'Bad' Women of Bombay Films

Studies in Desire and Anxiety

Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy, Sharmila Purkayastha, Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy, Sharmila Purkayastha

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030267872
• eBook ISBN: 9783030267889
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book presents a feminist mapping of the articulation and suppression of female desire in Hindi films, which comprise one of modern India's most popular cultural narratives. It explores the lineament of evil and the corresponding closure of chastisement or domesticity that appear as necessary conditions for the representation of subversive female desire. The term 'bad' is used heuristically, and not as a moral or essential category, to examine some of the iconic disruptive women of Hindi cinema and to uncover the nexus between patriarchy and other hierarchies, such as class, caste and religion in these representations.
The twenty-one essays examine the politics of female desire/s from the 1930s to the present day - both through in-depth analyses of single films and by tracing the typologies in multiple films. The essays are divided into five sections indicating the various gendered desires and rebellions that patriarchal society seeks to police, silence and domesticate.

© The Author(s) 2019

S. Sengupta et al. (eds.)'Bad' Women of Bombay Filmshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26788-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Breaking Bad

Saswati Sengupta¹ , Shampa Roy¹ and Sharmila Purkayastha¹

(1)

Department of English, Miranda House, Delhi University, Delhi, India

Saswati Sengupta (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Shampa Roy

Email: [email protected]

Sharmila Purkayastha

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

hum hein mata-e-kucha o bazaar ki tarah

uthti hein har nigah kharidaar ki tarah. (Dastak 1970)¹

I am like a commodity in market-lanes

all eyes gaze on me as though of a buyer.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that women in Hindi films—rather than Bollywood since it is a brand of films that is not just mimicry of Hollywood—are offered as spectacular objects of desire. The embedded political, aesthetic and moral attributes of this desire, given that the Hindi cinematic tradition, like the Indian market, has been dominated by empowered men, is refracted through corresponding privileged and sectarian interests. Evoking the paradigm of Parsi theatre, an influential precursor to Hindi films, where the young male “baby-faced players of female roles polished and polished the art of female impersonation”, Mrinal Pande has argued that femininity in Hindi films, “have all been created, not born”.² Yet, this construction of women, despite hegemonic representations and dominant typologies, reveals complex and ambiguous subjectivities.

‘Bad’ Women of Bombay Films: Studies in Desire and Anxiety is a feminist mapping of the articulation and suppression of female desires in Hindi films. It explores the lineament of evil and the corresponding closure of chastisement or domesticity that appear as necessary conditions for the representation of subversive female desires. The book also foregrounds articulations that challenge and dismantle such imprisonments. Our “ways of seeing”³ and the “visual pleasure in narrative cinema”⁴ as facilitated by the “camera obscura”—“a metaphor for the functioning of ideology by Marx and for the process of the unconscious by Freud”—is the convergence of representations, power relations and their material bases.⁵

Films, arguably the dominant cultural narrative of our times, play a significant role in the ideological manoeuvering of desire that has been conceptualized variously as “troubled water” (Sartre), signifying a “lack” (Freud, Lacan), an internalization of social codes and “a function of market economy” (Deleuze and Guattari), gendered and, yet, fundamentally inventive (Irigaray, Grosz).⁶ Further, this gendered map of desire is underscored by the cultural, social and economic differences among women (Spivak).⁷ Ashis Nandy in a dismissive mode summarizes that, “the popular Hindi film is not concerned with the inner life of the characters on screen”.⁸ But Hindi cinema where meaning is fabricated through the warp and woof of songs, choreographed dances, formulaic plots with their predictable generic endings, costumed characters enacted often by larger than life “stars” has developed “a distinctly expressive melodramatic language of affect”.⁹ The grammar and semiotics of interiority in Hindi films is different from that of realism, the dominant western mimetic mode since the late eighteenth century whose attention to quotidian details helps represent its plot developments and characterizations as teleological and natural, mystifying in the process its ideological positions.

Even a random harvest of Hindi films, where the formulaic, the fantastic and the real cohabit, yields desiring women. The declaration of their agency is quite often through songs, albeit penned by male lyricists and helmed by male directors. The singing female figures are often framed against open and expansive landscapes, quite at odds with the confinements of their domesticated lives:

badti chaloon gaati chaloon apni lagan mein

aaj mein azad hoon duniya ke chaman mein…. (Chori Chori 1956)¹⁰

Singing, I move on in my own pursuit

today I’m free in the garden of this world.

This articulation of selfhood that also resonates the decolonized new nation through the evocative word azad/free is often enacted as an exploration of an unknown space visually represented by women negotiating the public terrain on foot, carts, cycles, cars and trains:

mausam mastana rasta anjana

jane kab kis more pe ban jaye koi afsana... (Satte Pe Satta 1982)¹¹

The weather is carefree, the road uncertain

who knows what turn it takes to create a legend.

The female journey is usually truncated by the appearance of the hero and the allure of heterosexual romance but the layering over cannot erase entirely the admission of female picaresque machalti arzoo/intoxicating desire (Parakh 1960).¹² This yearning desire to seize the moment is articulated sometimes as an inchoate awakening—

chanchal ho gaye ghungroo mere raton raat kya? (Abhinetri 1970)¹³

Have my anklets become lively overnight?

—and sometimes as a conscious break from the past:

aaj phir jeene ki tamanna hai… (Guide 1965)¹⁴

Today, I wish to live again….

Domestic duties, wifehood and motherhood will eventually discipline these women through the teleological plot of traditional satisfaction. But for the moment they revel in their exhilarating sexuality, and in their freedom to explore and challenge institutionalized faiths:

hoon abhi mein jawaan ae dil …

mujh ko behak jaane de, batein na kar hosh ki… (Aar-Paar 1952)¹⁵

I am young right now, my heart

let me lose my way, let there be no talk of being sensible…

y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Breaking Bad
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Back Matter