Women and Resistance in Contemporary Bengali Cinema

A Freedom Incomplete

Srimati Mukherjee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138615786
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317309901
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Historically, Indian cinema has positioned women at the intersection of tradition and a more evolving culture, portraying contradictory attitudes which affect women's roles in public and private spheres.

Examining the work of three directors from West Bengal, this book addresses the juxtaposition of tradition and culture regarding women in Bengali cinema. It argues the antithesis of women's roles, particularly in terms of ideas of resistance, revolution, change, and autonomy, by suggesting they convey resistance to hegemonic structures, encouraging a re-envisioning of women's positions within the familial-social matrix. Along with presenting a perception of culture as dynamic and evolving, the book discusses how some directors show that with this rupturing of the traditionally prohibitive, and a notion of unmaking and making in women, a traditional inclination is exposed to align women with ideas of absence, substitution, and disposability. The author goes on to show how selected auteurs in contemporary Bengali cinema break with certain traditional representations of women, gesturing towards a culture that is more liberating for women.

Presenting the first full-length study of women's changing roles over the last twenty years of Bengali cinema, this book will be a useful contribution for students and scholars of South Asian Culture, Film Studies and Gender Studies.

Part I
Representations of disjuncture

Antithetical responses to resistance in public and private spheres

1
Feminism in a Kolkata context

Assault, appeasement, and assertion in Dahan

Rituparno Ghosh’s cinematization of Dahan (Crossfire, 1997), based on the novel by Bengali writer Suchitra Bhattacharya, interrogates the intersections of a woman’s molestation in a Kolkata subway station, the retribution she faces from community and husband, and the solidarity offered by another young woman, a radical schoolteacher, who is witness to the incident. At the same time that I trace the feminist overtones characteristic of most of Ghosh’s films, I consider the overarching impact of class and privilege, as also masculinity, which stands as counterpoint to the expiatory feminist impulse. However, beyond textual critique, this chapter begins, also, a preliminary discussion of Dahan’s possible reception in international and particularly “First World” circles. I draw on Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “Transparencies on Film,” in which Adorno says, “Benjamin did not elaborate on how deeply some of the categories he postulated for film—exhibition, test—are imbricated with the commodity character which his theory opposes” (182),¹ to examine how Dahan (in some versions with English subtitles) enables the undercutting and reversing of both a facile commodification of Indian women and broad assumptions about “Third World” subjects’ desire to relocate to countries such as the United States. Despite limited possibilities of reaching the masses as contrasted with the recent proliferation of Bollywood extravaganza in the United States, for instance, Dahan is effective in sending out its quiet message of feminist resilience.

In relation to the foci of this study, I analyze, in this chapter, how masculinist impulses in the private sphere, such as in the intimate spaces of the home, as also in sites of the public sphere not marked by large-scale public access, such as in a court-room, can be equated with Tagore’s views on the repressive, stagnating aspects of tradition addressed in my Introduction. Further, this chapter traces how incipient or full-fledged feminist actions represented in Ghosh’s film show a directorial impetus to bring us non-traditional, unexpected aspects of women’s personalities that point to more exciting and dynamic possibilities within Bengali culture itself. Finally, the chapter addresses contradictory responses from agents of the public and private domains to women’s resistance in order to exemplify how one contemporary director focuses on this rift.

Domestic and economic structures of domination

In the film, the newly married and attractive Romita Chowdhury is assaulted by a group of men on July 29, 1997 as she exits one of the Kolkata Metro (subway) stations with her husband on a rain-washed night. As the men attempt to drive away with her on a motorbike, a young schoolteacher, Srobona Sarkar, rushes to the motorbike and forcefully pulls one of the men off. Romita falls to the ground in the process, and the men ultimately manage to escape. Srobona, herself injured, holds the traumatized Romi and drapes her sari back over her as her husband, Palash lies bleeding on the ground.

The director of the film, Ghosh, foregrounds Srobona’s resolve from the beginning. The class ten (tenth grade) students in her school want to acknowledge her courage formally, but she is firm in that she will be unable to attend the event if she has to identify the by then arrested men on that day. Ghosh layers this representation of the unyielding woman through the depiction of Srobona’s grandmother,² who despite opposition from Srobona’s mother and Srobona herself refuses to see her granddaughter’s intervention in the assault as anything especially creditable. Her questions—“Is injustice normal? Is it normal not to respond to or protest what is wrong?”³—counteract the extensive media coverage that Srobona gets as the singular and daring interceptor.

Ghosh’s representation of Romi is more divided. At the same time that she molds herself into the role of acquiescent housewife and then mourns how her marriage is rendered “stale” because of the assault, she resists the post-assault objectification by neighbors and relatives and questions where the self/identity goes under such circumstances. She takes vicarious pleasure in Srobona’s agency, inquiring of Palash if like him, she, too, had gone to identify the men in jail.

Palash, however, turns savagely against the woman who rescues his wife, reading Srobona’s incisive questions to him—“Did the press contact you? Why won’t you talk?”—as twisted. “If she wants to be a heroine,” he says to his wife, “why should it be at the expense of causing a scandal?” Yet, it is not just the undaunted female rescuer versus the beaten and ineffective husband polarity that Dahan presents to us, outlining the external/feminist “threats” to the mutuality in the marriage established in the opening scenes of the film through Romi and Palash’s romantically charged camaraderie.⁴

Other demons stalk both Romi and Srobona’s interpersonal relationships, signaling the unmitigated force of “multiple patriarchies” and social and “economic hegemonies” in the Bengali context (Grewal and Kaplan 17). In their introduction in SCATTERED Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan note:

Yet we know that there is an imperative need to address the concerns of women around the world in the historicized particularity of their relationship to multiple patriarchies as well as to international economic hegemonies. We seek creative ways to move beyond constructed oppositions without ignoring the histories that have informed these conflicts or the valid concerns about power relations that have represented or structured the conflicts up to this point. We need to articulate the relationship of gender to scattered hegemonies such as global economic structures, patriarchal nationalisms, “authentic” forms of tradition, local structures of domination, and legal-juridical oppression on multiple levels.

(17)

If we read the Indian institution of marriage as an “‘authentic’ (form) of tradition,” then two scenes from Dahan illustrate the ineffectiveness of Romi’s resistance to this particular hegemony. In the first of these charged bedroom scenes, Palash recounts to his wife that a colleague had asked him if there was a difference between molestation and rape. He adds that there was speculation that Romi had perhaps had an affair with one of the men before marriage, and he did not know what to believe. The tension initiated in this scene escalates in a scene shortly after when, following an altercation in which Palash objects to Romi standing in the verandah in a nightgown, he then proceeds to imprint his authority and rights on her. This scene is grotesquely reiterative in that it repeats the violence of the assault on Romi, the violence this time clearly shown to the audience, perhaps receiving its sanction because framed by the institution of marriage. In fact, at the close of the scene, Palash reminds Romi that he is her husband, a role ratified by the “ceremony” of marriage.

In Dahan, Ghosh does not hesitate to point out, however, that such masculinist manipulation and exploitation exist well beyond the frame of marriage in contemporary Bengal. Together with the insidious effects of the hierarchized Indian class structure, they operate to undermine seriously the opposing feminist impulse that the film captures. In a scene set in what appears to be a five-star hotel, Srobona’s fiancé, Tunir, for instance, who is looking to make a job-related move to the United States, says to Srobona that although she had been elevated to celebrity status in Kolkata, by way of her attacking ruffians and hastening to the police, she would be redundant in that regard in California, since American women were capable of protecting themselves. Underlying the irrelevance of this comment, of course, is Tunir’s effort to both ridicule and trivialize Srobona’s gesture at a time when others, as the film shows us, had remained neutral or departed from the crime scene.⁵

Tunir also pleads with Srobona to not go to court as witness to Romi’s assault. Although he predicates his request on his fear that the same men (released on bail) may now attack Srobona, we soon learn that Radheshyam Gupta, the father of one of the accused and a rich, influential promoter (one involved in the construction and sale of apartments in multi-storied complexes) in Kolkata, is a friend of Tunir’s finance director at work. Together they negotiate with Tunir to dissuade his girlfriend from appearing in court, promising to facilitate his transfer to the United States. Tunir, generally empathetic of Srobona’s assertiveness, in this instance, pleads on behalf of Gupta’s son, saying he was repentant, had committed the crime in the heat of the moment, and had spent a week in jail.

However, even as Tunir outlines his interests in and obligations to his firm, as well as the incentive offered him, Srobona tells him she must move forward with what she has started. She asks him to give up his job and not consider moving to the United States. “We will stay here,” she insists. “They can rape you,” he warns. “They will have it done if they go to jail.” “Look at me,” he entreats Srobona. “Who is more important to you, Romita or I?” “Don’t ask to hear,” replies Srobona. “You will not like my answer.”

Ghosh sets at least two such scenes with Srobona and Tunir in five-star hotels, making it clear to the audience that the milieu is Tunir’s choice and suggesting his job is more lucrative than Srobona’s one of school teacher. His possible transfer to the United States also hints at the firm’s multinational connections. As Grewal and Kaplan would say, Srobona’s is a gendered relationship to these “scattered hegemonies” such as “global economic structures” and “local structures of domination.” Yet, it is a young, middle-class Bengali woman who unerringly resists Tunir’s erotically charged appeals and is not hesitant to speak her mind, despite the possibility of falling out of favor with a fiancé who is more empowered financially and who offers her the possibility of migration to the West.

Silence, “honor,” and the patriarchal legal system

What Grewal and Kaplan term “legal juridical oppression” is also very much a force that undermines Srobona’s efforts. As I mentioned earlier, the accused are quickly released on bail; the police officer-in-charge, who had shown some integrity of character, is transferred after “pressure from above” (and the new officer-in-charge is hostile to Srobona); and in court, Romita, supposedly coerced by her in-laws, fails to identify the men who had assaulted her, claiming there was little visibility during the incident. In “Embodying the Self: Feminism, Sexual Violence and the Law,”⁶ an essay on feminist (and legal) intervention in the area of sexual violence perpetrated on women in India, Nivedita Menon notes:

Or, as another writer puts it, publicizing private injuries, that is, making them legally cognizable, politicizes them. “The specific legal strategy advocated here is that we publicize and thus politicize those injuries—those intimate intrusions into our lives—which we want to make legally cognizable.” Law is seen as the primary legitimating discourse and it is believed therefore, that legal criminalization would socially delegitimise a practice.

(78)

In Dahan, Ghosh suggests that it is not only the agents of law that capitulate to financial pressure and show leniency to the accused from the beginning. His directorial intent is to take us inside the Bengali household and markedly masculinist matrimonial structure to show how such “publicizing” of “private injuries,” as Menon mentions, is suppressed.

Within such a structure in general, the sexual violation of the housewife, if it is perceived as inflicting shame on the household, must remain private and not be vocalized. Of course, such silencing further facilitates the corrupt practices of the law I refer to in the previous paragraph. Thus, even though sexual assault could and possibly would be charged as a criminal act, “local structures of domination,” in this case the patriarchal household that compels Romi to lie about her assailants, also enable the men to go free, resulting in fewer convictions. In a scene earlier to that of Romi’s appearance in court, her father-in-law expresses anger that she had accepted the summons, an act that necessitates her presence as victim and witness in the trial. The family’s initial intent, then, is to not collaborate in the legal process, in the hope that this non-involvement will preserve whatever “honor” remains and not foreground the housewife’s sexuality and its violation. Romi’s “disrupting” of such intent leads to her presence in court and subsequent lying. It is more than likely that the family believes this falsehood will help in the men’s acquittal; will appease them; and stop them from avenging themselves through future attacks that may further “publicize” the family. It is precisely such publicizing that the household fears.⁷

In the trial scenes of Dahan, Srobona’s vilification continues unabated. The defense attorney casts aspersions on her character by asking ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Representations of disjuncture: antithetical responses to resistance in public and private spheres
• PART II Narratives of waste and rupturing the prohibitive
• PART III From transactional commodities to subjects in meaningful exchange
• Index