Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas 9780415961172, 0415961173

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VOLUN INSDYC] -UD)Y/NN (Glace N a, STUDIES

Narratives of Gendered Dissent in ; South Asian Cinemas PN om AUlateln

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Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South

Asian Cinemas

Routledge Advances in Film Studies

—

Nation and Identity in the New German Cinema Homeless at Home

Inga Scharf Lesbianism, Cinema, Space The Sexual Life of Apartments Lee Wallace

3 Post-War Italian Cinema American Intervention, Vatican Interests Daniela Treveri Gennari

4 Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America Edited by Victoria Ruétalo and Dolores Tierney 5 Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear Julian Hanich

6 Cinema, Memory, Modernity The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema Russell J.A. Kilbourn 7 Distributing Silent Film Serials Local Practices, Changing Forms, Cultural Transformation Rudmer Canjels

8 The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema Raz Yosef

4] Neoliberalism and Global Cinema Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique Edited by Jyotsna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner 10 Korea’s Occupied Cinemas,

1893-1948 The Untold History of the Film Industry Brian Yecies with Ae-Gyung Shim 11 Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas

The Reel Asian Exchange Edited by Philippa Gates and Lisa Funnell 12 Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas Alka Kurian

Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas Alka Kurian

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group NEW

YORK

LONDON

First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Taylor & Francis The right of Alka Kurian to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kurian, Alka, 1963—

Narratives of gendered dissent in South Asian cinemas / Alka Kurian. p. cm. — (Routledge advances in film studies ; 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Motion pictures—Social aspects—South Asia. 2. Motion pictures—Political aspects—South Asia. 3. Motion pictures—Religious aspects—South Asia. 4. Women in motion pictures. 5. Feminism and motion pictures. I. Title. PN1993.5.A753K87 2012 302.23'430954—de23 2011037531

ISBN13: 978-0-415-96117-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-12809-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon

by IBT Global.

Printed and bound in the United States of America on sustainably sourced paper by IBT Global.

To My Parents

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Foreword

Xl

Introduction

PART I Class, Caste, and Social Exclusion 1

2.

Subalterneity and Resistance in Shyam Benegal’s Nishant and Manthan

11

Radical Politics and Gender in Govind Nihalani’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi,

and Gangavihari Borate’s Lal Salaam

Be)

PART I

Nationalism, Religion, and Identity 3.

4

The Politics of Hindutva in Nandita Das’ Firaaq, Rahul Dholakia’s Parzania, and Rakesh Sharma’s Final Solution

63

Gender, Home, and Displacement in Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani

98

PART III Nationalism and Ethnic Struggle 5

Subjectivity, Choice, and Feminist Agency in Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist and Beate Arnestad’s My Daughter the Terrorist

vill

Contents

PART IV Heteronormativity, ‘Difference’, and the Construction of a

Subversive Femininity 6

Gender, Identity, and the Diaspora in Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach and Sarah Gavron/Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

157

Notes

175 181 191

Bibliography Index

Figures

wilh

Sushila accuses her husband of not helping her escape from the zamindar’s house. Bindu tells Dr. Rao that it is the owner of the Mishra dairy who is corrupt, and not the milk producers. Brati wants to paint the city red. Siddhartha has been priming himself for the revolution. Siddhartha begins to get defeated by police brutality and the entrenched feudal system in the village. Sujata accuses the guests at her daughter’s engagement party. Nandini is taken aback by Sujata’s blindness. Geeta confronts the police inspector. Somu’s mother understands her son’s politicization. Ghisu refuses to put his thumb print against his name in the registry without getting his wages. The forest officer puts his own thumb print instead. Rupi becomes a Naxalite. Mohsin talks to Aarti about seeing his family being killed in front of his eyes. Jyoti reaches out to Muneera in the midst of crisis. Working class Muslim men find a gun. Acharya Dharmendra attempts to rouse the Hindus. Cyrus submits to God to show him the way. The ‘enlightened’ Hindu youth. Shernaz flees from the ‘mob’. Zubeida reluctantly parts ways from a radicalized Salim. In the absence of his father, Salim is the new head of household and is at war with the Sikh and Indian patriarchy over his mother. Darshika and Puhalchudar will fight to the end.

13

14 3 ob! 40 46 49 oy) oD

oe ay) 68 rie Pi 81 86 Dé 94 109

117 132

x

Figures

52 6.1

Giz 6.3

A bomb-strapped Malli’s dilemma. Nazneen falls in love with the young, handsome, and confident Karim. Nazneen does not want to relocate back to Bangladesh with Chanu. A group of South Asian women out on a holiday by the beach.

142 163 164 168

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been a long journey and completing it would not have been possible without the help and support of my colleagues, fellow researchers, friends, and family. I remain forever indebted to my mentor and friend, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, for her kindness and patience, her unrelenting willingness to shape my thinking, and her meticulous feedback on my writing. Iam thankful to Shyam Benegal for unconsciously planting the first seed of curiosity—way back in the 1970s—about subaltern cinema of India and then responding to my enthusiasm with touching humanity when I met him nearly three decades later in the US. For reading through the manuscript and providing me with invaluable criticism, references, and ideas, I am grateful to Nandi Bhatia, Bruce Burgett, Aruna Chakravarti, Elora Chowdhury, Nandita Das, Jigna Desai, Wimal Dissanayake, Kristin Gustafson, Shahnaz Khan, Bruce Kochis, Malashri Lal, Geoff Nash,

Robin Oppenheimer, Liz Philipose, Khanum Shaikh, Kshama Sawant, Jennifer Terry, and Amoshaun Toft. Significant in this process have been my students at the University of Massachusetts (Boston) and University of Washington (Bothell), who spent long hours watching countless films and waded through gruelingly complex discussion articles—several of my ideas were born in class, surrounded as I was by their enthusiasm and energy. | appreciate their faith in me as a teacher. I thank my colleagues at the University of Washington (Bothell) for trusting me with creating courses on South Asian cinema. My gratitude also goes to the staff at the Redmond Public Library for providing me the much-needed writing space through the dark, overcast days in the Pacific Northwest when escaping from home was essential for keeping up my morale. My families across the world have given me the strength and which has kept me going all these years: my parents Vimal and Sharda, my sister Alpna, my brother Rahul, mother-in-law Vimla, brothers- and sisters-in-law Vishnu, Anita, Kuki, and Prateek, and all my cousins, nieces, and nephews in Canada, India, New Zealand, Singapore, and the US. For shoring me up emotionally and intellectually, I thank my son Adi, whose kindness, humor, and love for music has sustained me over the years. And last but not the least, I thank my husband Shesh for being my greatest critic and friend. I am grateful for his

xii

Acknowledgments

love, companionship, and generosity and thank him for whisking me away on vacation when I am overwhelmed and frazzled with work. Also, without his meticulous editing of the manuscript, this book would have taken even longer to complete. Thank you, Adi and Shesh, for pushing me and reassuring me—I dream with and for you.

Foreword

India is the sum of its vast array of diversities; languages, castes, communities, religions, ethnicities and regions that extend all the way from the Himalayas in the north to the tropical southern peninsula enclosed by two seas and an ocean. Few realize that India is more a continent than a country. By definition, the term Indian can only be a plurality. For instance, Indian food consists of many different cuisines, each with equal claim to be Indian. So with everything else. Cinema is no exception. There are many Indian Cinemas. Films made in the official language of India ie., Hindi as well as in twenty two other national languages at the last count. There are three hundred and forty seven spoken languages as well. Several films have been made in some of these in recent years. If you look at South Asian Cinema you have to take account of films made in all the countries of South Asia such as Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives and not the least, Pakistan. For all the bewildering variety of geographical and cultural landscapes which find representation in South Asian Cinema, the Dominant Discourse tends to revolve around Indian and Pakistani films made in Hindi / Urdu. There is a tendency to ignore the films made in other languages and regions. Pan Indian and Pakistani Cinema is usually seen as being ones that set the style and form of South Asian films made in the entire subcontinent. This is a flawed generalization, yet cannot be totally discounted. Although a fairly large number of regional films are culturally specific and reflect local concerns and characteristics but what makes for a distinct South Asian identity is its aesthetic which is common to the entire region. Its underlying principles course through all the folk and classical forms of Entertainment including the Cinema. These were codified in a tract on Aesthetics written in Sanskrit almost two thousand years ago—the Natya Shastra; The science and grammar of Theatre. Regardless of the content, it is the form that invariably follows a template which uses a blend of nine human emotions that are universally experienced. This is rarely done consciously. The filmmakers are often not even aware of this when creating the emotional landscape of a film. If anything is culturally common to all of South Asian Cinema, it is this. This cultural

xiv

Foreword

commonality gives South Asian film an identity that is distinctly its own compared to films from any other country. Often, because of its form, all narratives have similar markers and patterns of storytelling; each with its share of drama and melodrama, comic elements, punctuated with songs

and dances. The accent is on offering an entertainment that is sensorily and emotionally satisfying. Since the attempt is to make the films profitable, they cannot risk alienating audiences by challenging their social and religious beliefs, their longheld gender and caste attitudes or even their traditionally accepted moral positions. In effect, most films function simply as commodities for entertainment. Although many of these films have status quo(ist) social attitudes, quite a number also deal with contemporary social and political issues which find resonance with South Asian audiences. Occasionally however, there are films, most of them marginal to the mainstream that could be considered subversive or project views that are contrary to commonly held traditional and conventionally accepted social beliefs. Alka Kurian’s book deals with films that have been made since the 1970s; films that tackle issues or touch upon issues of Gender, Social Justice and Dissent. Her choice of films may have something to do with their availability for study. Films made in South Asian languages other than Hindi do not find mention since most regional language films are simply not available outside

of the regions where they have been made. There is room for a study of these films in a Second Volume. Her approach and analysis of the films she has chosen to study offer unusual and unsuspected insights into the films when placed in both the developing and the developed world. You rarely find a book that is both a study and an intelligent critique of the new wave South Asian Cinema of the last quarter of the twentieth and the early twenty first Century. In the past five or six years there have been a yet newer wave of films made by young directors who are presently in their twenties and thirties. Considering the scope of the subject, Alka Kurian can set her eyes on writing more volumes dedicated to the study of contemporary South Asian Cinema. There is a vibrant new world out there. Shyam Benegal November 17, 2011

Introduction

This book aims at carrying out a postcolonial, gendered investigation of women-centered South Asian films where the narrative becomes an act of political engagement with the world and a site of feminist struggle, a map that weaves together multiple strands of subjectivity, i.e. gender, caste, race, class, religion, ethnicity, colonialism, and imperialism. The objective will be to explore the cinematic construction of an oppositional narrative of feminist dissent with a view to elaborate a historical understanding and theorization of the ‘materiality and politics’ of the everyday struggle of Indian women and identify the development of their political consciousness. In the spirit of acknowledging the centrality of “writing, memory, consciousness, and political resistance” (Mohanty, 2003: 79), the discur-

sive space thus opened up by films for remembering history and recording experiences, labor, and dreams becomes an important project that aims at

correcting the “gaps, erasures, and misunderstandings of hegemonic masculinist history [that] leads to the formation of politicised consciousness and self-identity” (Mohanty, 2003: 78). The book investigates South Asian cinematic texts with the objective of unravelling the ways that ‘cultural workers’ have tended to use subversive narratives as a tool of resistance. Narratives that are political, ideological, classed, raced, and gendered offer the focus of this exploration. Through the strategies of disclosure and documentation of memory, personai experiences, and imaginary events shaped

by the larger historical, political, and cultural contexts, these discursive texts engage in the processes of struggle against a plethora of oppression: caste, class, religion, patriarchy, sexuality, and (neo-)colonialism. The book looks at the manner in which, through their creative and aesthetic interventions, South Asian filmmakers enable the articulation of an alternative gendered subjectivity as well as constitute the grounds for personal and collective empowerment. It would be useful to briefly explore here the cinematic practices of Third Cinema that I suggest are best suited to representing political and counter-hegemonic narratives of this kind. Mike Wayne (2001) defines Third Cinema—either documentary or fictional genres—as an ideological

2

Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas

framework that intervenes in the historical processes of the times. Instead of being a cinema of entertainment, it is a “passionate, angry, often satirical, always complex” (2001: 5) medium that combines theory and practice with the view to questioning the traditional mode of cinematic production and consumption. By offering a moral and ethical challenge to the dangerous reconfigurations of the social, political, cultural, and ideological neocolonial formations in South Asia, the films investigated in this study come closest to my understanding of Third Cinema. I argue that by mobilizing differential ways of conceptualizing the historical formation of the subaltern consciousness, these films embody a radical aesthetic of cultural politics that aligns itself with the larger oppositional movements for social justice in South Asia. I am interested in looking at the connections between art, politics, and history in the way these films utilize the aesthetic medium to unravel certain truths buried underneath the public face of ‘received’ history. While many Third World women have been producing and directing films for a long while, not all have been unequivocally feminist despite centering their cinematic narrative on women. This could be related either to a lack of a clear political agenda for female empowerment against patriarchy and neo-colonialism or their marginalization in the field of film production (a situation not too different to the First World). But, over the last two decades, a discernibly increasing number of women filmmakers have been gaining free and equal decision-making powers and access to technology in the filmmaking industry. Further this surge in women filmmakers in the Third World has been matched by an international rise in women’s independent cinema. The growth of feminist films and videos in the Third World could be a direct result of the Third World’s struggles against neocolonialism and imperialism and women’s grass-roots, local movements. The attempt in this book is to explore radical new films and documentaries made in the “Post-Third-Worldist” film culture that critically assesses “Third-Worldist . . . nationalism and First World Eurocentric feminism ... arguing for ... specific forms of resistance in relation to diverse forms of oppression . . . so as to articulate a contextualized history for women [and menlin specific geographies of identity [i.e.] feminist projects [that] are often posited in relation to ethnic, racial, regional, and national locations”

(Ella Shohat, 2003: 52).In short, this critique stems

from what Mohanty (1991) refers to as the ‘politics of location’, embedded

in modes of resistance directly informed by specific forms of oppression. Further, it takes on board the implications of subaltern marginalization in the Third World nation-states and the perpetuation of imperialistic Eurocentric perception of Third World, cliterodectomized, veiled (Shohat, 2003: 52), and overly sexed subjectivities as objects of pity. Through maintaining their distance from Western discourses, Post-Third-Worldist cultural practices performed by non-white cultural activists insist on problematizing the intersection of nation, race, gender, heterosexism,

Introduction

3

class, neo-colonialism, and imperialism. Challenging the persistence of neo-colonialism and racism, they question the idea of nation as an inalienable unit. Shohat underlines the specificity of Third World cultural practices that are inextricably linked to the localized histories of people living within specific geographical, ethnic, regional, and national territories. On the question of Third World Cinema’s ‘counter-telling’ within the post-war independent nation-states, she maintains that in the face of Eurocentric historicizing, the Third World and its diasporas in the First World have rewritten their own histories, taken control of their own images, spoken in their own voices, reclaiming and reaccentuating colonialism and its ramifications in the present in a vast project of remapping and renaming. Third World feminists, for their part, have participated in these counternarratives, while insisting that colonialism and national resistance have impinged differently on men and women, and that remapping and renaming is not without its fissures and contradictions. (Shohat, 2003: 51)

Since the second half of the 20" century there has been a flurry of publications of personal testimonies that challenge monolithic representations of the ‘average Third World woman’. Written by women across the Third World, these are subversive stories of contestation of racism, slavery, war, religious fundamentalism, neo-colonial capitalist imperialism, patriarchy, and increasingly, caste. Here, one is referring to the ‘popular-class’ testimonies of women writers such as Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, and Barbara Harlow in South and North Americas, and historical, fictional, and autobiographical “experience-oriented narratives” (Shari-Stone, 2003: 1) of social contestations written by, among others, Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy, Amrita Pritam, Bapsi Sidhwa, Taslima Nasreen, and Bama in South Asia. Such writings take on board as subject matter the lives of the dispossessed, marginalized, deterritorialized, and disempowered women in the so-called Third World. The importance, in this context, of Norma Alarcon’s idea of “plurality of self” (1989: 39) and Audre Lordes’ “multiple identities”(Byrd, 2009: 236) of Third World women can hardly be undermined. Challenging the notion of the Western individualistic liberal feminism, they celebrate Third World women’s ‘multiple consciousness’ or collective selves located on the ‘borderlands’ and whose feminist struggle lies in simultaneously questioning the logic of colonialism, patriarchy, sexual heteronormativity, class, religious and geopolitical identities. Apart from raising awareness, they enable possibilities for coalition among women ‘cultural activists’ from all walks of life who, united in their commitment to “olobalization of dissent” (Roy, 2004: 129) and disputing “cultural oppression of [hetero-normative and capitalist] imperialism” (Deshazer, 1997: 1), envision a just, sustainable, equitable world. Writers like these are not alone

in their endeavor or commitment.

4

Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas

This book investigates works of South Asian filmmakers whose ‘oppositional consciousness’, often influenced by the works of cultural activists of the above kind, has led them to formulate cinematic representations of gendered experiences of fear and oppression, i.e. of war, loss, exile, poverty, and exploitation. It performs an investigation of cinematic representations of these experiences in a way that the historical context is integral and not simply incidental to the narrative. It explores cinematic representations of the interlocking system of oppression rooted in imperialism, racism, capitalism, neo-colonialism, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, heteronormativity, casteism, and patriarchy that have a direct impact on men and women from South Asia and its diasporas. Cultural analysis of gender relations is incomplete without looking into all of these issues simultaneously, as together they underline the day-to-day lived experiences, political formations, practices, and politics of Third World women. I base my work on the premise that “overly structural and economist approaches” (Bhavnani, Foran, and Kurian, 2003: 3) to understanding gender relations and in particular women’s lived experience is inadequate and what is required is a holistic approach. The films selected in this book demonstrate a multiplicity of filmmaking practices—art/parallel, cross over, and documentary'—that open up spaces for putting forward ‘alternative models of resistance’ by both women and men filmmakers who experiment with a variety of cinematic traditions. Through the use of apparently innocent, somber, serious, dramatic, and at

times comical, crude, non-prescriptive images, the subversive power of such gendered cinematic narratives resides in doing away with the subject-object binary and in their capacity to unveil the invisible hierarchies of power that always tend to get obscured by the logic of complex socio-political structures, organizations,

belief systems, and traditions. The book will

be structured around the following themes that look into the question of the disenfranchisement of the gendered subaltern due to and resistance to: Class, Caste, and Social Exclusion; Nationalism, Religion, and Identity; Gender, Nationalism, and Ethnic Struggle; Heteronormativity, ‘Differ-

ence’, and the Construction of a Subversive Femininity. Chapter one looks into alternative cinematic discourses, increasingly seen as part of the crucial project of revisionist history of India, which represent the pathos of the country’s quintessentially subaltern, the alleged lower-caste, Dalit, and the marginalized subjectivities. It explores the centrality of the subaltern, and in particular the role of women subaltern, in understanding the construction of anti-imperialistic feminist discourses of resistance to and contestation of ‘dominant modes of (hegemonic patriarchal) knowledge’. Important among the scholars that have contributed to the elaboration of such alternative discourses is Mahasweta Devi, who expresses two levels of skepticism. On the one hand she is deeply suspicious of India’s

Introduction

5

independence, which she considers a sham for allowing for a brazen substitution of one structure of colonial rule by an indigenous, homegrown patriarchal structure of control. Second, she has little sympathy for the narcissistic obsession of the elite, middle-class India with the “psychic effects of the colonial epistemic violence” (Sumita Chakravarty, 1999: 294) that, for her, pales into insignificance compared with the physicality of the wounded and tortured gendered body, a violent playing field for the exercise of patriarchal and colonial power. Therefore, by dealing with what has been omitted in the larger, hegemonic narratives of the country, Devi’s work focuses on the fight for dignity and human rights of the subaltern by re-examining their centrality in India’s political and nationalist struggle, the ramifications of which are felt in several ways. The cinematic texts that I include in this section to substantiate my argument include Shyam Benegal’s Nishant (Night’s End), his 1975 film that centers on the narrative of a raped upper-caste woman set against the backdrop of historically entrenched collective abuse of subaltern members of a small village located in the South of India, and Manthan (The Churning), his film made a year later that plots the story of upper-caste sexual and power politics which get interrupted through a state-led economic reform initiative in a Gujarat village mired in patriarchal heteronormativity. I draw an analogy between Benegal’s cinematic illustrations with the concerns of the Subaltern Studies group’ in India to argue that both focus on recuperating the narratives of underprivileged members of the Indian society whose political and social agency has been eliminated from the country’s elite historiography. Second, | also use feminist critical methodology to investigate the construction of the sexed subject born out of the interplay of sexual

politics within the two cinematic narratives. Chapter two deals with cinematic narratives of the Naxalite movement (1960-75) that fracture the popularly held perception of the metropolitan male-centric model of this essentially agrarian movement. | illuminate my thesis through a close examination of the following three films that foreground rural and in particular rural women’s participation in the movement: Govind Nihalani’s Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa (1998), Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2005), and Gangavihari Borate’s Lal Salaam

(2002). I perform a feminist analysis of the films and attempt to understand the role of memory and testimony in the politicization of consciousness and construction of identity. Chapter three looks at the growth of the right-wing Hindu fundamentalism that has been taking place in India since late 1980s, and which was epitomized by the 2002 anti-Muslim attacks in Gujarat. Through an examination of Nandita Das’ Firaaq (2009), Rahul Dholakia’s Parzania (2005), and Rakesh

Sharma’s

Final Solution

(2002), I examine

the gendered ramifications of this state-led genocidal violence. Clearly distressed by the ‘Land of Gandhi’ turning into a site of killings where

6

Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas

a multiplicity of Hindu men and women across the board either directly participated in or openly encouraged violence against the Muslims, critics have tried to look for reasons for this unfolding of these terrible acts of human brutality. Many scholars have pointed to the failure of Indian secularism in dealing with the multi-religious/cultural composition of the country’s population.While the films under investigation no doubt perform a scathing critique of this anti-Muslim carnage, in my view they offer a narrow exploration of the complexity of the situation. On the one hand they tend to mostly focus on the radical and communalized sections of the majority Hindu community; without counterbalancing this with a moderate Hindu point of view. As a result, their portrayal of the Hindus runs the risk of being seen as nationalistic, barbaric, and fanatic.

Further, their emphasis on the country’s historically contingent cultural politics (nostalgia, ethnocentrism, Hindu fundamentalism, Islamophobia), does not make space for the audience to think about the question of class and economy. It is the process of the industrial decline, the economic underdevelopment and socio-economic segregation of the people, and the link between global economic policies and its impact on the lives of people and communities in Gujarat that in my opinion, contributed significantly to the unfurling of the politics of hate. Also, the films pay scant attention to the Hindutva-led politics of divide and rule pitting

one minority community against the other in favor of the Hindu majority. What the films do need to be celebrated for are traces of gendered resistance against Hindutva that bubble through the surface despite the limitations of their effectiveness. Chapter four problematizes women’s unequal status as members of modern nation-states because of their symbolic appropriation as metaphors for nation. It looks into contestations of the essentialized identity of the Third World woman as a “singular, monolithic subject” (Mohanty, 2003: 17) and provides strategies of intervention against such conceptualizations. The development of feminist movements across the Third World is linked to struggles for national self-determination in which women’s participation brought them out of the confines of their domesticity into the public arena. However, the promise of liberation that came with these movements was not truly fulfilled, as in the independent nations women’s

issues were sacrificed in the larger interest of nation-building. Set in Pakistan, Sabiha Sumar’s 2003 Khamosh

Pani offers an examination of the

dialectical relationship between nation and a network of women imbricated within the crucial phases of Indian history: colonialism, decolonization, the fallout of the country’s partition within the ‘postcolonial’ period, and national re-imagining. Chapter five takes on board the idea of women’s participation in militant postcolonial nationalist struggles. It debunks the claim about it being a transformative and empowering experience for the women who choose

Introduction

7

to engage with deeply patriarchal paramilitary organizations. I focus my analysis on the civil war in Sri Lanka (1983-2009) and argue that Tamil women’s politics of resistance through participation in the armed struggle directed by the militarized minority militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), especially in its ideology of violence, led to their disempowerment and undermined their agency. As a social institution the LTTE was structured around an ideological framework and practices that went against the essence of women’s emancipation: i.e. it was rooted in gendered division of labor that subordinated women’s status, authoritarianism that elicited unthinking obedience and loyalty to an essentially masculinist leadership, a hierarchical structure that undercut the very essence of freedom of expression, and promotion of masculinist notions of valor, virility, superiority, and gallantry. This argument needs to be complicated, however, by historicizing colonized women’s politics through an examination of instances of women voluntarily joining suicidal militant missions in situations where annihilating the enemy and choosing the moment and circumstances of one’s death become a source of empowerment and expression of agency. I illustrate my thesis through a close examination of Santosh Sivan’s 1998 feature film The Terrorist and Beate Arnestad’s 2007 documentary My Daughter the Terrorist. The final chapter elaborates how notions of race, class, and home are redefined within the South Asian gendered diaspora through strategies of subversive identity formation. I will be making my argument through an analysis of Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane (inspired by Monica Ali’s novel by the same name), and Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach. The two cultural texts are enunciated from feminine points of view and use the trope of women’s cross-border/cultural/spatial/temporal movement as a key element in the construction of diasporic gendered subjectivity. They challenge hegemonic (Western as well as South Asian) patriarchal constructions of the traditional South Asian women that become the narratives’ primary site of contestation. Both of them represent multiple heterogeneous “migratory subjectivities” rather than fit the mold of a “singular and homogenised version of diasporic experience” (Desai, 2003: 135).

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130-6, 138, 139, 141-3, 148, 150, 160, 171-3 Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), 65, 67,

70, 78, 80-82, 84, 93, 105

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195

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Women Make Movies, 153

85-86, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99,

ve

106-8, 111-118, 123-128,

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