fringe, derided as Sajjad’s kept mistress, pregnant with no means of gainful employment as Hamidabai does not allow her to perform film songs; she is forced by circumstances to abandon her dreams of becoming a tawaif and goes over to another kotha which allows singing and dancing which was anathema to Hamidabai. Shabbo is marginalized despite her education and her illegitimate birth, where her mother’s patron and lover Khan Saheb refuses to give her his name. Further her romantic desires and dreams of love and marriage are denied to her as she cannot escape her tainted birth as a daughter of a tawaif. The paradoxical nature and layers of marginalization enacted on the performing women are brought out brilliantly in this film. While Hamidabai can be nostalgically ‘remembered’

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as Khan Saheb’s muse, she cannot claim any ‘respect’ as his lover, and her daughter is perpetually cast as a liminal woman consigned to the fringe. The women characters in both Pestonjee and HBK are caught in incompatible relationships which are inimical to their sense of self, and do not experience the home as an enabling space. I suggest that their spatial location in their homes results in encountering moments of acute terror. I want to borrow Bhabha’s idea of “unhomely” (1994, p. 9) to analyze this marginalization.11 Defining the “unhomely”, he writes that it is not actually being unhoused. Rather it is a moment of perception when a character’s tactile physical experience is jolted into a realization, “…as it creeps over them … taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of ‘incredulous terror’” (ibid). Jeroo and Shabbo experience such epiphanic moments of being ‘unhomed’ in the films. In different ways this ‘incredulous terror’ becomes apparent when the realization manifests itself that the home is a place which is not secure or a dream home. For Jeroo the lengthy court battle, Pesi’s dwindling income and her father’s paralytic attack culminate in a crucial scene when we see her rage at Fuiji, and her inability to maintain a ‘tidy ghar’. In another scene, she breaks down completely and rages at the ornate object-filled cluttered space which is a financial drain and does not provide any sustenance. Jeroo is free only in her widowhood; it ensures her the ownership of her home on her terms. For Shabbo, this moment of ‘terror’ occurs when she realizes that Lukka is planning to rent out her home for dancing girls and his business enterprise of making illicit liquor is abhorrent to her sensibilities. It is this moment that decides her future and her decision to set fire to the home which fetters her and traps her. It is also interesting that the salon is called kothi in this film and not kotha, the usual name for a tawaif’s salon. A kothi means a home while a kotha is a salon for entertainment. In this scene we see her stand still with a frown of disapproval as she listens to Lukka describe his plans to revive their ruined economic state. As Lukka’s voice drones on, Shabbo appears frozen in space, staring into nothingness. In the last scene we see her striding purposefully to her cupboard and taking out the red odhni (headscarf), draping it on herself. She moves back into the space behind the bed and stands in the shadowy alcove over it. As she stands still, the dimness of the frame is suddenly suffused with flames engulfing her. The scene fades to black as we gaze on the bright red draped face surrounded with the dancing flames. Cinematically the narrative, character, and authorial signature which foreground marginalization are aptly illustrated in the visual style and mise en scene of both films. As an auteur, Mehta’s style can be identified as not

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merely commensurate with the trope of realism of setting, dialogue or accent or production design but also in the use of frames and cinematic language.12 The visual economy and spatial logic of both theater and cinema embody deeply symbolic resonances. Character and space need to be integrated via narrative and visual economy to signify the ideological and political statements that the auteur intends to make. It is well known and documented that the auteurist enterprise is invested in a signature style of filmmaking which is easily identifiable. Mehta’s attention to both is easily discernible in her cinematic oeuvre. For instance, the mansion in Rao Saheb (1985) appears dark and gloomy accentuating the unhappy life of the inhabitants of the mansion. Similarly, in Haveli Buland Thi (1987),13 the interior of the wada, the ancestral house is intricately aligned to the lived life of the family. In Pestonjee, the bulk of the film is shot inside Firoz’s home, Pesi’s home, Soona’s home, as we see characters entering, leaving these places, inside small lifts with old-styled metal grills, narrow alleyways of building entrances, old staircases, arched niches, windows, etc. There are very few outdoor scenes in the film. Most sequences throughout the film capture characters in mid-­ close-­ups, sitting close to each other engaging in conversation and talking. These visual framings and shot compositions can be understood as showing the intimacy and intricate lives of the characters, but I think they reinforce the idea of the margin through the visual economy. The close-ups and constant use of shots that show Firoz and Pesi enclosed by the grilled lift or in the narrow staircase, standing against a carved niche reiterates their marginality visually. Both men are continuously and repeatedly framed in these shots, seemingly squeezed in the tight enclosed spaces. The use of a brilliant dream sequence illustrates Jeroo’s containment and unhappiness in her marriage. Narrated through Firoz’s dream gaze the sequence unfolds as we see him startled by a disembodied screech. The top angle shot captures a screaming Jeroo clad in a dirty sari, enclosed in a circular well hole like frame swaying precariously asking Firoz to save her. She appears as a diminutive shrunken figure clutching the lower rung of the banister encircling circular staircase. The mise-en-scene evocatively captures the complete entrapment of the fashionable well-dressed woman reduced to this untidy figure, ravaged in her unhappy marriage. In HBK the interiors and spaces too accentuate the marginalization experienced by the characters. It is visible in the tight frames of the interior of the kothi which appear narrow and confined. The repeated framing of the coloured glass paned window in an elongated shot coupled with the

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camera panning over the shabby walls capture the economic deprivations faced by the inhabitants. It also underscores the marginalization as the only colours that we see are the glass panes which accentuate visually the colourless and marginal lives of the inhabitants. For the purposes of this chapter, I shall refer to the 2005 Zee 5 adaptation. Like the 1987 telefilm this text too underscores the marginalization and claustrophobia of entrapment visually. The entire film is shot in one single set which looks like a proscenium stage that intertextually cites the ‘original’ text; the stage version. The rich saturated green on the set walls, the photographs, the two windows from which one can glimpse the never changing visual of the balcony on the opposite side hung with drying clothes and cluttered overhanging electrical wires add to the sense of stasis and the completely closed space from which there seems to be no escape. There are no outside scenes. The characters seem trapped in this dark green space which is caught in a time warp defined by Hamidabai’s uncompromising stance and her control over it. Even after her death, the space remains unchanging as Shabbo’s desperate attempts at selling the kothi remain aborted; no one wants to rent or buy this home of ill-repute. The sense of entrapment and stasis is further brought out when we see Shabbo gazing longingly out of the window with a book in her hand, caressing it; her trips to the library have stopped as she cannot pay for her membership. The entire kothi and its inhabitants are caught in this static space. A similar stylistic trope is also visible in Haveli Buland thi. Like HBK the inhabitants of this haveli too are caught in an intermedial time, which has heralded unforeseen changes due to onset of modern times, consumerism, and urbanism. Both the telefilms are social and political documents of their times and significantly all the women characters experience claustrophobia and entrapment and denial of deep-seated desires in their spaces. In HBK, the still stage-like set is cluttered with the tanpura (stringed musical instrument), a table, a cupboard, a bed, the gramophone, and photographs on the wall which remain unchanged. The sense of stasis is reinforced as the camera angle is repetitive and non-dynamic as we never see the interior from any angle except full frontal and very occasionally from the two left and right corners. As I mentioned above in the section explaining feminist auteurist gaze which can be cross-gender, my reading of the two films moves away from a monolithic reading of gender frame as applicable only to women. I think it’s also important to analyse Mehta’s auteurist gaze unpacking gender politics in an inclusive manner where cross-gender oppression experienced by men too is articulated. Pesi’s marriage to Jeroo becomes the reason for

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his thwarted desires of fathering a child; Jeroo’s miscarriage and fears of dying in childbirth make him into a liminal presence in his own home and Jeroo’s life; her assertion that she loves her father and brother over everyone is brought forcefully into our gaze as she edges her husband out; she does not like his cluttered habits, his cricket playing, his outgoing and gregarious nature or his love of pop music. These incompatibilities in the marriage make him into a marginal and repressed figure in his own home. His realization that Jeroo chooses to be a victim who can only thrive and feel empowered in her unhappiness is perhaps the reason why he sets up another home with Soona and fulfills his desire of having a child of his own. In HBK, Lukka’s marriage to Shabbo is an ill-suited match due to Shabbo’s education and her desire for a life outside the kothi. Her attempts at making her marriage and her home respectable make her marriage run into rough weather, Lukka loses his illegal businesses and his power predicated upon his criminal activities. This loss of status adds to his marginalization and economic hardship for the married couple. Both Sajjad and Baharwala, the middleman and the retainer, are also marginal characters due to their gender and circumstances of their birth; in the space of the kothi men occupy a lower status as the kothi is owned and ruled by the bai, the courtesan. It is predicated along the matrilineal system as she is the source of authority (Oldenburg 1990). Men associated with the kothi can only claim some status through their mothers; Sajjad and Baharwala are both abandoned and raised in the staircase of Hamidabai’s kothi. Typically, Hamidabai reminds Sajjad about giving him refuge in her kothi; but that is on her terms. When he oversteps his bounds by getting a gramophone to lure Saida to learn film songs, she reminds him sternly, “Tumhe rehne ke liye jagah di hai, phonu ko nahin” (I have given you a place to stay, not the gramophone). Both Sajjad and Baharwala lament not knowing their mothers in different scenes as they contemplate their liminal identities; since they never know their mothers, they do not know their mother tongue, and cannot claim any belonging in this matrilineal space. In this feminized space they are liminal. Saida’s sarcastic needling attests to Sajjad’s marginal location, “you are not man enough and you become emasculated in front of her (Hamidabai)”. In illuminating ways Mehta’s exploration of the marital incompatibilities critically unmasks the power dynamics where the women are also culpable in ‘othering’ the men, we see both men and women struggle to give voice to their repressions within the normative gender roles that they are located in. In Mehta’s gendered frame, one can excavate the layers of ‘othering’ that are cross-gender

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foregrounding the fluidity, instability, and permeability of these discourses. This aptly echoes Butler’s position on the significance of acknowledging that no person exists outside of the hierarchy and dynamics of discursive power (1990, p. 87).

Agentive Marginalization: Recalcitrant Women To be sure, the marginalization, repressions, and being unhomed that these women experience in Pestonjee and HBK make them victims in their spatial and social locations. Yet can one reframe the discourse of marginalization to suggest the possibility of resistance despite the undeniable repression that these women experience; do Jeroo and Shabbo demonstrate agency? I argue that these women manage to challenge their marginalized status and emerge as defiant recalcitrant women who transgress their marginality; Jeroo through her widowhood, Shabbo in setting herself ablaze. Drawing on Mehta’s experiential observations cited above on her views about women demonstrating remarkable strength and resilience to counter inimical circumstances, I suggest that despite the repression of their desires, these two women need not be consigned to the status of marginality. To do so one can use the insights of Mansoor who has alerted us to ways in which one can engage with marginality productively. Menon explains Mansoor thus: Instead of viewing the margin as a space of disempowered passivity, it could be viewed as a discursively permeable space permitting reconfiguration of the binaries such as universal vs specific, western was non-western and so on, thus helping shape contemporary feminist discourses (Mansoor 2016, p. 2). Using the Derridean term ‘limitrophy’ she suggests that boundaries be seen as permeable zones, where lines need not be rigid. It becomes possible thus to conceive of the margin as being actively engaged in the creation of alternative meanings within the existing or culturally accepted systems of meanings. This conception has important implications for women from the global south conditioned to perceive of themselves as passively marginal to the first world feminist center. When the center is no longer an absolute originator of meaning, the marginal entity is no longer its product either. While this does not de-center the center per se, it does lead to a decentring of its operational mechanics. This permits the women in the global south some agency to negotiate their situatedness and it need not be perceived only as a rigid derivative of the center. (2020, p. xxvi)

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Borrowing from this position one can argue that marginality too can be read as a permeable category that can escape the notion of fixity and limits. Interestingly this recalibration of our terms of engagement and understanding of marginality located in cultural differences has remarkable resonances with Mehta’s statements about women’s life struggles cited above. Let me explain with reference to the films. Towards the end of Pestonjee Mehta places a sequence where we see the widowed Jeroo. In this sequence the camera frames Jeroo lying prone on her bed dressed in black but reading a magazine while eating fruits. The prone and calm posture presents a very different Jeroo, one who seems to appear relaxed and enjoying herself in her solitary state. This trope of the widow eating is not an innocuous little scene; it has tremendous cultural resonances in the Indian context. One can cite another such widow from Mehta’s oeuvre, the Mawsi, maternal aunt, from Rao Saheb. Widows are not supposed to enjoy or derive pleasure from eating as their status is predicated upon denial of their desires. In a revealing anecdote, Mehta has remarked upon the ways in which her encounters with widowed women in her family alerted her to the ways in which these women surreptitiously started eating savories or other foods that they were traditionally not supposed to (Gulati and Bagchi 2005, p. 200). Appreciation and enjoyment of food and music are two important tropes that Mehta uses to alert the viewers to the ways in which Jeroo and Mawsi can and do challenge their marginalization. In the short scene, Firoz’s chance visit to Jeroo makes us realize that this widow has achieved and secured her space which can help her actualize her desire for music and piano playing which her marriage had denied to her. As we see her on her bed savouring fruit, she suddenly realizes that Firoz is standing in the doorway; she quickly covers the plate with her magazine and gets up. In no uncertain terms she informs Firoz that he is no longer needed to manage her finances as her brother will do so in the future. This curt dismissal of her dead husband’s best friend is followed by her sitting down in front of her piano and playing a loud tune. Her almost angry and frowning expression and forceful hitting of the keys is a symbolic gesture which can be read as an assertion of herself which is finally free of her marriage and incompatible spouse. Shabbo’s setting fire to the kothi and perishing in the blaze too is an act of defiance against what she perceives to be a constriction of herself. Her incompatible marriage, her keen awareness of her inability to gentrify Lukka and her bitter realization that she will not be able to sell her mother’s kothi to respectable buyers alongside her epiphany of being ‘unhomed’

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make her determined to take matters in her own hands. In this specific sequence we see her drape herself with the red odhni, which we had seen earlier after her mother’s death as she was designated the inheritor of Hamidabai’s kothi given the matrilineal system. Shabbo’s inheritance of this home does not translate into an abode or a secure space for her, in fact, her location in this space makes her a ‘disreputable’ woman who cannot be a part of respectable dwelling. As Binay informs her, he cannot continue to visit her as he is responsible for his mother’s and sister’s reputation. Since she cannot evade or escape her spatial location, she ensures its destruction rather than acceding to make it into a dancing kotha that will sully her mother’s tawaif credentials. The only way to preserve her mother’s heritage and her inheritance of that tradition is paradoxically achievable only through death and annihilation. Her death then echoes her mother’s assertion that she is not willing to be reduced to a recorded mechanical voice; they remain as traces. Both Hamidabai and Shabbo demonstrate their moral integrity even as they are repressed, excluded, and marginalized. Shabbo’s death is then a symbolic gesture of resistance that is available to her in her cultural context, the woman choosing to die, sacrificing her body as a defiant challenge to her repressed location.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to integrate auteur biography, auteurist style, and committed feminist politics mobilized through the gender optics to excavate marginalization and repressions through productive tools available for understanding difference as well as argue that these ‘othering’ can also be read as agentive where we do not need to consign these women to narratives of victimhood forever. It has also attempted to place Mehta into a history of Indian women filmmakers, particularly with reference to her Hindi films Pestonjee and Hamidabai ki Kothi, as a feminist auteur committed to her personal convictions of exploring feminist issues as politics and praxis.

Notes 1. NSD is the acronym for National School of Drama. NCPA is the National Centre for the Performing Artists. Mehta was the Chairperson of NSD from 1988-1992. She also headed the NCPA from 1993-2009.

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2. Laxmibai Tilak (1868–1936) was married to the controversial social reformer and activist Narayan Waman Tilak (1861–1913). Her autobiography Smritichitre: The memoirs of a Spirited Wife (1934–1937), (trans Shanta Gokhale 2017; also translated as I follow after: An Autobiography (E. Josephine Inkster). Oxford University Press, London, 1950) is a fascinating narrative of this Brahmin woman who had to undergo trials and tribulation after her illustrious husband converts to Christianity. Vijaya Mehta appears as the older Laxmibai in the film. 3. The idea of gender as performance and its fluid multiplicity is borrowed from Judith Butler. She says, “there is no recourse to a person… that escapes the matrix of power and discursive relations…” (1990, pp. 86–87). 4. Annie Besant (1847–1933), theosophist and early women’s rights champion, M. N. Roy (1887–1954), radical humanist philosopher and revolutionary leader, (Anna Karve) Dhondo Keshav Karve (1858–1962), educationist and social reformer, Jyotiba Phule (1827–1890), social and educational philosopher and reformer, and J. P. Narayan (1902–1997), are noted social, political and educational reformers. They are known for their contribution to the National struggle for independence and in shaping the ideals of the modern Indian nation after independence in 1947. 5. Mehta’s autobiography Zimma (2012) was published in Marathi and she has mentioned that she herself was rewriting it in English. However, it has not yet been published. See her interview by Gowri Ramnarayan (2011) in The Hindu at: https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/the-­ saturday-­interview-­trendsetter-­of-­her-­time/article2350561.ece 6. Parsis in India are a minority community demographically and the dwindling numbers have been a cause of concern. Their rituals, religious practices and westernized lifestyle have always relegated them to the zone of the religious and ethnic fringe. Parsis are usually depicted as stereotyped caricatures in popular Hindi films, characterized as minor sidekicks used for comedic interludes. Mehta’s film departs from the norm to present us with an insightful entry into the lives of the community and the characters. 7. As a community, the tawaifs became significant figures of art, culture and political players in the nineteenth century (Leonard 2013; Banerjee and Ailawadi 2015; Singh 2007) and have been the subject matter of literature and films (Sachdev 2009a; Bhaskar and Allen 2009; Vanita 2018). However, their fortunes suffered due to the breakup of the system of feudal patronage and the British rule post 1857. Beginning from the colonial period and during the national movement their cultural space also got eroded due to the demands of middle-class norms of respectability as they were excluded from the normative association of ‘good domesticated family’ women (Morcom 2013; Maity 2020; Thatra 2016), eventually getting completely ostracized in the modern nation as we see in HBK.

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8. See Panja’s (2004) analysis of the ways in which Tagore destabilizes the idea of the home in Chokher Bali. It is the widowed Binodini who’s the disruptive presence in the novel. See also the Introduction by Alice Thorner and Maitryee Krishnaraj in Ideals, Images and Real Lives: Women in Literature and History (2000). 9. All her plays and films have focused on marriages and women’s experiences of marriage, abandonment, widowhood etc. One can cite Sandhya Chaya, HBK, Rao Saheb, Haveli Buland thi, Shakuntala, Smritichitre etc. 10. See Yatindra Mishra’s illuminating history of the relationship of the Bai and Film Music (2009). Early gramophone and radio artists in India came from performing women backgrounds as did most cinema actresses of early films. However, Hamidabai refuses to adapt to the changing times and pays a heavy price for doing so. Sachdev’s (2009b) article on Eurasian tawaifs in India explains and elucidates their contribution to the development of recording music in colonial times and how the entertainment industry was significant for the idea of the imagined nation and identity formation. Despite their marginalized status as women performers the contribution of the tawaifs to music and entertainment industry remains historically important. 11. Bhabha discusses the idea of ‘unhomely’ experienced by some fictional women characters such as Isabel Archer in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Bimala in Tagore’s Home and the World (1916), and Aila in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1990) in The Location of Culture. 12. See Clup’s description of Vijaya Mehta’s 1976 production of Mudrar̄ ākṣasa and her 1979 production of Shakuntala for NSD. Both plays were staged in playing spaces modelled on the vikṛs ̣t ̣amadhyama, ancient architectural stage design. Her experimentations in form, traditions, stage architecture, integration of character and space that fuse traditional and modernist theatre practices are well known (Clup 2018, p. 230). 13. Haveli Bulund thi was based on a well-known play by Mahesh Elkunchwar, Wada Chirebandi (1985).

References Ailawadi, N., Banerjee, S., & Saxena, S. (2020). ‘Introduction: Perspectives on Framing Gender’. In: Banerjee, S., Saxena, S., Ailawadi, N. (eds). The Working Woman: Indian Perspectives on Stereotypes, Marginalisation and Empowerment. Bloomsbury Prime, New Delhi, pp.1–14. Banerjee, S. & Ailawadi, N. (2015). ‘A Tale of Two Divas: Gauhar Jaan and Jaddan Bai’. In: Banerjee, S., Ailawadi, N., Malhan, M. (eds). Tawaif and the Travelling Bioscope. Apple Books, New Delhi, pp. 15–26. Benegal, S. (1981). Kalyug. Filmvalas & Artisan Entertainment.

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Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge, London. Bhaskar, I. & Allen, R. (eds) (2009). Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema. Tulika, New Delhi. Butler, J. (1990). ‘Feminism and the Subversions of Identity’. In: C.C.  Gould (ed). Gender. Humanities Press, New Jersey, pp. 80–88. Chaudhuri, S. (2006). Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed. Routledge, London and New York. Clup, A. (2018). ‘Searching for Shakuntala Sanskrit drama and Theatrical modernity in Europe and India,1789-present’ (Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University). https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/161459246.pdf. Accessed on 12 June 2021. Dasgupta, C. (1983). ‘The “New” Indian Cinema: A Wave or a Future’. In: Vasudev, A., Lenglet, P. (eds). Indian Cinema Superbazar. Vikas Publishing, New Delhi, pp. 39- 49. Freire, P. (1996). The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Books Ltd, London. Ganesh, D. (2013). ‘In the Company of Women’. The Hindu. November 7. https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/society/in-­the-­company-­ of-­women/article5325469.ece. Accessed on 23 June 2021. Gokulsing, K.M., & Dissanayake, W. (1998). Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change. Trentham Books, London. Gulati, L. & Bagchi, J. (eds) (2005). A Space of Her Own: Personal Narratives of Twelve Women. Sage Publications, London. Hanisch, C. (2006). ‘The personal is political’. https://webhome.cs.uvic. ca/~mserra/Attached Files/PersonalPolitical.pdf. Accessed on 28 June 2021. Joshi, S. W. (2005). Hamidabai ki Kothi, ZEE5, Trickilainmer. Leonard, K. (2013). ‘Political Players: Courtesans of Hyderabad’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 50 (4): 423–448. https://doi. org/10.1177/00194646135024414. Loomba, A., & Lukose, R.A. (eds). (2012). South Asian Feminisms. Zubaan, New Delhi. Maity, J. (2020). ‘The Nautch Girl and Prostitute in Colonial India: the ‘Other’ Working Woman’. In: Banerjee, S., Saxena, S., Ailawadi, N., (eds). The Working Woman: Indian Perspectives on Stereotypes, Marginalisation and Empowerment. Bloomsbury Prime, New Delhi, pp. 15–35. Mansoor, A. (2016). ‘“Marginalisation” in third world feminism: its problematics and theoretical reconfigurations’. Palgrave Communications 2. https://doi. org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.26. Accessed on 15 June 2021. Mehta, V. (2005). ‘Abode of Colour’. In: Gulati, L., Bagchi, J. (eds). A Space of Her Own: Personal Narratives of Twelve Women. Sage Publications, London, pp. 181–202.

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———. (1982). Smritichitre. Doordarshan. ———. (1985). Rao Saheb. PBC Productions. ———. (1986). Shakuntala. Doordarshan. ———. (1987). Haveli Buland thi. Bombay Doordarshan. ———. (1987). Hamidabai ki Kothi. United TV. ———. (1988). Pestonjee. NFDC. ———. (1991). Lifeline. Doordarshan. Menon, K. (2020). ‘Women of Marginalized Communities: Concerns about Exclusion’. In: Musavi, A., & Gupta, J. (eds). Women of Marginalized Communities: Concerns about Exclusion, Swaroop Books, Delhi, pp xxix-xliv Mishra, Y. (2009). ‘The Bai and the Dawn of Hindi Film Music (1925-1945)’. In: The Book Review XXXIII (2): 46–47. Morcom, A. (2013). Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion. Hurst, London. Nigam, S. (2014). ‘From the Margins: Revisiting the Concept of ‘Marginalized Women’’. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2490983. Nihalini, G. (1984). Party. NFDC. Oldenburg, V. (1990). ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow, India’. Feminist Studies 16(2): 259–287. https://doi. org/10.2307/3177850. Panja, S. (2004). ‘Rabindranath Tagore’s Chokher Bali:The New Woman, Conjugality and the Heterogeneity of Home.’ In: Lal, M., Panja, S., Satpathy, S. (eds). Signifying the Self: Women and Literature. Macmillan, Delhi, pp. 211–225. Pawar, Y. (2017). ‘Theatre doyenne Vijaya Mehta Ends Seven-year-hiatus’. DNA. December 5. https://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/interview-­theatre-­ doyenne-­vijaya-­mehta-­ends-­seven-­year-­hiatus-­1960370ps. Accessed on 23 June 2021 Rajadhyaksha, A. & Willemen, P. (eds) (1995). An Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Ramnarayan, G. (2011). ‘The Saturday Interview: Trendsetter of her Time’. The Hindu. August 12. https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/the-­ saturday-­interview-­trendsetter-­of-­her-­time/article2350561.ece. Ridgeway, C. L. (2009). ‘Framed Before We Know it: How Gender Shapes Social relations. Gender and Society’. Gender and Society 23(2): 145–160. www.jstor. org/stable/20676769. Sachdev, S. J. (2009a). ‘Frames of Cinematic History: The Tawaif in Umrao Jan and Pakeezah’. In: M. Jain (ed). Narratives of Indian Cinema. Primus Books, New Delhi, pp. 167–194. Sachdev, S.J. (2009b). ‘Eurasian Women as Tawaif Singers and Recording Artists: Entertainment and Identity – Making in Colonial India’. African and Asian Studies. 8:268–287.

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Silverman, K. (1988). The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis. Singh, L. (2007). ‘Courtesans and the 1857 Revolt: Role of Azzezun in Kanpur’. The Indian Historical Review XXXIV (2): 58–78. Thatra, G. (2016). ‘Contentious (Socio-Spatial) Relations: Tawaifs and Congress House in Contemporary Bombay/ Mumbai’. Indian Journal of Gender Studies 23(2):191–217. https://doi.org/10.1177/0971521516635307. Thoraval, Y. (2000). The Cinemas of India 1896–2000. Macmillan, New Delhi. Thorner, A., & Krishnaraj, M. (eds) (2000). Ideals, Images and Real Lives: Women in Literature and History. Orient Longman, Mumbai. Vasudev, A. (1986). The New Indian Cinema. Macmillan, New Delhi. Vasudev, A. & Lenglet, P. (eds) (1983). Indian Cinema Superbazar. Vikas Publishing, New Delhi. Vanita, R.(1990). “Pestonjee” Film Review. Manushi 60:44. File60. Manushi 1983–1999. Barnard Archives and Special Collections, Barnard College Vanita, R. (2018). Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema. Bloomsbury, New York & London.

CHAPTER 16

Reconstructing Motherhood in Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s Nil Battey Sannata Priyanka Tripathi

It has been observed that ‘motherhood is not a one-size-fits-all, a mold that is all-encompassing and means the same to all people’ (Bombeck 2013, p. 10). The emergence of motherhood in the twenty-first century has been persuasively linked to the tenuous consolidation of being physically equipped to bear a child along with traditional patriarchal cultures that determine biology on one hand (Rich 1995) to the steady surge of feminism on the other. Usually, ‘the only truly enlightened choice to make as a woman, the one that proves, first, that you are a “real” woman, and second, that you are decent, worthy one is to become a “mom”’ (Douglas and Michaels 2005, p.  5). But these feminist retellings of motherhood render voice to the otherwise silent ideologies and experience of motherhood (Umansky 1996), one that is not just centred around glorified caregiving but towards individual dimensions or personal traits. ‘Mother’ derives its origin from the Latin word ‘mater’ or can be considered to be a modern English equivalent of the word ‘modor’, both of which reflect

P. Tripathi (*) IIT Patna, Daulatpur, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Iqbal Viswamohan (ed.), Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_16

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‘matriarchy’ in some ways. Dictionaries restrict themselves to being more on the biological side stating mother as a ‘parent’ and motherhood as the ‘state or time of being a mother’ while theorists have a very nuanced explanation to ‘being a mother’ from various vantage points. Andrea O’ Reilly (2004) considers motherhood to be primarily not a natural and biological function, a cultural practice which is incessantly redesigned in response to changing economic and societal factors. Amrita Nandy infers that ‘motherhood does not arise from a single defining dramatic event, but rather develops through time as a result of cumulative cultural and political influences’ (2017, p.  54). Similarly, Sarah Hardy is also of the opinion that the good mother is an idea deployed through ‘material and discursive spaces in order to mobilize subjectivities that are socially adapted and useful’ (Hardy and Wiedmer 2005, p.  16). Linguistically decoding the same, Roman Jakobson in his article ‘Why “Mama” and “Papa”?’ stated that vocalizations of a baby take place primarily due to crying or shrieking that eventually culminates into baby noises being recognised in vowels and consonants of which ‘ah’ can fit most conveniently with ‘mahs’ and ‘pahs’ (2019, p. 313). Despite the glorification of motherhood, women’s role in procreation has long been neglected in Hindu literature as well. A father’s contribution has been referred to as a seed, while a mother’s contribution has been referred to as ground. In reality, it is believed that the father’s sperm is the most vital component of the child’s blood, hence creating patriliny. Manusmriti blatantly affirms: ‘Of the seed and the womb, the seed is superior. All creatures of life assume the quality of the seed’ (Nandy 2017, p. 69). Due to such diverse interpretations, more and more women began to shun conforming to the defined roles of mothers. They didn’t want to view it as a goal and therefore, by turning down these biologically assigned responsibilities for all the childcare activities to be performed by them, setting fathers free and without any childcare responsibilities, they desired equal participation of both the parents in bringing up the child. While such radical shifts receive consideration for critical discussions, motherhood and its association with female parenting also implement possibilities for sustaining the subjectivity of the mothers. In this regard, bell hooks suggest that motherhood should receive deserving recognition, praise, and celebration within a feminist context where there is renewed effort to rethink the nature of motherhood; to make motherhood neither a compulsory experience for women

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nor an exploitative or oppressive one; to make female parenting good, effective parenting, whether it is done exclusively by women or in conjunction with men. (2000, p. 136)

Subduing such effective possibilities of female parenting and child care, motherhood, however, has been utilized as a soft means of encoding masculine subordination and subjugation. The different genres of popular culture often replicate these ideologies and represent its uneven gendered efficacies. Hindi films have assiduously captured, reflected, and imagined the sense and sensibilities of the time it’s being made (Tremblay 2007; Dwyer 2014). With changing politics and polemics of the nation, it has also altered its text and technique to match the pulse of the transforming dynamics. One of the iconic penetrations has been towards the idea of motherhood in Hindi cinema. If an attempt is made to document and categorize the changes that the idea of motherhood has undergone, one comes across a glaring shift of this idea towards being initially rooted in biology and routed through religion and culture to setting out on a different trajectory during the colonial times and especially during India’s independence movement, when it got aligned with the idea of nation and nationalism (Siddiqi 2008). Two major epics in India, The Mahabharata and The Ramayana are replete with references that place being a mother on a high pedestal (Krishnan 1990; ANI 2021). In 1957, Mehboob Khan’s Mother India was made as a response to Katherine Mayo, an American historian’s book Mother India (1927) which according to popular perception of that time was an attempt to vilify Indian culture (Sinha 2006). Mayo had highlighted the problems of child marriage and the general ill-treatment and cruelty that women in India faced. She had also inferred that it was ‘the ruinously abating sexuality of Indian males as the core problem that led to sexual aggression, rape, homosexuality, prostitution, and venereal diseases’ (Mitra 2020, p.  5). This had led to a huge uproar because for Indians, Mother India or Bharat Mata referred not only to the magnificent and glorified sentiments attached to the idea of the Goddess of India in which India as a country is personified as a goddess, but also meant for the mother in general, who on one hand was loving and caring and on the other, strong and powerful when it came to being the torchbearer of wisdom and righteousness for her children. With motherhood being deeply entrenched in the patriarchal structure, the maternal body is also dissociated from her identity, negating her subjective

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experience. The conventional expectation of her being ‘selfless’ in her actions divests her of embodiment and inflicts a self-silencing stance. Hindi cinema despite deifying and idolizing motherland and motherhood on screen—‘Janani janmabhumischa svargadapi gariyasi’ (Mother and motherland are greater than heaven; Ramaswamy 2010, p. 73) has rendered the experiences of motherhood invisible. Such glorification of motherhood in a way infuses the biologically potent capacity as a ladder for social status and position that is ideally ascribed. Implicitly enough, such idealizations sought to dictate the mother figure’s patriarchal expectations and impending doings. Therefore, behind the idealized status, these reverences substantiate ‘motherhood’ as the prime institution to discriminate against women as subordinates that subdue their distinct subjective experiences. Indeed as Krishnaraj observes, ‘As an ideology, it is generalized into an acceptable cultural mode of thought and behaviour. In India, glorification may be a means to make motherhood culturally acceptable’ 1995, p. 36). The suffering, self-sacrificing ‘reel’ mother has been a recurrent figure in Bollywood films. Films, such as Yash Chopra’s Deewaar (The Wall, 1975) often limited the mother’s choice and freedom as her existence was essentially dependent on her sons’ benevolence. The impending danger that is ingrained in these cultural manifestations is that films as a popular cultural medium are recasting patriarchal visions of ‘motherhood’ as a natural desire of having protective sons as the basic essential means for retaining female existence in society. It is even more vicious than the radical feminist denials of motherhood and its associated duties. The constant portrayals of feeble ‘motherhood’ protected by sons attempt to repress the potentials of mothers to edges leading to the causes of motherhood suffocation in the role of a ‘mother’ that can alternately be enjoyed if intended. The popular representation in films reinforces the social expectations and cultural constructions of motherhood that are imposed one way or the other in becoming leading role models. Some women figures internalize these ideologies without questioning the uneven construction of the ‘motherhood’ image. However, beyond such passive consumers of ‘motherhood’ subordination, there are also some cultural narratives that do counter such discourses that eventually subvert the dominant configurations of ‘motherhood’. A major shift can be seen towards the end of the twentieth century when technological interventions deconstructed motherhood. Western feminists argue that a thorough and theoretical study of women surviving

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in patriarchal society or under male subjugation is incomplete without taking into account the ‘woman’s function as a mother of daughters and as a daughter of mothers’ (Nandy 2017, p. 37). These roles are to identities that are defined in relation to ‘previous and subsequent generations of women’ and find more meaning in the emotional, political, economic, and symbolic structures of family and society (Hirsch 1981, p.  202). Undoubtedly, these arguments might have led to complex categorizations of motherhood, but not without making a significant case of this idea that became an iconoclastic starting point of altered deliberations and discourses of motherhood, one that is not deeply entrenched in patriarchal sentiments. Ashwini Iyer Tiwari in Nil Battey Sannata (transl. being an absolute zero, incompetent) is one such instance that focuses on maternal issues. This film deconstructs the idea of traditional motherhood in many ways and provides a rich canvas or a prism through which Indian society, deeply rooted in a traditionally patriarchal culture can be interpreted differently. The Hindi film industry, also known as ‘Bollywood’, depends highly on male protagonists and ‘female characters generally do not have much meaning without their male counterparts’ (Gupta 2015, p. 110). However, Tiwari dedicates Nil Battey Sannata to ‘God’s most wonderful creation-­ MOTHER’ by curating a lead female protagonist on whose shoulder she not only decides to helm the film but also makes a major statement out of her with the help of tropes such as ‘motherhood’, ‘ageing’ and ‘ambition’. In this film, the actress is not just a pretty face, rather she is portrayed as a symbol of inspiration, instrumental in making choices and establishing her agency. The trope of motherhood employed through Chanda in Nil Battey Sannata compels the audience to give respect and seriousness otherwise attributed to male protagonists. She is an assertive woman, capable of dreaming big and being the living example of who she wants her future daughter to be. Nil Battey Sannata revisits parental authority and has two central characters around whom the plot of the film revolves: Swara Bhaskar as Chanda Sahay, a high-school drop-out domestic worker and single mother of a sullen young girl named Apeksha, played by Riya Shukla. As Apeksha or Apu as she is usually called by her mother, struggles with her education, especially with high school mathematics as a subject, Chanda decides to coach her with her some words of wisdom. Apu on the other hand is of the opinion that even if she works hard she may not be able to achieve much as her mother can barely manage her living and school education

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with her menial job. Higher education is a far-fetched dream and an unrealistic expectation out of their situation. She says, ‘ek engineer ka beta engineer, ek doctor ka beta doctor aur ek bai ki beti aur kya ban sakti hai, bai’ (an engineer’s son will become engineer and a doctor’s son becomes a doctor. What can a maid’s daughter be? Maid, it’s that simple) (NBS). This infuriates her mother who despite her economic status strives for a good life for her daughter. The daughter has her own point in which she declares, ‘is desh mein to bacchon ko apna career decide karne ki koi freedom nahi hai’ (the children in this country have no freedom to decide their career). Ruth Maxey describes this phenomenon as the notion of ‘inescapable maternal presence or mother-weight’ which refers to a kind of conspicuous presence of being surrounded by mother and her questions. This is in contrast to the popular psychological belief that suggests that the presence of a mother can help you understand the ways of the world in a more secure way (Maxey 2006). This is an alternative configuration of motherhood, one that doesn’t conform to the desirable construction of the image of a mother, one that typically includes ‘caring, tending, and compassion, which by extension include cooking, washing or other necessary activities entailed by the patriarchy from which others/fathers are released’ (Krishnaraj 1995, p. 36.; qtd. in Mitra 2020, p. 65). Adrienne Rich in her book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1995) also refers to motherhood being natural to women but also emphasises that one should be wary of the archetypes in which mothers become some kind of prototypes of ideals created, sanctioned and promoted by patriarchy. The very idea of motherhood has been glorified and worshipped in global culture. The association of women and their capability to bear and bring up a child has often been seen as the only ‘ambition’ of a woman’s life. As Bertrand Russell notes, ‘Fruitfulness, whether of crops, or of flocks and herds, or of women, was of prime importance to men in the beginnings of agricultural and pastoral stages’ (Russell 1996, p. 199). Societal expectation of being a productive woman through being a mother under the protection of a patriarchal setup of a family has changed with the currents of time as reflected in the movie with Chanda’s single-handed parenting of her daughter Apeksha or Apu. Kotwal and Prabhakar’s 2009 study confirms how a single mother often faces emotional turmoil along with the ‘feeling of rootlessness’ and ‘lack of identity’ after going through the loss of a protective and breadwinning male figure in the family. The mother playing both the roles of caregiving and bread-earning parent,

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Chanda tries to caress and console her daughter by saying, ‘Maa hoon main teri, gudiya’ (I am your mom, child) to which Apeksha reverts with ‘toh baap banne ki koshish mat kiya kar’ (Don’t try to be my dad), intensifying the lack of a father-figure even more strongly. The overt glorification of motherhood has also been challenged by the representation of Chanda’s character through her portrayal of humane emotions of frustration, anger or resentment when not being able to manoeuvre her child in the right way. When Apeksha, her daughter does not conform to her ‘developmentally appropriated practice’ and continues to defy her mother’s wishes of crafting a career out of their impoverished condition and throws teenage tantrums by stealing money or wasting time in idle activities instead of studying, Chanda vents out her emotional outburst by calling her daughter afad hai ladki afad (she’s a big pain in the neck) or jhanjhat hai tu jhanjhat (you’re a burden on me). The question of successful motherhood is put under threat even though Chanda invests all her efforts and energy into shaping her future’s daughter. Not only by working hard to save money for her daughter’s coaching classes but Chanda fights back the hardships by enrolling herself into school. From her repercussion of ‘agar main khud samajh leti na… toh kuch bhi kar ke use padha hi deti’ (if I could understand…then I would have tutored her) to her journey of enrolling herself in school and taking on a challenge to motivate her daughter to study demonstrates her commitment to her role as a mother, a guide, and a role model that her daughter required. With her teenage daughter’s mental troubles, Chanda discovers and builds her own identity via schooling. The process of parenting becomes liberated as Chanda transitions from a bai (maid) to a math tutor for tenth-grade students, overcoming her fear over her daughter’s future, her guilt and humiliation about poverty, and her aggravation over her own incapacity. As a child, Chanda had to leave her education midway but she did not wish her daughter to meet the same fate as hers. To motivate her daughter, she decides to enroll herself in the same school as Apu’s and become her classmate. Following which she not only had to face her daughter’s anger but also sarcastic comments from others. In one such episode at school, when Chanda is introduced by the Principal to high school students, Pintu one of her classmates makes fun of her and states, ‘is umra mein aurtain lagati hain mathe par bindi, ye ab aayein hain is umra mein padhne English, Math and Hindi’ (women at her age are busy adorning themselves with bindi but she has come to study in school, English, Math and Hindi) (NBS). However, the support of the school principal, Shrivastava, and her

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employer (Ratna Pathak Shah) suggests that social changes and transformation in attitude is possible pertaining to women, particularly for the ones who are vulnerable in one way or the other, only when more people in society develop sympathetic understanding. Very soon, Chanda starts doing well in Mathematics. In one such episode when she gets higher marks than her daughter in Mathematics, her daughter is infuriated. In her anger, she tells her that fetching more marks is of no use to her as she is just a domestic worker and will continue to be one. Failing to convince her mother through cajoling and coaxing, this aggression was her final attack but instead of losing her cool, her mother openly challenges her, which is, if she gets better grades than her in Mathematics, she will drop out of the school. However, one is reminded of the conditioning regarding class dynamics prevalent in our society, which one is not ready to let go despite opportunities walking one’s way. A kind of discomfort is visualised when these cushioned domains are challenged. This incident invariably reminds us of ‘poverty trap’ which is a spiraling mechanism which forces people to remain poor (The Economic Times). This notion has not been used in this context but can well be appropriated. In general, this phenomenon occurs due to lack of capital and credit to people but in its appropriation within this context, it can as well be due to being less motivated individuals lacking ambition and passion for growth. The status quo of single motherhood comes with its own problems that does not confine itself only with the emotional and physical toils of mothering a child, but also imposes the responsibility of earning bread for the family. A large majority of single-parent households experience financial difficulties. Meeting the fundamental requirements of children becomes increasingly challenging to provide for the basic necessities, and to maintain the necessary quality of life. In this context, the depiction of Chanda’s character effectively portrays the quotidian struggle of single mothers. Chanda’s position as a maid, further complicates the situation. Her financial woes worsen as the intersection of class and gender comes into play. One may focus on the struggle of penurious single mothers which has also been analysed in the Indian feminist movement. Radha Kumar captures the transition: The bourgeois ideology of motherhood was now expanded to include working class women. Perhaps it was because of this that no real attempts were made to canvass against women’s retrenchment from industrial employment: instead, attempts were made to carve out the space of ‘women’s work’

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which, for both middle class and poor women, centred on her biologically defined qualities of motherhood. (Kumar 1997, p. 71)

To overcome the financial impediment in the way of forging a better future for her daughter, Chanda takes up several menial jobs when her daughter questions if her mother could afford her higher education at all. And the only way that Chanda comes up with to defy the shackles of their destitute life is to plant a dream in her daughter’s mind and pursue it with hard work and perseverance. One fine day, Chanda’s dream finds a concrete vision upon accidentally meeting the District Collector (Sanjay Suri). With persistent efforts, she manages to meet him to find out about the process of becoming an IAS officer. He informs her that in order to become an IAS officer, one doesn’t require a lot of money but needs to put in a lot of hard work. Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exams have to be cracked after doing graduation from any college. She is extremely happy when Apu gets good marks in Mathematics. She thinks that finally her daughter has sparked interest in studies but gets shattered when her daughter tells her, ‘khud to apne jindagi mein kuch kar nahi payee, aur ab apne sapne mujpe thopna chahti ho’ (you couldn’t do anything in your life, and now you want to impose your dreams on me). Soon, she realizes the value of efforts put by her mother and decides to change the course of her life by studying hard. In her IAS interview when she is asked, ‘Apeksha, aap IAS kyun banana chahti hain?’ (Apeksha, why do you want to become an IAS officer?), ‘kyunki main bai nahi banana chahti’ (because I do not want to be a maid), she replies. Nil Battey Sannata reflects different spectrums of motherhood but in its every facet, it restores the dignity of a mother. What may sometimes appear to be a compromised or an appendage to conventional notions of motherhood as defined by patriarchy gets usually challenged in these films. While it is true that in terms of practice, usually fathers in the context of India, shrug off any childcare responsibilities, and mothers, working or not, keep on reeling themselves to nurture kids related responsibilities; however, in this film, one comes across a well-crafted individual who doesn’t care for a meaning that society has assigned to her on the basis of her biological being. Chanda is shown as a single parent in the film who at some point of time, has lost her husband but, in the film, not even once she reflects a kind of helplessness in which she states that her miseries would have ended had her husband been there. She is financially less

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resourceful but her determination and hard work well compensate for that lacunae. Not even once in the film does Chanda laments that if her husband was there, their life would have been different. She is a strong woman to her insensitive daughter who only understands the value of her mother’s attitude towards the end of the film. In appreciation of both the actors, Nandini Ramnath in her review writes, ‘Swara Bhaskar is perfect as Chanda and beautifully captures her character’s spirit, drive and endless optimism. But full marks too to Riya Shukla, who depicts Apeksha’s intransigence and immaturity without a trace of self-consciousness’ (Ramnath 2016, n.p.). In the interest of patriarchally defined and biological confirmed roles, ‘The idea of a “good” mother is deployed through material and discursive spaces in order to mobilize subjectivities that are socially adapted and useful-­keeping the attention of mothers focused on their children and their needs, wants, and activities’ (Marotta 2016, p. 21). In the climax of Nil Battey Sannata, there is an instinctual sequence of Chanda’s conversation with her daughter in which something that started with a dispute over education and ambition turns into a full-blown moment of fulfilment of individual desire in a customary space. It can well be quoted as a conclusion: You know there is no wrong in failing. What’s wrong is admitting to it without trying. Always remember one thing, ‘your dream belongs to you’. Lot of people will laugh on your dream. A very few people will understand your dream. Keep them close. They will keep your dream alive.

The entire critical analysis of the film Nil Battey Sannata has exposed the gendered nexus of ‘motherhood’ and inevitable ‘single parenting’ which apparently reinforce patriarchal ethics but simultaneously subverts it as a soft gesture of establishing subjectivity and impending empowerment. While popular culture often projects tendencies of motherhood stereotypes enforced by patriarchal societies, NBS has thwarted such tenacious tendencies and sets the goal to critique motherhood both as a challenge and empowerment. At this particular juncture, the obvious question remains—if motherhood is socially and culturally constructed, how it can be reconstructed beyond social obligation, challenge, entanglement and subordination but more as a medium of pursuing ambition and subjectivity. Putting these evocative concerned questions in queue, Denise Thompson in a different context recommends the suspension of glorification of motherhood, rather focusing on the very issue of ‘mothering’ itself

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and for this, ‘mothering arrangements are to be changed in the interests of everyone, social resources, both material (such as adequate income and child care), and intangible (such as respect) need to be provided in abundance for the women who already mother’ (Thompson 2001, p. 89). Such a change in approach would not only dismantle the glorification and subordination of ‘motherhood’ but would shape the act of mothering as means of sustaining, re-defining and asserting the ‘self’. The protagonist of this very film has reinforced this agency of ‘motherhood’ or ‘mothering’ to be more specific on and again during single parenting her daughter. While her inevitable ‘motherhood’ apparently restricted her experiences into multiple challenges of social obligations, this ‘motherhood’ challenge itself becomes a driving factor in pursuing her ambition, sustaining subjectivity, and endorsing agency. The entire projection in this film recasts the social construction of motherhood within the institution like family as ‘selfless’ and naturally caring, subverting it as an effective tool for women’s empowerment, particularly through single parenting.

References ANI PR (2021). ‘Plan for Working Women and Mothers in 75th Year of Indian Independence.’ The Print. August 15. https://theprint.in/ani-­press-­releases/ p l a n -­f o r-­w o r k i n g -­w o m e n -­a n d -­m o t h e r s -­i n -­7 5 t h -­y e a r-­o f -­i n d i a n -­ independence/716031/. Accessed on 16 August 2021. Anon. (n.d.). ‘Definition of ‘Poverty Trap”. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/definition/poverty-­trap. Accessed on 20 August 2021. Bombeck, E. (2013). Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession. Open Road Integrated Media, New York. Chopra, Y. (1975). Deewaar. Trimurti Films Pvt. Ltd. Douglas, S.J. & Michaels M.W. (2005). The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It has Undermined All Women. Guilford Press, New York. Dwyer, R. (2014). Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India. Reaktion Books Ltd., London. Gupta, S. (2015). ‘Kahaani, Gulaab Gang and Queen: Remaking the Queens of Bollywood.’ South Asian Popular Culture 13(2):107–123. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14746689.2015.108710. Hardy, S. & Wiedmer, C. (2005). Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the Maternal through Politics, Home and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Hirsch, M. (1981). ‘Mothers and Daughters’. Signs 7(1): 200–222. Hooks, B. (2000). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Pluto Press, London.

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Jakobson, R. (2019). ‘Why “Mama” and “Papa”?’. In: Readings in Modern Linguistics: An Anthology. De Gruyter Monton, Berlin, pp.  313–320. doi:https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110820041-­021. Khan, M. (1957). Mother India. Mehboob Productions. Kotwal, N. & Prabhakar, B. (2009). ‘Problems Faced by Single Mothers’. Journal of Social Sciences 21(3):197–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/0971892 3.2009.1189277. Krishnaraj, M. (1995). ‘Motherhood—Power and Powerlessness’. In: J.  Bagchi (ed). Indian Women: Myth and Reality. Sangam Books (India) Ltd., Calcutta, pp. 34–44. Krishnan, P. (1990). ‘In the Idiom of Loss: Ideology of Motherhood in Television Serials’. Economic and Political Weekly 25(42/43): WS103–WS116. Kumar, R. (1997). The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India 1800-1990. Kali for Women, New Delhi. Marotta, M. (2016). ‘Mother Space: Disciplining through the Material and Discursive’. In: Wiedmer, C., Hardy, S. (eds). Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the Maternal through Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 15–33. Maxey, R. (2006). ‘Interview: Meena Alexander.’ MELUS 31(2):21–39. Mitra, Z. (ed) (2020). The Concept of Motherhood in India: Myths, Theories and Realities. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne. Nandy, A. (2017). Motherhood and Choice: Uncommon Mothers, Childfree Women. Zubaan, New Delhi. O’Reilly, A. (ed) (2004). Mother Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering. Women’s Press, Toronto. Ramaswamy, S. (2010). The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Duke University Press, Durham. Ramnath, N. (2016). ‘Film Review: Nil Battey Sannata is a Mostly Winning Tale of Dunces and Dreamers.’ Scroll. April 22. https://scroll.in/article/807011/ film-­r eview-­n il-­b attey-­s annata-­i s-­a -­m ostly-­w inning-­t ale-­o f-­d unces-­a nd-­ dreamers. Accessed on 6 October 2021. Rich, A. (1995). Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W.W. Norton & Company, New York. Russell, B. (1996). ‘Phallic Worship, Asceticism and Sin’. In: Marriage and Morals. Routledge, Oxon. Siddiqi, Y. (2008). Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue. Columbia University Press, New York. Sinha, M. (2006). Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. Duke University Press, Durham. Thompson, D. (2001). Radical Feminism Today. Sage Publications, London. Tiwari, I.A. (2016). Nil Battey Sannata. JAR Pictures, Colour Yellow Productions.

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Tremblay, R.C. (2007). ‘Representation and Reflection of Self and Society in the Bombay Cinema’. Contemporary South Asia 5(3):303–318. https://doi. org/10.1080/09584939608719798. Umansky, L. (1996). Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties. New York University Press, New York.



Glossary

Indian word

Meaning

Aapa Atma Bahir Bai Banarasi Bejaan Bhadralok Bhasha Bindi

Elder sister (a word especially used among Muslims) Spirit Outside Maid or househelp; also, a word suggesting respect for women From the city of Banaras Lifeless Genteel folks (Bengali) Language A small colored and often decorative mark worn by Indian, especially Hindu, women on their foreheads A town in the state of Madhya Pradesh, particularly known for its handwoven saris (popularly known as Chanderi saris) Bantering, lighthearted teasing Box Big brother, paternal grandfather, gangster boss One and a half Heart Let the heart beat Home Alley, street Arrogant, audacious different Mansion

Chanderi Ched-chaad Dabba Dada Dedh Dil Dil Dhadakne Do Ghar Gully Gustakh Hatke Haveli

(continued)

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Glossary

(continued) Indian word

Meaning

Hijra Hichki Jaan Jatra Jhanjhat Kabaddi Karva chauth Kathak Khaas Kotha Kothi Ladki Lagaan Lootera Mast Mardaani Matlab Mawsi (mausi) Mulk Odhni Pagglait Parampara Paratha Taare Zameen Par Sapne Saas-bahu Sarangi Saheb Salaam Sapne Shaadi Shanti Silvat Tanpura Tawaif Wada Zindagi Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara Zubaan

Transgender Hiccup Life a popular folk-theatre form of Odia and Bengali theatre Problem, burden A contact-team sport played between two teams of seven players A Hindu festival observed by married women A form of Indian classical dance Important Brothel Mansion Girl Tax Dacoit, robber Carefree A brave woman Meaning Maternal aunt Nation A garment for covering the head Crazy (slang) Tradition A flat thick piece of bread usually made with wheat flour Stars on earth Dreams (also, aspirations) Mother-in-law, daughter-in-law A musical instrument Sir, master Salute, also a manner of greeting Dreams Marriage Peace Crease A musical instrument Courtesan A residence complex Life You won’t live twice Language (also, tongue)

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 8 Mile, 40, 41 1942 A Love Story, 101 1942, Romeo and Juliet, 226 1947 Earth, 264 #MeToo movement, 3 A Aaina, 55, 59, 64 Aandhi, 62 Acquaintance rape, 248, 249 Affective value, 186 Ahuja, Sonam Kapoor, 220 Akhtar, Farhan, 33, 138 Akhtar, Javed, 33, 57, 58, 99, 262 Akhtar, Zoya, 2, 4, 98 Aligarh, 216 Alkazi, Ebrahim, 283 Altman, Rick, 81 Amar Akbar Anthony, 115

Amazon Prime, 139 American feminism, 287 Amin, Idi, 174 Anand, Chetan, 273 Anpadh, 13 Anti-homophobia, 222 Anurag Kashyap Films Private Limited (AKFPL), 139 Anwer, Megha, 82 Apte, Shanta, 197 Armaan, 55, 69, 73 Arora, Anupama, 82 Art cinema, 150 Aryan, Kartik, 90 Athique, Adrian, 184 Atman, 74 Aunty Sudha and Aunty Radha (ASAR), 93 Aur Pyaar Ho Gaya, 67 Auteur(s), 120, 293 Auteurist, 294 Azmi, Shabana, 62, 116

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

B Baazi, 265 Bachchan, Abhishek, 129 Bachchan, Amitabh, 15, 69 Baghban, 45 Bajirao Mastani, 264 Balan, Vidya, 139 Balki, R., 27 Banarasi, 265 Barjatya, Sooraj, 35, 228 Barsaat Ki Ek Raat, 267 Barthes, Roland, 172 Barve, Anil, 289 Basinger, Jeanine, 12 Basu, Anustup, 84 Bath Film Festival Director Tarquini, Holly, 242 Bedi, Angad, 22 Begum, Fatma, 1 The Bell Jar, 239 Bend It Like Beckham, 161 Benegal, Shyam, 13, 150 Best Foreign Film, 166 Between Friends, 232 Beyond Bollywood, 163 Bhansali, Sanjay Leela, 112, 261 Bhaskar, Swara, 309 Bhatt, Alia, 139 Bhaumik, Kaushik, 161 Bhumika, 62 Bicycle Thieves, 166 Bigelow, Kathryn, 88 Bittu, 149 Black, 259 Bollywood, 2, 12, 73 Bollywood Hollywood, 161 Bombay, 129, 182 Bombay Boys, 2 Bombay cinema, 48 Bombay Hustle, 138 Bombay Talkies, 98 Boot Polish, 129

Border, 266 Born Free Entertainment, 139 Bose, Shonali, 3 Brand Bollywood, 182 Breathe: Into the Shadows, 259 Bressonian, 164 British Historical Cinema, 263 Broacha, Cyrus, 146 Bulbbul, 4 Bulbul-e-Paristan, 1 Butler, Judith, 3, 300n3 C C.I.D., 265 Caccia alla volpe, 113 Calling Sehmat, 271 Cannes, 146, 166 Cartier Bresson, Henry, 164 Casssandra, Regina, 222 CBFC, 238 Central Board of Film Certification, 153 Chadha, Gurinder, 1, 161 Chak De India!, 104 Chakraborty, Subroto, 265 Chakravarti, Uma, 225 Chanderi, 265 Chandni, 60 Chandra, Tanuja, 4 Chatterjee, Basu, 13, 62, 150 Chatterjee, Partha, 15 Chaturvedi, Juhi, 3, 150 Chauha, Sunidhi, 47 Chawla, Juhi, 59, 64, 67, 230 Chick flicks, 91 Chopra, Aditya, 58, 139 Chopra, Anupama, 20, 34 Chopra, B.R., 13 Chopra, Pam, 58 Chopra, Priyanka, 3, 39 Chopra, Yash, 58, 162

 INDEX 

Choudhury, Sarita, 174 Cinemas of India, 163 Cinema vérité, 5 Cinephilia, 120 Cixous, Helene, 3, 4 Clean Slate Films, 138 The Color Purple, 239 Constitutiveof womanhood, 256 Coolie, 123 Crawford, Joan, 150 Critical Race Studies, 218 Cuklanz, Lisa M., 248 Cukor, George, 150 Cultural capital, 50 CUT TO, 274 D Daddy Long Legs, 60–61 Dadlani, Vishal, 47 Darmiyaan, 1 Darr, 55 Das, Nandita, 4 Das, Swati, 48 Dasvidaniya, 141 Davis, Bette, 150 Dayama, Yashaswini, 22 DDLJ, 63 De Sica, Vittorio, 166 Dear Zindagi, 21, 219 Death of the author, 288 Debord, Guy, 5, 180 Dedh Ishqiya, 12 Deewaar, 57, 128 Degrees of Consent, 248 Deol, Sunny, 66 Desai, Jigna, 163 Desai, Manmohan, 115 Dhaliwal, Gazal, 6 Dhar, Shelly Chopra, 215 Dharam-Veer, 123 Dharavi, 41, 166

323

Dharma Productions, 27 Dharmendra, 123 Dhoom Tana, 122 Dhulipala, Sobhita, 44 Di Sica, Vittorio, 113 Diasporic audience, 63 Diasporic Indian, 171 Dil Apna Aur Preet Parayi, 69 Dil Dhadakne Do, 98 Dil to Pagal Hai (DTPH), 82 Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, 58 The Dirty Picture, 11 Disability in Hindi cinema, 267 Displacement, 170 Dixit, Madhuri, 49, 82, 120 Do Aur Do Paanch, 115 Don, 121 Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, 165, 167, 171 Dream Girl, 121 Dube, Karishma Dev, 149 Dubey, Ira, 22 Duhan, Abhishek, 223 Dushman, 81 Dutt, Barkha, 146 Dutt, Sanjay, 85 Dutt, Sunil, 125 Duvernay, Ava, 142 Dwyer, Rachel, 62 E E.T., 71 Écriture féminine, 3 Ek Pal, 1 Eliot, T.S., 168 Elkunchwar, Mahesh, 283, 301n13 Elsaesser, Thomas, 121 Eminem, 40 The Empire, 277 Empire of the Moghul, 277 English Vinglish, 26, 219

324 

INDEX

Estés, Clarissa Pinkola, 239 Eternal Sunshine Productions, 139 Excel Entertainment, 138 Exotic cultural spectacles, 185 F Feels Like Ishq, 216 Female filmmaker, 50 Female homosociality, 42 Female sexuality, 238 The Feminine Mystique, 14 Feminism, 285 Feminist films, 242 practice, 287 scholars, 287 Feminist masculinity, 37 Feminist movement, 287 Femme fatales, 272 Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT), 153 Film Companion, 20, 149 Film festivals, 3 Finding Fanny, 12 Fire, 215, 216 First Post, 138 “Flowers for Algernon”, 71 Foucault, Michel, 3 Fourth Wave Feminism, 4 Francis, Leslie, 248 F-Rated, 242 Freudian theories, 126 Friedan, Betty, 14 From Reverence to Rape, 3 FTII, 145 G Gade, Akanksha, 22 Gangs of Wasseypur, 141 Garm Hava, 129 Gender, 2 Genres, 90

Ghai, Subhash, 124 Gibson, William, 266 Girl Rising, 173 Globalization, 63 Gold, 97 The Golden Notebook, 239 Gopal, Sangita, 242 Gordimer, Nadine, 301n11 Gowariker, Ashutosh, 98 The Great Gambler, 121 Guddi, 62 Gulabo Sitabo, 195 Gully Boy, 98 Gulzar, Meghna, 2, 265 Gupta, Sayani, 152 Guptan, Anvita Dutt, 4 Guzaarish, 259 H Habitus, 185 Hamidabai ki Kothi, 6 Hanisch, Carol, 287 Happy New Year, 112 Haqeeqat, 266 Haraamkhor, 140 Haseen Dillruba, 230 Haskell, Molly, 3, 12 Haveli Buland thi, 284 HBO shows, 167 Hegemonic power structures, 185 Heller-Nicholas, Alexander, 85 Henry, O., 269 The Hero: Love Story of a Spy, 69, 273 Heteronormative romance, 91, 226 Heteropatriarchy, 49, 50 Heterosexual imaginary, 223 Hichki, 139 Highway, 12 Hindi cinema, 81 Hindustan Ki Kasam, 266 Hip-hop, 41 Hiptoola, Elahe, 2

 INDEX 

Hollywood, 111 Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd, 98, 102 hooks, bell, 174 Hum Aapke Hain Koun, 228 Hum Kisise Kum Nahin, 115 The Hurt Locker, 88 Hussain, Adil, 13 Hyderabad Blues, 2 I I Am, 12 Idiom of cinema, 174 Indian cinema, 163 Indian Idol, 112 Indianness, 180 Indian New Wave cinema, 283, 284 Indian Women Rising, 149 India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid, 240 Indie Film/Indie’ cinema, 2, 5 Ingraham, Chrys, 223 Intersectional feminism, 4 Intertextuality, 117 INT. SYED HOUSE—SEHMAT & IQBAL’S BEDROOM— NIGHT, 274 Iqbal, 2 Irani, Boman, 169 Irani, Daisy, 56 Irani, Honey, 3, 4 Irrfan, 91, 92, 200, 224 Ishqiya, 11 Islamicate, 42 Itachuna Rajbari, 265 Iyer, Bhavani, 3, 6 J Jab Pyar Kisise Hota Hai, 67 Jagte Raho, 129 Jain, Naman, 47 Jakobson, Roman, 306

325

Jalal, Farida, 72 James, Henry, 301n11 Jane Eyre, 65 Jau Mi Cinemat, 197 Jawani Deewani, 115 Jio MAMI, 142 Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, 129 Jodha Akbar, 264 Johar, Karan, 35 John Jani Janardhan, 123 Jonas, Priyanka Chopra, 139 Judgementall Hai Kya, 230 K Kaabil, 267 Kaafir, 259 Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, 63 Kafir, 277 Kagti, Reema, 5, 97 Kahaani, 12 Kahan Kahan Se Guzar Gaye, 112 Kaho Na Pyar Hai, 55 Kaif, Katrina, 49, 119 Kajol, 85 Kalyug, 283 Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, 180 Kapoor and Sons, 216 Kapoor, Anil, 46, 69 Kapoor, Arjun, 46 Kapoor, Boney, 46 Kapoor, Ekta, 149 Kapoor, Jahnavi, 44, 46 Kapoor, Kareena, 103 Kapoor, Karisma, 82 Kapoor, Kunal, 22 Kapoor, Raj, 129, 163 Kapoor, Rishi, 124 Kapoor, Sonam, 46 Karva chauth, 246 Karve, Anna, 300n4 Karve, Dhondo Keshav, 300n4 Karz, 113

326 

INDEX

Kashyap, Tahira, 149 Katha, 62 Kaun? Who Did It?, 153 Kavi, 140 Keller, Helen, 265 Kesari, 260 Keyes, Daniel, 71 Khalnayak, 66 Khamoshi, 22 Khan, Aamir, 35 Khan, Farah, 2, 5 Khan, Salim, 262 Khan, Shahrukh (SRK), 24, 27, 82, 113 Khan, Zayed, 116 Khanna, Akshay, 128 Khanna, Twinkle, 67 Kher, Kirron, 116 Khilona, 22 Khuddar, 267 Khushboo, 62 Kimmel, Michael S., 271 Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, 148 KNPH, 68 Kongara, Sudha, 153 Krrish, 56, 73 Krrish 2, 57, 73 Krrish 3, 73 Krrish trilogy, 70 Kumar, Akshay, 86, 104, 119 Kumar, Ashok, 57 Kumar, Raj, 69 Kunder, Shirish, 114 Kya Kehna, 67 L La Femme Nikita, 273 Laawaaris, 67 Lagaan, 69, 98, 104, 127 Lajmi, Kalpana, 1 Lakshya, 98

Lamhe, 58, 60 The Last Leaf, 269 The Last Time I Saw Paris, 18 The Laugh of the Medusa, 3 Lessing, Doris, 239 LGBTQI +, 6 Limitrophy, 297 Lipstick Under My Burkha, 216 Little Zizou, 165, 168 Locarno International Film Festival, 2 Lootera, 259 Lowenthal, David, 259 The Lunchbox, 141 M Made in Heaven, 98 Madhumati, 121 Mahaan, 121 Mahal, 103 Main Hoon Na, 2, 112 Making Movies in a Colonial City, 138 Male gaze, 3 Manikarnika, 260 Mann, 267 Manto, 4 Marathi theatre of the 1960s, 283 Mardaani, 12, 139 Marginalization, 295 Marxism, 3 Mary Kom, 12 Masaan, 141 Masculinity, 37, 73 Masoom, 116 Mata Hari image, 272 Mathur, Arjun, 44 Maxey, Ruth, 310 McGregor, Joan, 248 Meena Kumari, 57, 69 Mehbooba, 121 Mehta, Deepa, 1, 161, 215 Mehta, Vijaya, 6 Melancholia, 125

 INDEX 

Melodrama, 81, 90 Mera Naam Joker, 116 Merchant-Ivory productions, 165 The metaphoric feminine, 245 Middle-brow cinema, 150 Mills and Boon romance, 64 Mind Your Language, 17 MIR, 276 The Miracle Worker, 266 Mirch Masala, 62 Mirza, Diya, 139 Mise en scene, 18, 293 Mismatched, 216 Misogynist, 253 Misogyny, 119 Mississippi Masala, 161, 164, 166, 167, 169, 172 Mistry, Meher, 90 Mistry, Rohinton, 166 Monga, Guneet, 5 Monk, Claire, 260, 263 Monsoon Shootout, 140 Monsoon Wedding, 180 Mr. & Mrs. Iyer, 2 Mudrārākṣasa, 301n12 Mughal-e-Azam, 123, 264 Mukerji, Rani, 103, 139 Mukherjee, Hrishikesh, 62, 150 Multiplex, 80 Multiplex cinema, 149 Mulvey, Laura, 3 Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), 142 My Brother Nikhil, 216 My Own Country, 166–168, 171, 172 Mythologies, 172 N Naficy, Hamid, 5 Nair, Mira, 1, 161, 163 The Namesake, 161, 166, 167 Narayan, Jai Prakash, 286, 300n4

327

Nargis, 125 Naseeb, 115 National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), 142 NCPA, 283 Neale, Steve, 12 Nebbou, Mehdi, 16 Nehruvian socialism, 81 Netflix, 142 New Wave feminist auteur, 284 New Woman, 241 NH 10, 12 Nihalini, Govind Party, 283 Nil Battey Sannata, 13 Noir, 90 Non-modernity, 106 Non-residential Indian (NRI), 162, 174 NSD, 283 O O’ Reilly, Andrea, 306 October, 150, 195 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 310 Oh Man!, 20 Om Shanti Om, 2, 112 Once Upon a Time Mumbaai (2010), 145 One India Stories, 139 Onir, 12 OTT, 80, 90, 153 P Paatal Lok, 138 Padmaavat, 264 Padukone, Deepika, 3, 23, 119 Pagglait, 141 Panipat, 260 Parallel cinema, 62, 90

328 

INDEX

Paramatman, 74 Parampara, 60, 72 Paranjpye, Sai, 1, 62 Paris Je Taime, 17 Parsi, 165 Parsis, 166 Pastiche, 113, 125 The Past Is a Foreign Country Revisited, 259 Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna, 88 Pather Panchali, 164 Patil, Smita, 62 Patriarchal constructs, 285 Peddlers, 140 Period. End of Sentence, 141 Pestonjee, 6 Phillauri, 230 Phule, Jyotiba, 300n4 Piku, 12, 150, 199 Plath, Sylvia, 239 The Point of No Return, 273 Postcolonial, 179 city, 187 feminism, 13 films, 183 Post-heritage, 260 Post-MeToo, 151 Poverty porn, 188 Pre/postcolonial spaces, 185 Pretty Woman, 119 Q Qarib Qarib Singlle, 80, 88 Queen, 12, 219 R Rai, Himanshu, 163 Raje Patil, Aruna, 1 Rajnigandha, 62 The Ramāyaṇa, 116

Rana, Ashutosh, 85, 86 Rangan, Baradwaj, 114, 143 Rani, Devika, 1, 163 Rao, Rajkumar, 222 Rape on Trial, 249 Raphael, Jody, 248 The Rapist, 3 Ratha Sapthami, 68 Ray, Satyajit, 163, 164, 168, 174 Red Chilies Entertainment, 27 Rehman, Waheeda, 72 Rekha, 73 Rich, Adrienne, 310 RnM Moving Pictures Production, 139 Rockford, 2 Romeo and Juliet, 222 A Room of One’s Own, 239 Roshan, Hrithik, 55, 68, 73 Roshan, Rakesh, 70 Roy, Bimal, 13 Roy Kapur Films, 139 Roy Kapur, Siddharth, 139 Roy, M. N., 300n4 Rudaali, 1 Russell, Bertrand, 310 S Saat Khoon Maaf, 11 Saawariya, 112 Safar, 22 Sahni, Balraj, 57 Salaam Bombay!, 162, 166 Salim, 58 “Salim-Javed”, 57 Samarth, Shobhana, 1 Sanday, Peggy Reeves, 248 Sangharsh, 81, 86 Saraf, Rohit Suresh, 24 Sardari Begum, 264

 INDEX 

Sarkar, Bhaskar, 89 Sarkar, Hemanti, 27 Sarkar, Tanika, 225 Sathyu, M.S., 112 Satte pe Satta, 121 Say Salaam India, 141, 147 Second Wave Feminism, 3, 4 Seeta aur Geeta, 57 SEHMAT, 276 Sembene, Osmane, 164 Semiotics, 2 Sen, Aparna, 2 Seth, Roshan, 168 The Shadow and Arc Light, 198 Shahrukh Khan (SRK), 66 Shakuntala, 284, 301n12 Shalimar, 128 Shantaram, V., 13 Sharma, Anushka, 3 She Found It at the Movies, 21 Sheila Ki Jawani, 47 Shetty, Sunil, 116 Shinde, Gauri, 2, 4 Sholay, 57, 115 Shrivastava, Alankrita, 6, 259 Shroff, Jackie, 64 Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, 216 Shukla, Riya, 309 Siddiqui, Nawazuddin, 141 Sikhya Entertainment, 138 Sikka, Harinder, 271 Sikri, Surekha, 45 Silvat, 80, 88, 90 Silverman, Kaja, 288 Singh, Amrita, 64 Singh, Gracey, 69 Singh, Neha, 86 Singh, Raghubir, 164 Singh, Ranveer, 38 Sircar, Shoojit, 150, 195 Sirk, Douglas, 150 ‘Situated’ and ‘universal,’ 5

The Sky Iis Pink, 3 Slumdog Millionaire, 172 Smritichitre, 284 Soloway, Joey, 220 Sontag, Susan, 114 Soorarai Pottru, 141 Speaking Tree Films, 147 The Spy Who Loved Me, 273 Sridevi, 46, 60, 61 Srivastava, Alankrita, 3 Stanley Ka Dabba, 47 Stanwyck, Barbara, 150 Static space, 295 Stensgaard, Molly Marlene, 142 Sternberg, Joseph von, 150 Studies in South Asian Film & Media, 196 Such a Long Journey, 165, 166 Suhaag, 67, 115 Superhero films, 70 Sur: The Melody of Life, 220 Suri, Sanjay, 313 Suriya, 153 Sur—The Melody of Life, 89 Swades, 116 Swami, 259 T Taj Mahal, 264 Talaash, 98 Tamas, 129 Tanhaji, the Unsung Warrior, 260 Taraporevala, Sooni, 5 Tees Maar Khan, 112 Telling the Right Story, 222 Tendulkar, Vijay, 283 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 249 Tezaab, 120, 129 That Girl in Yellow Boots, 141 Third Wave feminism, 3, 4 Thiruvothu, Parvathy, 91, 220

329

330 

INDEX

Thomas, Rosie, 261 Tilak, Laxmibai, 285 Tiwari, Ashwiny Iyer, 6 Toronto Film Festival, 220 Toxic masculinity, 223 Transnational audience, 186 Transnational cinema, 167 Transparent, 220 Trivedi, Amit, 27 Truffaut, Francois, 168 U Umrao Jaan, 264 Unhomely, 293 Utekar, Laxman, 27 V Veer-Zaara, 116 Venice Film Festival, 145 Vicky Donor, 195 Vikṛs ̣ṭamadhyama, 301n12 Vinod Chopra Films, 215 Vishesh Films, 87 Visual Pleasure, 3 von Trier, Lars, 142 Vyajanthimala, 121

W Walker, Alice, 239 Washington, Denzel, 174 Water, 264 Wazir, 216 Webster, Jean, 60 Women directors, 2, 118 Women Who Run with the Wolves, 239 Women’s pictures, 12 Woolf, Virginia, 239 Y Yash Raj Films (YRF), 56, 58, 139 Yeh Ballet, 165, 171 Yeh Zindagi ka Safar, 89 Z Zafar, Ali, 22 Zamindar Abolishment Act, 269 Zanjeer, 57 ZFF Masterclass, 140, 143 Zindaggi Rocks, 89, 220 Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, 98 Zinta, Preity, 69 Zubeida, 264