Gaze Averted: Interrogating the Portrayal of Menstruation in Hindi Cinema

Abstract

Hindi cinematic discourse has aestheticized women as a category that cannot possibly conceive a lived reality. They are visualized without any cognizance of their biological realities—sexual desire, menopause, aging, pregnancy, and menstruation. Cultural imagination mediated through cinema has constructed period blood as an undesirable category like offal, cadavers, and bodily waste. In this paper, we illustrate this argument through two recent films that have received critical acclaim: R. Balki’s Padman (2018) and Rayka Zehtabchi’s Period. End of Sentence (2019). Both the blockbuster film and the Oscar-winning documentary engage in a critical dialogue about women’s reproductive health posturing debates on shame, economics of power, and patriarchy. These films have reinstated the bleeding women as impure and temporarily exiled, denying them any agency to discuss their health and sexuality without reluctance and therefore negating women’s health in the familial budget. In spite of their best effort, the ironic novelty of representation in the films is progressive, but it lacks any real subversion for it is still nascent and tokenistic. Agency is solely derived from a capitalistic patriarchal focus rendered with scientific temper and linguistic and monetary tools to negotiate on behalf of the disenfranchised women. Bollywood has to take into account the dialectics of women’s bodies in a hegemonic sociopolitical structure and assert women as self-fashioned subjects/protagonists. Until then the cinematic potential for change will remain incomplete and unilateral.