New Feminist Visibilities and Sisterhood: Re-interpreting Marriage, Desire, and Self-Fulfillment in Mainstream Hindi Cinema

Abstract

Indian Cinema has as a “key arbiter” of popular culture in the subcontinent corroborated notions of identity, values, and gender. The Hindi film heroine as a protagonist in Bollywood or “mainstream” Hindi narratology post-2010 is a distinct extrapolation of a country’s changing sociocultural, economic, and political inflections. The “female led” cine-narratives while redefining gender roles and responsibilities question and explore desire in a patriarchal society struggling with layers of power renegotiations. The success of women-led commercial Hindi films has also revealed the potency of the multiplex to host alternate narratives and the vibrancy of global Indian audiences. The twin entanglement of a “neoliberal governmentality” and instrumentality in appropriating this new form of feminism as discussed by Gill and Scharff, eds. New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. London: Palgrave Macmillan (2011). along with “postfeminist” influx from the west as daily engagement with brands, products, and celebrity rhetoric has endowed contemporary directors to boldly interpret desire and sexual fulfillment in cinema for an aspirational youth emboldened with the neoliberal narrative. Simultaneously, SVOD platforms like Amazon Prime and Netflix are extending portrayal of desire with the advantage of an uncensored yet formidable space of the aspirational middle class with access to technology. Representation has moved beyond challenging stereotypes to recast the young techno-savvy urban female as liberated, open to satisfying desire, and hugely skeptical of marriage. Located within these new feminist realities is sisterhood and the female buddy film. These narratives explore the intertextuality of patriarchal repression with the conventional coded and uncoded messages as well as bold, blatant, and unseen private moments, which were if at all depicted in independent cinema. Sisterhood within heterosexuality is being reinterpreted as a symbol of empathy within an unvoiced constituency. Specific films juxtapose the metropolitan global woman with invested agency and attempt to represent diversity of the “other” as she extrapolates the meaning of freedom in a hybrid postfeminist space. This chapter examines the portrayal of desire and self-fulfillment in context of marriage in the mainstream Bollywood film, Veere di Wedding (2018) in the context of feminist film criticism, auteurship, reversal of the gaze, and “competitive femininity, perfection and imperfection” (McRobbie, Australian Feminist Studies, 30:3–20, 2015). It also delves into the dynamics of production ideology of Hindi mainstream cinema, distribution, and spectatorship vis-à-vis the millennial.