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

Abstract

Though met with tepid commercial success and critical acclaim, Tanuja Chandra’s directorial journey in Hindi language cinema is in fact quite significant. The cinematic significance lies in Chandra’s initial resistance to make the text-book women-centric films of the 1990s, where melodrama is the default mode of storytelling. Instead, Chandra is interested to narrate stories of women and narratives of their agency through film genres that are overtly masculine: thriller and action. Using Rick Altman’s conception of film genres as being inextricably associated with deeply rooted semantic codes and conventions that allows filmmakers to rework “formulas” and reconfigure the expectations of consumers, this essay proposes to unpack Chandra’s two early films Dushman (1998) and Sangharsh (1999). Both films use the genre of the psychological thriller by making the women in them the pivot on which the plot revolves. Interestingly, the men (played by male Bollywood stars of the time) are relegated not only to secondary roles but also to an extent mere witnesses to the action (physical and narrative) that the women are engaged in.

The essay also proposes to juxtapose the two above-mentioned films with Chandra’s latest directorial exercises, Silvat (2016) and Qarib Qarib Singlle (2017). Silvat marks Chandra’s foray into a decidedly feminist tradition of filmmaking, exploring the inner world and sexuality of the female protagonist. The other film is more of a proverbial romantic comedy starring Irrfan and Parvathy Thiruvothu. Chandra seems to highlight how “women makers create out of generic resources new combinations and outcomes.” Chandra’s critique of the conventional romantic comedy and its deeply problematic cultural and social mores is unmistakable.

The chapter argues that Chandra is an important pit stop in charting the emergence of the female director in Bollywood because of her continued improvisations and reappropriations with genres that have traditionally been the stronghold of male directors. Chandra’s career underscores Steve Neale’s theorizations on genre as a process that is marked by sameness and difference, where every difference can be read as an act of transgression and resistance.