This article was downloaded by: [University of Wyoming Libraries]
On: 30 March 2015, At: 08:57
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:
1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,
London W1T 3JH, UK
Women's Studies in
Communication
Publication details, including instructions
for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uwsc20
Framing the Feminine:
Diasporic Readings of
Gender in Popular Indian
Cinema
Anjali Ram
a
a
Roger Williams University
Published online: 11 Nov 2010.
To cite this article: Anjali Ram (2002) Framing the Feminine: Diasporic
Readings of Gender in Popular Indian Cinema, Women's Studies in
Communication, 25:1, 25-52, DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2002.10162440
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2002.10162440
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of
all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications
on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our
licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the
accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content.
Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions
and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by
Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied
upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of
information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,
actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,
and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use
of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study
purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,
reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access
and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Women's Studies in Communication Volume 25, Number I, Spring 2002
Framing the Feminine: Diasporic Readings of Gender in
Popular Indian Cinema
Anjali Ram
This essay focuses on the ways in which Indian immigrant women actively engage and
interpret Indian cinema. Employing an ethnographic approach, the analysis moves
between readers' readings and film texts in order to locate how Indian cinema mediates
the constitution of gendered identities in the diaspora. Keeping alive the sense of agency,
this study demonstrates that Indian women viewers/readers simultaneously comply with
and resist the dominant patriarchal representations that saturate Indian cinema.
"There is something incendiary in me and it has to do with being
female, here, now, in America . . . . When they brush up against
each other each of those markers- 'female,' 'here, ' 'now,' 'America
'-/ find that there is something quite unstable in the atmosphere
they set up."
- Meena Alexander (1996, p.IO)
R ecent approaches to migrancy emphasize the multiple linkages that are
constituted as immigrants "forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded
social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement"
(Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc, 1995, p. 48). Crucial to such alternating
and shifting migrant positions is the role played by the electronic media
and new communication technologies. The mobility and transnational
flows of media texts and technologies contest geographically bounded
notions of national culture. Specifically, the idea that media construct and
reconstruct everyday discourse and are implicated in the making and
re-making of the migrant self has been explored by writers such as
Appadurai (1996), Chambers (1994), and Naficy (1993, 1999).
In this study, I explore one such instance of mediated identity by
examining how commercial/popular Indian cinema is implicated in the
reconstitution of gendered identities within the Indian diaspora. I Scholars
Anjali Ram is an Assistant Professor at Roger Williams University. The author wishes
to thank David Descutner, Ohio University, Suzanne Gottschang Zhang, Smith College,
and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, insights and suggestions. An
earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1999 Annual Convention of the
National Communication Association inChicagoand was designated asthe TopPaper
in the Feminist and Women's Studies Division.
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
26 Women's Studies in Communication
have speculated in passing about the widespread prevalence of film
viewing in the Indian diaspora. For instance, Chakravarty (1993) comments
that Indian commercial cinema metonymically references "India"
for immigrants and Dasgupta (1993, p. 56) writes that for Indian immigrants,
Indian cinema plays an important role in maintaining a "continuity
in their dislocation."
The ubiquity of this cultural practice is evident by the fact that almost
every Indian grocery store carries a large selection of Indian film videos.
Rows of hot pickles, packets of spices in all shades of brown, yellow and
orange, baskets of mangoes, green gourds and okra, sheaves of curry
leaves and cilantro, and bunches of small green chilies frame rows of
videocassettes of popular Indian films. These videos are very often in tum
interspersed with large posters of the latest movie releases and brightly
colored announcements of local Indian film screenings. Inevitably, customers
add a video or two to their regular purchases of cumin seeds,
garam masala and papad. Some enterprising Indian grocery owners such
as George Jacob in New York have extended their video rental business by
signing leases on small movie theaters to show Indian films on the large
screen (Berger, 1998). Besides watching films, the Indian immigrant
community often plays host to visiting film stars who perform at gala
events in major cities in the U.S. Frequently the guest of honor for the
celebration of national holidays and social/religious events in the Indian
immigrant community is a prominent Hindi film star. On such occasions,
young women in the community typically dress according to the latest
Bombay cinema fashions and dance to songs from Hindi movies (Dasgupta,
1993; Mukhi, 1998).
Given such a pervasive consumption of Indian cinema, my purpose in
this study is to understand the ways in which Indian immigrant women
interpret the gendered representations in Indian cinema and conversely
how such interpretations help us understand the role of cinema in mediating
gender in the diaspora. Further, in this paper I wish to extend the
literature on gender and migrancy by taking the mediated experiences of
Indian immigrant women as central and worthy of investigation. Hegde
(1998) and others have pointed out that there has been a tendency in the
research to treat the migrant experiences of men and women as similar.
Inevitably, the specificities of immigrant women's lived realities are
rendered invisible. In contrast, I draw attention to the experiences of a
distinct group of immigrant women. By unpacking their talk about Indian
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 27
cinema, I hope to examine some of the ways by which Indian immigrant
women negotiate cultural constructions of gender, community and nation.
Most research on Indian popular cinema has been concerned with texts
rather than readers' readings (see for example Ahmed, 1992; Chakravarty,
1993; Mishra, Jeffery & Shoesmith, 1989; Thomas , 1989). In contrast, in
this study I seek to articulate how audience interpretations of cinema assist
us in understanding the mediated nature of identity. The ethnographic
methods employed by the Birmingham school and Hall's encoding/decoding
model generated viewer-centered approaches in media research . Often
termed "reception studies," such research introduced the idea of the active
audience where viewers were no longer captive to the text but employed
a range of reading strategies to decode the media. While I situate my study
within the paradigm of reception studies, I am very well aware of the
charge that often the case of the active audience has been overstated
(Carrage, 1990; Condit, 1989). Keeping in mind the polarizations of the
text-reader debate , I attempt to understand how cinema mediates identity
by counterposing texts and readers' readings in conjunction to history,
social relations and political formations. In other words, I am interested in
both how the text interpellates and recruits readers in an Althusserian
sense and the culturally specific ways in which women viewers interpret
and make meaning of these cinematic texts. Most importantly, neither
media texts nor readers' readings forestall stable or closed circuits of
meaning. While Indian cinema projects narratives of womanhood that are
coded through discourses of patriarchy and nationalism, they sometimes
open up spaces for subversion. Conversely, women viewers' negotiations
with popular media texts simultaneously resist and submit to the preferred
reading . Such re-editing and re-framing of the film texts by Indian women
within the context of the diaspora is the focus of this study. The complex
and contradictory intersections of textual meanings and viewer engagement
allow me to articulate some of the ways in which popular Indian
cinema is involved in the construction of gendered identity in the Indian
diaspora.
To forecast briefly-I begin by commenting on the methodological
underpinnings of this study. Additionally, in an attempt at critical selfreflexivity
I comment on my own subject position as an Indian immigrant
woman and its implications as I entered, lived in and interpreted the
home/field . Then, as I attend to intertextual conjunctions among Indian
cinematic texts, Indian immigrant women readers and the diasporic context,
I develop three areas, which build upon each other. First, I take up the
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
28 Women's Studies in Communication
question of gender as it emerges in relation to discourses of nationhood.
Second, I explore how the women viewers reframe, re-edit and negotiate
with the codes of gender presented in Indian films. Finally, I undertake a
reading of the popular Indian film star, Rekha, both as heroine within film
texts and as a movie star constructed through viewer interpretation, film
narrative, and media gossip.
My interest in "reading" Rekha was prompted by the enthusiastic
response from the women I interviewed, who unanimously declared her to
be their favorite actre ss. The competing ideological codes that Rekha
projected through both her film roles and her star image parallel the
contested readings of gender that emerged across my interviews . Within
the confines of the male-centered commercial Indian cinema, Rekha
circulates as an ambiguous figure where both patriarchal and feminist
discourses mesh to produce contradictory readings of Indian womanhood.
The liminal space that she often occupies both in film texts and subtexts
can be calibrated with some of the ambivalences that emerge in the
discourse about cinema and gender by the immigrant women participants.
Each section reveals some of the multiple, complex and contradictory
ways in which gender is read by women viewers, giving us clues to how
the "woman" question might be negotiated within the Indian diaspora.
Methodological Notes/"Homework"
This study derives from a larger project in which I focu sed on local
practices and textual details to build a picture of how Indian women in the
diaspora negotiate with nationalist and gendered representations inherent
in popular Indian cinema.f Employing an ethnographic approach, I included
in-depth interviewing, textual analysis, and participant observation
as methods of data gathering and generation. To accomplish a dialogue
with the women participants, I avoided a prepared questionnaire in favor
of a topical protocol that included both questions and topic s for discu ssion
and attempted to develop a collaborative interaction as advocated by
several femin ist scholars (Brown, 1989; Langellier & Hall, 1989; Minister,
1991; Nelson, 1989). All of the fourteen Indian women I interviewed are
part of the second wave of Indian immigration to the U.S. Living in
Central Massachusetts, these women had immigrated as wive s of Indian
profe ssionals and their ages ranged from 25 to 55.3
Since my intention was not to make generalizations in the positivistic
sense, the number of participants was not a crucial issue. Following
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 29
Patton's (1990) recommendations, I used "purposeful-sampling" to get
"information-rich cases" by approaching women who are regular viewe rs
of Indian films and who are located at the cusp of the migrant experie nce
(p.169). My emphasis was less on a specific number of "subjects" and
more on the intensity and depth of the interviews. I deliberately chose
women who have lived the reality of displacement and are in the process
of negotiating their identity as Indian and as women in the interstitial
spaces of non-white, immigrant America. I believe that their migrant
expe riences intensify the ways in which they interpret the gendered
represe ntations in Indian cinema. In other words, being immigrant is a
crucial, if not central, aspect of their particular engagement with Indian
cinema.
The interviews were audio taped and varied from one hour to two-anda-half
hours depending on the enthusiasm of the participant and the
rapport that I did or did not manage to create. Although most of the
interviews were conducted in English (except one which was entirely in
Hindi), both the participants and I lapsed into Hindi often. In most cases,
I followed up the interviews with additional phone conversations and
meetings, which allowed me a more intimate, deeper understandin g of the
women's experiences and interpretations.
To supplement the interviews, I engaged in participant observation by
attending local Indian film screenings. Indian social/community gatherings
and festivals. Participant observation allowed me to fill in some of the
inevitable gaps that I encountered while analyzing my interviews. Rather
than relying exclusively on my analysis of the ellipses and disjunctures in
an interview transcript, I used my direct and first hand experience to draw
a more complete picture of the context of utterances. Recordin g observations
in systematically assigned data logs enabled me to look at them as
written texts in conjunction with the interview transcript s.
Each of the audio taped interviews was transcribed and since many of
the interviews included Hindi, the process of transcription included translation.
I started transcribing as I conducted my interviews. Such simultaneity
allowed me constantly to reevaluate my topical protocol and my
interviewing style. Listening to the tapes, I caught myself making several
mistakes such as failing to follow up on particular thread , interrupting my
participant, changing a topic too quickly and so on. Humbl ed by my many
failures, I attempted toaddress them by being more vigilant and mindful
in subsequent interviews.
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
30 Women's Studies in Communication
The act of transcribing, however painstaking, provided an analytic
prelude. Nelson (1989) states that, "it is during the labor of transcribing
that the researcher performs the actual transformation from listening to
speech to the writing of speech, of making visible the invisible" (p.229).
My own experience with transcribing my interviews certainly confirmed
her claim . The repetitious process of transcription enabled me to attend
closely to the participants' voices until I started "hearing" patterns,
themes, contradictions, and elisions emerging from the larger mass of
conversation. Consequently, transcribing formed the first stage of making
sense of the data analysis as I concomitantly recorded the theme s and
topics as they occurred.
My next step involved re-reading all the transcripts and my notes in
order to identify the core themes that emerged in the interview texts. My
research questions provided an initial guide as I sorted through the wealth
of interview data. My study was guided by two main research questions:
How do Indian immigrant women interpret the gendered and nationalist
representations embodied in popular Indian cinema?; and How does
Indian cinema contribute to the construction of mediated identities among
women in the Asian Indian diaspora? The process of discovering significant
theme s involved accumulation and clustering of several related
issues and subtopics. Emerson, Fretz and Shaw (1995) suggest that a
theme that allows a researcher to make linkages to other issues noted in the
data is particularly promising. Building a thematic narrative involved the
organization of themes into a "coherent story about life and events in the
setting studied"(p. 170). In other words, the analysis is not simply a
description or cataloguing of patterns but an "interpretive leap" which ,
according to Patton (1990, p. 423) attaches significance, offers explanations,
draws conclusions, makes inferences, builds linkages, attaches
meanings and imposes order," Given the scope and focus of this paper, I
have chosen to highlight the theme of gendered identity as it is articul ated
both through film texts and readers ' readings.
I situate my analysis within the interpretative paradigm (Bohman,
Hiley, & Shusterman, 1991) and emphasize cultural particularities, contradictions,
and concurrences in the social construction of meaning. Like
Fiske (1991, p. 451) , I view texts and readers' readings as "instances of a
system in practice. " As Fiske explains, data in interpretative and critical
traditions are not statistically and proportionately "representative." Instead,
they are "systemic," whereby the text(s) analyzed provide insights
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 31
and clues into the larger social, cultural , political structures within which
they are instituted.
My interest in Indian cinema and its relation to the lives of Indian
immigrant women stems in part from my own confrontation with the
politics of memory, place and identity. Displaced from the comfortable
confines of Indian urban, upper-middle class, I have been repositioned as
migrant , marginal and other in the United States, first as an international
student and then as a green-card toting, immigrant woman/scholar. Like
many immigrants, I found some comfort and delight in frequenting my
local Indian grocery store and restaurants, participating in Diwali celebrations,
socializing with other desis,5 and of course, watching Indian movies.
However, as I observed the overt and aggressive displays of religious
nationalism in public events organized by the local Indian immigrant
community and the hyper-masculine, nationalist rhetoric that pervades
Indian cinema, my feminist politics and sensibilities interrupted my pleasures
of nostalgia and identification. Consequently, my concern with
researching cinema, gender and identity in the diaspora emerges in relation
to both my own uneasy, ambivalent consumption of Indian cinema
and a conscious, reflective recognition of its centrality in constituting
diasporic subjectivities in our community.
"Studying your own society" as Altorki and Solh (1988) put it, or
"homework" as Visweswaran (1994) terms it, presents its own special
dilemmas. If my membership within the community granted me a familiarity
with and a relatively easy access to women I interviewed, it also
presented me with contradictions and dilemmas. On one hand my own
positionality as immigrant and racialized "other" both inside and outside
academic arenas, and my own attempts to negotiate questions of home,
diaspora and identity led me to identify with my participants. On the other
hand my account of the readings and experiences of the women I interviewed
is framed and situated by my stakes in Third World and transnational
feminist politics and my academic location within specific critical,
cultural and postcolonial discourses. Such simultaneous negotiations between
positions of identification and critical distance reflect Lavie and
Swedenberg's (1996) observation that when the boundaries between home
and field collapse and sites of research, writing, and representing become
interchangeable, blurred and fragmented, ethnographic knowledge itself
becomes increasingly destabilized.
Perhaps mybiggest struggles in the home/field were with theissues of
betrayal and accountability that emerged when I attempted to analyze and
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
32 Women's Studies in Comm unication
thematize the women's voices (see Stacey, 1989).6 Much of what was
disclosed by the participants was dependent upon their positioning of me
as a "yo ung wife" of the community and not as researcher. However, my
representation of their voices emerges from my position as a member of
an academic community and from my feminist/critical investments. Consequently,
as I attempted to piece together my analysis I was constantly
worried about misrepresenting the experiences of the women with whom
I had talked. Upon listening to the taped interviews, I realized that my
intellectual saturation in academic discourses was constraining my ability
to appreciate the specific and different ways in which the women were
framing talk about gender. Subsequently, in my analysis I attempted to
draw upon a range of feminist scholarship, particul arly postcolonial, and
transnational femini sm, to make sense of what I was "hearing" in my
interviews. In fact my initial focus on gender broadened to a focus on
understandin g the embeddedness of gender within discourses of commu nity,
nationhood and cultural identity.
Most important, such a shift compelled me to consider my own situatedness
while studying and relating with my own community. Being
immersed in the Asian-Indi an community and constantly talking with
immigrant women about their experiences forced me to reflect on my own
contrapuntal positions in relation to the institutions where I teach and
study, to the larger American society, and to the Asian-Indian community.
At one point during my interviewing, I almost lost sight of the issue of
gender, as it remained so entangled with other discourses. Revisiting some
of the feminist literature allowed me to recogn ize and locate gender, both
in relation to my own positioning and my research, not as a separate issue
but as more multi-vocal and multi-layered than I had initially assumed.
For instance, the questions posed by feminist scholar Chandra Talpade
Mohanty (1993) enabled me to reframe and rethink both my own experiences
and the experiences of the diasporic women narrators. Mohanty
asks: "What are the politics of being a part of a majority and the 'absent'
elite in India, while being a minority and racialized 'other' in the U.S.?
And does feminist politics, or advancing feminism, have the same meanings
and urgencies in these different geographical and political contexts?"(p.
355). Such questions prompted me to resist applying a universal
femini st framework. Instead I felt encouraged to adopt a more culturallysituated
analysis of gender while being conscious about my own ambivalences,
contradictions and varied intellectual, political and emotional
responses in relation to my community.
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 33
While I do not believe that there is a facile methodological closure to
such home/field dilemmas, I do think that we can endeavor to be continuously
vigilant and reflective about our relationship with our participants,
the community and the phenomenon being explored. Such vigilance can
provide, as Ganguly (1992, p. 29) puts it, "the enabling moment for a more
persistently politicized scholarly practice."
Engendering the Nation
Ever since its inception, Indian cinema has contributed to the national
dialogue on Indian nationhood (Ahmed, 1992; Chakravarty, 1993) and
drawn deeply upon Hindu mythology for its thematic material. Consequently,
Indian cinema's narration of the nation usually collapses "Hindu"
with "Indian" and naturalizes mythic-religious representations of the national
identity. Entangled with such hegemonic configurations of the
nation is the question of gender. Woven through many cinematic texts is
the synecdochic relationship between the purity/sanctity of women and the
purity/sanctity of the nation (see Thomas, 1989). Images of purity are
maintained by representing chaste heroines, whose sexuality is confined
within the bounds of heterosexual marriage. Moreover, the common
narrative strategy in Indian cinema, where the villain threatens to violate
the heroine and is foiled in his attempts by the hero, serves among other
things to re-establish the moral order which includes preserving the
chastity of the woman.
The Hindu goddess Sita represents one such embodiment of purity,
chastity, and the careful control of sexuality, continuously circumscribed
within the domain of heterosexual marriage, family and the nation. Prescribed
as the feminine ideal by the classic Hindu text the Manu-Smriti,
stories about Sita are used to promote strong patriarchal ideologies primarily
through the notion of pati-vrata or complete devotion to the
husband (Courtright, 1995). Sita imagery can be seen in several movies
where, according to Saidullah (1992), "the martyred traditional wife who
wins her man from the 'bad', modern, ambitious woman is celebrated"
(p.38).7
Similarly, Vasudev (1983) refers to films such as Thodisi Bewafaii
(A Brief Betrayal, 1980) and Do Anjane (Two Strangers, 1979) in commenting
on how the woman who transgresses the role of the devoted,
chaste wife is duly punished. Additionally, these themes of purity are
underscored as being essential "Indian/Hindu" traits. Often Sita images
are interchanged with images of the goddess Ganga, similarly coding the
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
34 Women's Studies in Communication
feminine as the repository of purity." In contrast, adulterous women or
stock characters such as the "vamp" or the gangster's "moll" are often
given Western or Christian names (e.g., Mona, Dolly, and/or Lily) symbolically
locating their impurity alongside the paradigmatic axis that
includes Western culture, modernity, materialism and so on.
The immigrant women I interviewed clearly noticed and responded to
such gendered portrayals of controlled sexuality, monogamy, and purity in
Indian cinema. Jayshree, a woman in her mid-forties who works part-time
at a bank, professed identification and said, "I liked Mumtaz in Aap ke
kasam because my style is old fashioned still, see I don't call him [her
husband] by his name, I am very typical that way . . . I just call him
'Daddy' like them [her children]. I like that about being Indian."g Revati,
a young mother and housewife in her thirties, protested against some of
the recent film heroines who in her opinion do not represent "Indian
women." But she explained, "other heroines do--like the very theme of
Ramayana .. . where you basically adhere to a single, you know, monogamy
and ours is not a society where women freak out with a lot of guys
and have relationships before marriage and after."
Similar interpretations of gender in relation to images of nationhood
resonated across the interviews. For these narrators gender becomes an
important site for cultural difference. Shame, patience, sexual loyalty and
even deference are presented as signifying the "Indian-ness" of Indian
women. Implicit in these accounts is that Indian women are different from
Western/AmericanlEuropean/Caucasian women. This difference is
marked primarily through the control of sexuality and the construction of
the pure/chaste woman. Several women I talked with elaborated on this
image of purity integral to Indian womanhood by expressing moral
censure at some of the recent trends in Indian cinema. Urmilla, a social
worker and mother of two teenage daughters declared that nowadays, the
heroines "show too much of their body" and "in India we still have some
respect with not too many clothes off." Similarly, Shailaja, a store assistant
in her mid-forties, bemoaned that "there seems to be a need nowadays to
wear dresses as short as possible, or to use Western dresses." One participant,
Seema, a forty-five year old housewife, went to great lengths to
recount a humorous anecdote that involved the lack of any bodily exposure
in earlier films in contrast to contemporary films. Through her story
she explained how she could not stand "English movies" because of the
"bedroom scenes," and that she gets very upset when some of the new
Indian films exhibit a similar license.
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 35
In addition to the ideology of purity and compulsory heterosexuality,
Indian cinema presents gender through images of sanctity symbolized by
mother figures. Again, Hindu mythology provides the ground for such
expressions. One of the most powerful symbols to resonate across religious,
nationalist and popular discourses within Indian contexts is that of
the Earth. In Hinduism, the Earth is revered as both Prithvi, or as
natural/divine phenomena, and as Bharat Ma, Mother India, a more
cultural/national entity. As Kakar (1989) observes, the maternal-feminine
is more central in Indian myths and psyche than in their Western counterparts.
Nationalist movements since colonialism have employed the
iconograp hy of Bharat Ma to stir up patriotic/anti-British sentiments.
Contemporary Hindu nationalism, as Bacchetta (1993) notes, projects
Bharat Ma as the ideal model of feminini ty and as representative of the
territorial rights of the Hindu nation.
Within Indian cinematic history, the well-known '50s film Mother India
functions as the unofficial ur-texte, for the celebratio n of the mother as
nation and nation as mother. Thomas (1989) asserts that the female lead,
Radha, is portraye d as "both venerator of men and venerated by them as
devi (goddess) and maa (mother), and she is, in turn, in need of men's
protection and a protector and destroyer of men" (p. 16). Similar portrayals
of Indian motherhood as both powerful and sacred permeate Indian
cinema. Understandably, when I discussed the portrayal of gender in film
with the women I interviewed, the figure of the mother emerged prominently.
Revati remarked that Hindi film accurately portrays Indian mothers,
for "that is how life is in India . .. mothers in India are very protective,
taking care of their children is their main aim." More emphatically,
Shailaja referred to the film Mother India and commented,
take for instance Mother India; in every circumstance she takes
full responsibility for her family and keeps it together . . . and
when there are any necessities, she takes it upon her self and that
is a specialty of Indian women . . . compared to Western culture.
Similarly. Urmilla observed that "no matter what other kinds of roles
there are . . . the mothers' roles are the same in Indian movies-they show
them as sacrificing and caring-that is what the mothers' instinct is like."
These interpretations confirm Vasudev's (1983) point that although Indian
cinema portrays women as self-sacrificing, they also figure as "indestructible
when it comes to protecting" their children, particularly sons (p.100).
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
36 Women's Studies in Communication
Moreover, these readings, like the ones on the purity of Indian womanhood,
are embedded within discourses of nationalism, where the maternal
metaphorically signifies Indian culture, tradition, and the nation.
Taken together, the representations and readings of purity and sanctity
suggest that Hindu mythology coupled with a Hindu/Indian nationalist
ideology supply important interpretive frames to read Indian womanhood.
The twin ideological discourses of purity and sanctity contain and constrain
the construction of the feminine in Indian cinema, and most of the
viewers I interviewed seem to acknowledge such representations as being
appropriately "Indian." These readings are not surprising given the essentialized
and nationalized discourses that pervade Indian diasporic communities
(Bhattacharjee, 1992). Hegde (1998) notes that the "image of the
Indian woman as inscribed in traditional patriarchal ideologies of Indian
society is reinvented in the new world" and that questioning such traditions
would be "a negation of Indianness" (p. 48).
These imbrications of gender and nationhood need to be understood
within the larger political and historical context of the pre-independence,
nationali st movements. According to Chatterjee (1993), discourses of
nationalism in colonial India were articulated through a paradigm of
structured oppositions such as EastiWest, Spiritual/Material, and Tradition/Modernity.
But most powerful among these distinctions, according to
Chatterjee, was the distinction between ghar, the home, the inner space,
and bahir, the world, the outer space. This interiority/exteriority binary
allowed Indian nationalism to use whatever was necessary to control and
adapt in a modern, material world, while concurrently retaining a sense of
spiritual distinctiveness by constructing the home as the domain for the
true Indian self. The home then remained as the essence, "unaffected by
the profane activities of the material world-and woman . . . its representation"(p
.120). Such a series of correspondences between home, tradition ,
and gender provided an empowering, anti-colonial ideology for the construction
of nationhood that has been consistently revived in Indian
cinema. For diasporic women , then, such representations of gender, while
repressive, rhetorically construct a distinct, differentiated sense of Indianness
that can be recruited to develop a sense of national pride, identity and
belongingness when faced with the ruptures of migration.
However, such engendered interpretations of nationhood were not the
only ways in which the women I talked with constructed and represented
gender. Contradictory interpretations of womanhood emerged across the
interviews I conducted, depending on the context of the discussion. Often
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 37
these ambivalences were implicit and were not apparent immediately.
Only after sifting through the interview transcripts several times was I able
to appreciate some of the resistances, re-edits, and re-negotiations involved
in how these women decoded gender as presented in the film texts.
Contested Readings: Formations of Pleasure
and Sources for Empowerment
By tracing "pleasurable negotiations" and "resistant readings," scholars
such as Bobo (1988), Cooper (1999), Gledhill (1988), Mankekar (1999),
and Radway (1991) have examined how historically- and socially-situated
women readers engage with media in ways that contest the dominant
ideology that suffuses a given text. Central to these studies is the exploration
of the complex links between textual representations, readers'
interpretations and social situatedness. In this section, I explore some of
the ways in which the women viewers I talked with generate pleasure and
partially resist the patriarchal coding in Indian cinema.
Maternal/Sexual Images
As mentioned earlier, in Indian cinema, as in Hindu mythology, women
are portrayed as both supplicants in a male-ordered universe and as
powerful and deified mother figures. Such paradoxical positioning of the
feminine provides one source for the ambivalences and contradictions that
surround the representations and readings of Indian womanhood. Most of
the women viewers I talked with expressed the importance of "showing
respect" for "the women of the house." For instance, Revati explained that
she liked the way the women were represented in the movie Dilwale,
because "they show a lot of respect to the ladies in the house, like her
bhabi [sister-in-law]." Another participant, Nita, a twenty-eight year old
who assisted in the family business, went into great detail in elaborating
why she enjoyed the movie Bhabi ki Chudiya (The Bangles of My
Sister-in-Law, 1962). As she recounted the story to me, it was clear that
she took great pleasure in how the bhabi in the movie was respected and
revered as a mother.
Here it is important to note the cultural ramifications of the bhabi
figure. In most kinship systems in India, relationships are classified in a
highly specific manner. For instance, the term "aunt" in English would be
too general to designate a relationship within the Indian social context.
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
38 Women's Studies in Communication
Instead very specific terms such as maasi would be used to denote a
maternal aunt versus bua to denote a paternal aunt and chachi to denote a
paternal uncle's wife and so on. Bhabi , therefore, solely denotes one's
brother's wife and does not simply refer to a generic sister-in-law relationship.
This cultural specificity is important, because the term bhabi
connotatively indexes the maternal both in Indian society and in its
cinema.to
Within the traditional, Indian, patriarchal, familial context, women
have varying degrees of power depending on the relationship role in which
they are positioned. As we have seen earlier, Indian women are revered
and are accorded much power as mothers, in contrast to being wives where
they are positioned as subordinate and subservient. Similarly, as the bahu
(daughter-in-law), Indian women are positioned as powerless, yet within
the same family network they can concurrently gain some measure of
power as the bhabi , when interpreted and represented as a surrogate
mother. Additionally, the bhabi often occupies a liminal location where
she symbolizes both matriarchy and sexuality, impersonating mother and
wife simultaneously. This sexual dynamic is often performed through the
playful teasing permitted in the bhabi-dewar (husband's younger brother)
relationship.
Such relative, contiguous, shifting registers of power and sexuality
point towards some of the contradictions and ambiguities in constituting
the feminine within the largely patriarchal ideology in most traditional
Indian societies. Several prominent Indian films narrate this ambivalence,
where the bhabi figures who initially play maternal roles are then transposed
as real or imagined wives and/or as sexual partners." When
considered within this context, the formations of viewing pleasures expressed
by these women in relation to the bhabi figures in Hindi cinema
suggest a particular, gendered, cultural reading. In other words, as Indian
women spectators they do gain some measure of pleasure and satisfaction
in viewing possibilities for empowerment and female sexual expression,
however partial and institutionalized these sites might be.
The Ideal Hero
Another source for re-editing some of the patriarchal ordering of the
feminine in Indian cinema was revealed through the ways in which the
women clearly distinguished those images of masculinity that were appealing
from those they found distasteful. In fact, during my interviews
with diasporic women viewers, I was particularly struck by the immediate
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 39
and lively responses they gave me when I asked them to discuss their
favorite heroes. Not only were they able to come up with several specific
actors and textual examples, but they were also able to elaborate what did
and did not constitute the ideal male.
Additionally, not one woman narrator embedded her discussion on
masculinity within the larger domains of community and the nation.
Instead, the context within which they deliberated upon masculinity was
intensely private and would sometimes occasion a digression into persona l
life history. For instance, Revati followed up her explanation of why she
did not like a particular film portrayal of the male protagonist with a
reflection on her own relationship with her husband. Similarly, two other
participants alternated their discussion of the ideal hero with personal
anecdotes and experiences. During my interview with Nita, she refused to
allow me to continue recording as she turned from discussing film heroes
to her own recent, painful divorce. The emotional energy that was displayed
in the women viewers' comments about the ideal and the unworthy
hero appear to resonate with the modes of reader identification described
by Radway (1991) . Radway proposes that 'ideal' romance novels provided
both positive pleasures and "inadvertently activate unconscious fears and
resentment about patriarchal arrangements" (p. 157) for the women readers
she interviewed. Conversely, she observes that the 'failed' romance
novel elicited discussions that focused not on "aesthetic qualities of bad
stories nor on the uninspired . . . plots, but rather on the intense emotions
that the process of reading a bad book evoked" (p.158-l59).
Collectively, the Indian immigrant women's readings of the ideal male
hero in Indian cinema have clear identifiable patterns. The ideal hero was
defined as being "realistic about life," "practical," "sensible." He would
respect the woman and be "adaptive" and "compromising." He would also
be extremely devoted to the woman he loved, regardless of all obstacles,
whether it be the family as shown in the movie Dilwale or grave illness as
in Prem Geet (Song of Love, 1973). Older actors such as Rajesh Khanna
were cited for their "gentleness." Newer actors such as Shah Rukh Khan
were preferred, as he seemed like "the boy next door," "accessible" and
"someone with whom I could talk." Coupled with such constructions of
the ideal hero, most of the women insisted that they disliked "actionmovies"
and preferred instead romantic movies where women play an
important role.
Most importantly, in the interviews I conducted, the ideal hero was
interpreted as someone who would never display aggression towards the
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
40 Women's Studies in Communication
woman. The participants made it a point to refer to some recent films, to
give examples of negative images of masculinity. For instance, the hero
portrayed in the recent film Yashwant (1996) upset several participants. As
Revati declared:
Oh I certainly don't like Nana Patekar [in Yashwant,
1996] ... Too aggressive, too aggressive .. . They [Indian women]
should get up and slap him or something, like in this movie
Yashwant, he does care for her, . .. he likes her but he always
talks so bad, very rude and he slaps her for her own good
[reason] or whatever, but it feels bad that he treats her that way.
Similar portrayals were pointed out by many of the women I talked with,
as being very problematic . Nita suggested that, if a man mistreated a
women, she should "find a way to get rid of him," and that "in India a lot
of women they need to learn that."
The women I talked with clearly rejected texts that portray violence
towards women and insisted that the heroine empower herself and oppose
the abuse. However, the interesting point here is that their criticism of
violent, hyper-masculine portrayals in Indian cinema occurred side by side
with references to the purity/sanctity model of Indian womanhood as
being self-sacrificing, loyal, devoted, patient, and so on. Such variations in
many of the viewers' negotiations with gender in Indian film indicate the
multiple positions occupied by diasporic readers. On one hand, their
(dis)location as diasporic women urges them to take pleasure in the
nationalist discourses projected vigorously through Indian cinema, which
promote idealized constructions of Indian womanhood as markers of
difference from the West. On the other hand, nationalism is only one
framework within which gendered identities are constituted. For as the
narrators elaborate on the ideal hero, a different construction of the
feminine emerges. In these accounts, women are not passive, sacrificing,
and patient persons articulated primarily through their place in the family
and their duties to their nation. Instead, they are constructed as individuals
who deserve to be nurtured, loved and respected by the male. Any kind of
abuse or aggression is not tolerated and it is perfectly acceptable to
challenge male authority. Here talk about gender is not circumscribed by
discourse s of national identity. Instead, a more personalized, private,
empowered discourse on womanhood emerges that allows cinema to
provide images for vicarious sexual fantasy and pleasure.
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 41
These discontinuities imply that their responses favoring gendered
representations that preserve notions of purity/sanctity and controlled
sexuality may not simply indicate their uncritical acquiescence to patriarchy.
Rather, their comments linking gender to reified and essentialized
constructions of Indianness are more likely to be strategically employed to
shore up a distinctive cultural identity made unstable by the fissures and
uncertainties of migrant displacement. Such shifts, in relation to the
constitution of gender, point to the contingent, contextual, conditional
nature of subjectivity. As Hall (1991) explains we should think of identity
as a "production" which is processual and never complete (p.21). In other
words, our talk is always positioned, placed, enunciated in context and
constituted within, not outside, representation. The contradictions in readers'
readings refuse a facile, unitary reading of the ways in which Indian
immigrant women engage with the representation of gender in Indian
cinema. Instead, these ambivalences invite us to consider identity construction
as being inflected by both personal and collective histories
simultaneously. Mankekar's (1999) work on how women viewers engaged
with Indian television both resist and comply with patriarchal representations
and Abu-Lughod's (1990) study of how Bedouin women both
resist and support power structures in their readings of television similarly
point out how resistance and compliance cannot be seen as mutually
exclusive and monolithic categories. Rather, as Mankekar argues, "reconceptualization
of resistance and compliance has implications not just for
how we interpret the constitution of women's subjectivities but also, more
generally, for how we may conceptualize popular culture" (p.29). Further,
these disparate readings affirm the importance of recognizing how mediated
practices need to be understood in the light of the politics of location
and the shifting of subject positionings.
In the following section, I provide a specific textual example from
Indian cinema that invites ambiguous readings regarding gender. My
choice to telescope my analysis to a particularly popular feminine icon of
Indian cinema, Rekha, is not arbitrary. Rather, as I mentioned before, my
attention was directed by the women viewers I interviewed. Their responses
regarding their favorite film heroine forced me to recognize that
despite the overarching patriarchy promoted by Indian cinema, there are
spaces for transgressive readings. By tracking such sites of subversion, I
seek to uncover an instance of the layered and laminated nature of both
film texts and readers' readings.
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
42 Women's Studies in Communication
Transgressive Representations of Gender in Indian Cinema
Unlike the elaborate and emotional responses that were evoked when
the women viewers contemplated their favorite film heros, I was unable to
draw similar, detailed discussions in relation to their favorite film heroines.
Most of the participants would expound on the allegorical representations
of femininity in Indian cinema as projected through the sacred
mother figure and the pure, cha ste, virginal hero ine. However, when asked
specifically to recall particular actresses and the film roles they played, the
only specific response I was able to elicit related to the well known Hind i
film actress and star, Rekha. Given the enthusiastic response from the
women I interviewed, I explore why and how Rekha may stand as an
appropriate feminine icon for Indian immigrant women. However, when
asked to elaborate on why they preferred Rekha, these women were unable
to do so, in sharp contrast to the enthusiasm they expended on male actors
and heros. Perhaps Indian cinema's notorious "male narrational auth ority,"
as Vasudevan (1989, p. 31) terms it, and its dominant male star-system are
respon sible for the pauc ity of lived/situated interpretat ions in relation to
heroines and actresses. Nevertheless, within the largely patriarchal mod es
of address of Indian cinema, there are interstitial spaces that allow for
expressions of female subjectivity and sexuality. Rekha, throu gh some of
her well-known film roles and her star image, repre sents one such slippage
in the androcentric coding of Indian cinema. In order to understand why
the women readers expressed a preference for Rekh a, I examine both the
network of goss ip and selected film texts that have converged to produce
her both as fictional/fantasy heroine and as real/public persona in the
collective, popular Indian imaginary.
Commerci al Indian cinema has clearly been a masculine domain which
inevitably promoted women as star objects instead of star subjects. In
other words, women were primarily seen as "stars" based on their ability
to function as objects of male desire and fantasy. Male acto rs, on the other
hand , achieved star status based on their ability to represent allegorically
aspects of the self such as the "angry young man" image of the famous
Amitabh Bachchan. One exception to this general principle was the actress
Rekha, who managed to project herself simultaneously as a desired object,
a desiring subject and the principle protagonist in several films.l" Such
contestations have been amplified by the syntagmatic chain of signification
set into motion by a series of public discourses about Rekha.
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anja li Ram 43
The role of gossip magazines and fanzines in constructing public/star
images of actors/actresses for popular consumption is an inevitable, pervasive,
universal, and intertextual phenomenon. Not only is the film press
in India almost as large as the film industry itself but writings about the
star often supersede commentary on the films themselves (Mishra, Jeffrey
and Shoesmith 1989; Vasudev and Lenglet 1983). For example, Thomas
(1989) recounts the rumors and stories that surrounded the actress Nargis
and star of Mother India to demonstrate how they influenced the Indian
audience's reading of the film.
Mishra et al. (1989) demonstrate the construction of the actor as
parallel text by deconstructing the multiple discursive frames that position
Indian cinema's most well-known male star, Bachchan. They argue that
stars are themselves "cultural interfaces" that embody historical, cultural,
and economic meanings. Additionally, they assert that popular cinema in
India, even more than in Hollywood, "became the cinema of the star rather
than the cinema of the director, or the studio" (p. 53). Although they
accomplish an exemplary analysis that contributes significantly to our
understanding of the imbrications of Indian cinema with Indian culture,
they refer excl usively to the construction of the hero. Even though I
recognize the predominance of male stardom in Indian cinema, I believe
that on occas ion female stars such as Nargis and Rekha have functioned
as parallel texts, thereby destabilizing, if not actually subverting, the
phallogocentric address of the Indian cinematic world.
The story of Rekha as narrated through film gossip mills invokes the
proverbial "ugly duckling" scenario. The daughter of a famous Tamil
movie star, Gemini Ganeshan, Rekha entered the Bombay film scene with
the 1969 film Savon Badon (Monsoon Clouds). We are told by her
unofficial media biographers that she was considered too dark-skinned and
too generously proportioned until she was expertly "made over" to become
one of the most compelling female presences on the Indian silver
screen. This metamorphic narrative of Rekha's physical appearance runs
concurrently with Pygmalion-like stories about her initial inability to
enunciate Hindi, the lingua franca of Bombay cinema, and her subsequent
phonetic mastery over not only Hindi but Urdu, the elite literary discourse
of Northern India.
Such stories of transformation mythologize how an ordinary woman
can achieve the extraordinary, dazzling persona of a movie star. Rekha
does not represent the unattainable, unrealistic beauty ideal. Instead she
holds out the promise of accessibility and potentiality to the female
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
44 Women's Studies in Communication
spectator similar to advertisements that use before/after images of transformation
. Neither is she deglamourized as most of the actresses in Indian
new/art cinema tend to be. Rather, in all images off and on screen, she is
carefully coded with appropriate signs such as thick, lustrous, flowing
black hair, full red lips, sultry eyes and rich adornments to signify her
location within the fantasy world of popular cinema. Thus, gossip stories
coupled with her screen images allow Rekha to be ambivalently constituted
as both average and glamorous simultaneously.
By the early '80s, Rekha had achieved stardom and the gossip turned
to her alleged liaison with the married mega-star Amitabh Bachchan.
Thomas (1989) observes that although Bombay filmmakers assert that the
Indian audience is conservative and easily shocked, the very same audience
"appears very eager to be shocked in certain contexts, if one is to
believe the evidence of the network of gossip that surrounds the scandals
in the lives and loves of film stars [in India]" (p.22). Mishra et al.'s (1989)
model draws attention to how "the screen biography and the star's actual
life intersect, often generating industrial deals and occasional political
placements" (p. 55). The Rekha-Amitabh affair was very soon committed
to celluloid amid much publicity in the movie Silsila (1981), directed by
Yash Chopra. The narrative mimetically documents how the hero Amit,
played by Bachchan , resumes his relationship with his former true love
Chandini, played by Rekha, while married to Shobha, played by actress
Jaya Bhadhuri who is Bachchan's wife in real life. Such intertextual
enmeshment of reel/real life further accentuated Rekha's liminality. In
Silsila she is neither the pure/chaste heroine nor is she condemned as the
"fallen" whore figure. Instead these dichotomies partially dissolve to
disrupt traditional Indian cinematic framing of the feminine as pure and
sanctified. Although the film ends by reinstating the sanctity of monogamous
marriage, it opens up spaces for Rekha as Chandini to express
degrees of female subjectivity/sexuality not often permitted in Indian
popular cinema. Additional stories that accentuate Rekha as interrogating
the traditional framing of the feminine in Indian popular culture chronicle
her brief, failed marriages and her independent entrepreneurial spirit in
starting one of the first women's health clubs in India. Karanjia (1983, p.
87) reports that Rekha is one of the few female stars of her era who
publicly and assertively declared, "I want to get like a man and make a
baby."
The image that most directly counters the purity/sanctity model of
Indian womanhood in cinema is that of the courtesan. Chakravarty (1993)
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 45
comments that the courtesan, as historical character and cinematic spectacle,
is one of the most enigmatic figures to haunt the margins of Indian
cultural consciousness. Socially decentered, she is yet the object of respect
and admiration because of her artistic training and musical accom plishments
(pp. 269-270).
The courtesan is an ambiguous/romantic figure in multiple senses. She
embodies both Hindu and Muslim social graces and represents what
Chakravarty calls "female power-cum-vulnerability" (p. 270). Rekha's
most memorable roles have involved playing the courtesan directly or
indirectly. In Silsila she plays the role of the "other woman," which is
echoed in variatio ns in Basera (1985). In Mukadaar ka Sikandar she plays
a bazaar entertainer in love with the tortured hero played by Bachchan,
again blurring the boundaries between real/reel life, fiction/fantasy as film
gossip and text intersect. In Utsaav, she plays Vasantsena, the legendary
courtesan of ancient India, whose life is narrated in the classical Sanskrit
play of the fourth century A.D. entitled Mirchchakatika (The Little Clay
Cart). However, it is in Umrao Jaan (198 1), which Chakaravarty (1993)
calls the quintessential courtesan film of Indian cinema, where she plays
both desiring subject and desired object and reveals the contested nature
of the feminine in the collective Indian imaginary.
In her splendid and thorough examination of the courtesan genre in
Indian cinema, Chakravarty (1993) devotes considerable space to deconstructing
the film Umrao Jaan. Rather than undertaking another textual
reading, I draw partially upon her analysis to point out how this film
further contributes to the syntagmatic, symbolic, biographical continuum
that Mishra, Jeffrey, and Shoesmith (1989) assert is essential to the
construction of a star persona. Based on a popular novel of the same name,
the film Umrao Jaan purports to be a quasi-historical account of a real-life
courtesan at the tum of the century in India. Once again star and screen
biographies edge into each other through the theme of metamorphosis.
The film introduces the female protagonist Ameeran, played by Rekha, as
a young girl from a middle class family who is kidnapped and sold to a
brothel in Lucknow. There she is transformed from a tall, gangly, plain,
adolescent to the beautiful, captivating Umrao, accomplished singer,
dancer and poet.
The courtesan genre in Indian cinema interrogates the purity/sanctity
model of Indian womanhood at several levels and considerably destabilizesreceivedgenderedrepresentations.AsChakravarty(1993)
pointsout,
the genre presents a matriarchal, woman-centered universe where women
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
46 Women's Studies in Communication
are wage earners. Moreover the primacy of the female image legitimizes
feminine subjectivity and desire. However, the courtesan figure does not
completely negate the patriarchal ideology that sutures most Indian films.
Chakravarty observes that the opulent and garish mise-en-scene is a silent
reproach to the courtesan's sinful way of life. Additionally, most courtesan-genre
films finally stop short of celebrating woman-as-subject by
presenting narratives of redemption through suffering or death. For instance,
the film Umrao Jaan ends with Umrao facing her reflection in the
mirror, socially rejected and utterly alone.
Similarly, within the domain of Indian popular culture Rekha as star/
heroine is positioned through a syntagmatic accumulation of gossip stories
and narrative roles as a contradictory figure, as neither completely outside
nor inside the phallogocentric, patriarchal order. The contests and collusions
represented by her screen/star biography might explain why the
diasporic women I talked with find her the most appealing female heroine
in Indian cinema. Reading Rekha at the interface of gossip, rumor, fiction
and fantasy reveals unstable, shifting frames of femininity that simultaneously
transgress and surrender to patriarchal codes. As women of the
diaspora, they, like Rekha, contin uously map out what it means to be an
Indian woman across the alternati ng registers of nationalism, cultural
identity, and the politics of representation and location.
Conclu sion
In this study, I examined the readings by socially-situated women
spectators in relation to the textual representations in popular Indian
cinema. First, I explored how women are implicated in discourses of
nationhood and how these gendered nationalist scripts emerge across film
texts and readers' narratives. Second, I attempted to unpack some of the
contestations and contradiction s inherent in the representations and readings
of Indian womanhood in relation to the maternal-feminine, sexuality
and the ideal-masculine. Finally, I engaged in an intertextual reading of the
Indian film star, Rekha, in order to explain how popular Indian cinema
holds out possibilities for transgression and subversion. By moving between
texts and readers' readings, I wish to demonstrate that the immigrant
women I talked with do not uncritically and passively accept the
patriarchal ideology that underpins Indian cinema. Instead, there is an
implicit recognition and rejection of some of the androcentric apparat us
that propels Indian cinema and that occurs alongside the submission to the
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 47
mythic, national narratives of the self that privilege the masculine subject
and present the feminine as object.
As my title states, this paper explores how the feminine is framed. I
deploy the term framing to convey the multiple layers involved as readers ,
texts and contexts interact. For instance, "to frame" can mean to construct
or to build, as in putting up the frame of a house or "framing a proposal."
Alternatively, "framing" can refer to enclosure, as in framing a painting or
a photograph. Framing can also refer to pre-arrangements and adjustments
as in taking care to "frame a question," or more insidiously, framing
someone. Additionally, the phrases "frame of mind" and "frame of reference"
refer to disposition and context. My use of the term frame implies
that women readers both actively construct interpretations and are themselves
contained to some extent by the gendered representations offered to
them by Indian cinema. Further, the women viewers' negotiations with the
film texts need to be understood within the context of their location (or
dislocation) and their cultural positionings.':' In other words, when discussing
media consumption, neither readers nor texts are reducible to
deterministic or mechanistic formulations. Rather, the term frame allows
us to apprehend what Shaun Moores (1993, p.16) refers to as "interdiscursive"
play between readers, texts and contexts. After all, while frames
may designate the boundaries of meaning, they do not necessarily determine
meaning itself.
In my interviews, I spent considerable time and effort discussing with
my interviewees their biographies, motivations and/or circumstances for
migrating, their experiences as immigrant women in the United States,
lifestyle changes, and ways in which they maintained contact with the
homeland. These open-ended dialogues, rich with vivid details of life
histories, have allowed me to consider their readings of Hindi film in
relation to their other practices of consumption and everyday lives. For
instance, they all participate in varying degrees in community activities,
religious and cultural festivals ; preserve links with relations and friends in
India; develop strong social bonds with other Indian immigrants; subscribe
to Indian magazines and news programs; decorate their homes with
Indian handicrafts and artwork; wear Indian clothes on special occasions
and at home; regularly cook Indian food; and so on. In other words, when
situated in relation to their everyday lives, their consumption of Indian
cinema becomes one more activity that heightens and intensifies what
Smith (1994) terms their cultural bifocality, as they negotiate between past
and present, home and diaspora, "here" and "there." Consequently, the
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
48 Women's Studies in Communication
practice of consuming film in the diaspora can be understood as a situated
communicative practice. The displacements, uncertainties, and instabilities
of migrant circumstances encourage the taking up of specific reading
positions and the development of perspectives that preserve the natural,
self-evidentiary, stable sense of cultural identity. Indian cinema with its
aggressive valorization of cultural identity and gendered national discourses
offers appealing sites of identification and stability for diasporic
viewers faced constantly with the indeterminate drifts of migration. However,
as these women actively re-edit and reframe the film texts that they
view, notions of gender, home, and nation are reconstituted, reimagined
and reinterpreted within transnational contexts.
Lata Mani (1990) points out that the "discourse of woman as victim has
been invaluable to feminism in pointing out the systematic character of
gender domination" (p. 37). However, she argues that it is important to
employ this discourse with care and in conjunction with a dynamic
conception of agency, for otherwise we are left with reductive representations
of women. To counter such images of the "passive, acted upon,"
and "always, already victim," she insists that we understand women as
agents even in moments of being "intimately, viciously oppressed" (p. 37).
By highlighting both the resistances and recuperations that emerged in my
conversations with Indian immigrant women, I have sought to keep alive
questions of agency while concurrently critiquing the structures of patriarchal
power and nationalist ideologies that are mediated by Indian
cinema in the diaspora. Further, the shifting and strategic intersection of
texts, active readings, and contexts affirm that popular culture is a crucial
site for exploring how gendered diasporic identities are communicatively
constituted.
References
Ahmed, A. S. (1992). Bombay films: The cinema as metaphor for Indian society and
politics. Modern Asian Studies, 26(2), 289-320.
Alexander, M. (1996). The shock of arrival: Reflections on postcolonial experience.
Boston: South End Press.
Altorki, S., & El-Solh, C. F. (Eds.). (1988). Arab women in thefield: Studying your own
society. New York: Syracuse University Press.
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Bacchetta, P. (1993). All our goddesses are armed. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars,
25(4), 38- 52.
Berger, 1. (1998, December 13). Indians keep ties to home with movies. New YcJrk Times,
pp.49.
Bhardwaj, S. M., & Rao, M. N. (1995). Asian Indians in the United States: A geographic
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 49
appraisal. In C. Clarke, C. Peach, & S. Vertovec (Eds.), South Asians overseas:
Migration and ethnicity (pp. 197- 219). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bhattacharjee, A. (1992). The habit of ex-nomination: Nation, woman and the Indian
immigrant bourgeoisie. Public Culture, 5(1), 19-44.
Bobo, J. (1988). The Color Purple: Black women as cultural readers. In E. D. Pribam
(Ed.), Female spectators: Looking at film and television (pp. 90-109). London:
Verso.
Bohman, J., Hiley, D. R., & Shusterman, R. (1991). Introduction: The interpretive tum.
In J. Bohman, D. R. Hiley, & R. Shusterman (Eds.), The interpretive turn:
Philosophy, science, culture (pp. 1-41 ). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Brown, M. E. (1989). Soap opera and women's culture: Politics and the popular. In K.
Carter & C. Spitzack. (Eds.), Doing research on women scommunication: Perspectives
on theory and method. (pp. 161-1 90.). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Carrage, K. (1990). Interpretive media studies and interpretive social science. Critical
Studies in Mass Communication, 7(2),81- 96.
Chakravarty, S. (1993). National identity in Indian popular cinema, 1947-1 987. Austin,
TX.: University of Texas Press.
Chambers, I. (1994). Migrancy. culture, identity. London: Routledge.
Chatterjee, P. (1993). The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Courtright, P. (1995). Sati, sacrifice, and marriage: The modernity of tradition. In L.
Harlan & P. B. Courtright (Eds.), From the margins ofHindu marriage: Essays on
gender. religion and culture (pp. 184-204). New York: Oxford University Press.
Dasgupta, S. (1993). Feminist consciousness in woman-centered Hindi films. In The
South Asian Women's Descent Collective (Eds.), Ourfeet walk the sky: Women of
the South Asian diaspora. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press.
Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I. & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fiske, J. (199 1). For cultural interpretations: a study of the culture of homelessness.
Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8(4), 455-474.
Ganguly, K. (1992). Migrant identities: Personal memory and the constructions of
selfhood. Cultural Studies, 6(1), 27-50.
Gledhill, C. (1988). Pleasurable negotiations. In E. D. Pribram (Ed.), Female spectators:
Looking at film and television (pp. 64-89). London: Verso.
Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L. & Blanc, C. S. (1995). From immigrant to transmigra nt:
Theorizing transnational migration. Anthropological Quarterly, 68(1),48-63.
Hall, S. (1991). The local and the global: Globalization and ethnicity. In A. King (Ed.),
Culture, globalization and the world system: Contemporary conditions for the
representation of identity (pp. 19- 39). New York: Macmillan.
Hegde, R. S. (1998). Swinging the trapeze: The negotiation of identity among Asian
Indian immigrant women in the United States. In D. V. Tanno & A. Gonzalez
(Eds.), Communication and identity across cultures (pp. 34-55). Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Kakar, S. (1989). Intimate relationships: Exploring Indian sexuality. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Karanjia, B. K. (1983). The star system: Another kind of nonsense, another profound
humanity. In A. Vasudev & P. Lenglet (Eds.), Indian cinema superbazaar (pp.
84-88). New Delhi, India: Vikas Publishing House.
Langellier, K., & Hall, D. L. (1989). Interviewing women: A phenomenological approach
to feminist communication. In K. Carter & C. Spitzack (Eds.), Doing
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
50 Women's Studies in Communication
research on women s communication: Perspectives on theory and method. (pp.
193-220). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Lavie, S., & Swedenberg, T. (1996). Introduction: displacement, diaspora, and geographies
of identity. In S. Lavie & T. Swedenberg (Eds.), Displacement. diaspora, and
geographies of identity (pp. 1-1 2). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mani, L. (1990). Multiple mediations: Feminist scholarship in the age of multinational
reception. Feminist Review, 35, 24-41.
Mankekar, P. (1999). Screening culture, viewing politics: An ethnography of television.
womanhood, and nation in postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Minister, K. (1991). A feminist frame for the oral history interview. In S. B. Gluck & D.
Patai (Eds.), Women's words: The feminist practice of oral history. (pp. 27--42).
New York: Routledge.
Mishra, v., Jeffrey, P., & Shoesmith, B. (1989). The actor as parallel text in Bombay
cinema. Quarterly Review of Film and Video. lI(3),49--67.
Mohanty, C. T. (1993). Defining genealogies: Feminist reflections on being South Asian
in North America. In The South Asian Women's Descent Collective (Ed.), Our fee t
walk the sky: Women of the South Asian diaspora (pp. 351-358). San Francisco,
CA: Aunt Lute Press.
Moores, S. (1993). Interpreting audiences: The ethnography of media consumption.
London: Sage.
Mukhi, S. (1998). Underneath my blouse beats my Indian heart: Sexuality, nationalism.
and Indian womanhood in the United States. In S. D. Dasgupta (Ed.), A patchwork
shawl: Chronicles of South Asian women in America (pp. 186-205). New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Naficy, H. (1993). The making of exile cultures: Iranian television in Los Angeles.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Naficy, H. (Ed.). (1999). Home, exile, homeland: Film. media, and the politics ofplace.
New York: Routledge.
Nelson, J. (1989). Phenomenology as feminist methodology: Explicating interviews,
Doing research on women s communication: Perspectives on theory and method
(pp. 22 1-24 1). Norwood: Ablex.
Patton, M. Q. (1990). Qualitative evaluation and research methods. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Radway, J. (1991). Reading the romance. (2nd ed.). Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press.
Saidullah, J. K. (1992). Shakti- the power of the mother: The violent nurturer in Indian
mythology and commercial cinema. Canadian Women S· Studies. 13(1), 37--41.
Smith, M. P. (1994). Can you imagine? Transnational migrations and the globalization
of grassroots politics. Social Text, 39, 15- 35.
Stacey, J. (199 1). Can there be a feminist ethnography? In S. Gluck Berger & D. Patai
(Eds.), Women s words (pp. 111-120). New York: Routledge.
Thomas, R. (1989). Sanctity and scandal: The mythologization of Mother India. Quarterly
Review of Film and Video. 11(3), 11 -30.
Vasudev, A. (1983). The woman: Vamp or victim. In A. Vasudev & P. Lenglet (Eds.),
Indian cinema superbazaar (pp. 95-100). New Delhi, India: Vikas Publishing
House.
Vasudev, A. & Lenglet, P. (1983). The film societies and the film press. In A. Vasudev
& P. Lenglet (Eds.), Indian cinema superbazaar (pp. 67-71 ). New Delhi, India:
Vikas Publishing House.
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
Anjali Ram 51
Vasudevan, R. (1989). The melodramatic mode and the commercial Hindi cinema: Notes
on film history, narrative, and performance in the 1950s. Screen. 30, 29-50.
Visweswaran, K. (1994). Fictions offeminist ethnography. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota.
Notes
I In this paper, I refer to the Hindi-language cinema produced by the Bombay film
industry. Although there are strong regional language film industries in India, the Hindi
films produced in Bombay or "Bollyw ood" forms the national cinema. In this paper, I
use the terms Indian cinema, Bombay cinema and Hindi cinema interchangeably.
2This paper emerges out of my dissertation research where I examined how Indian
women in the diaspora read the gendered and nationalist representations in popular
Indian cinema. The dissertation concluded by drawing upon Bourdieu' s notions of
"field" and "habitus" to develop the idea of the diaspora as habitus and to demonstrate
the political, economic, and social contexts within which texts and readers' readings
circulate.
' The changes in U.S. immigration policy after 1965 allowed entry to nonEuropean
professionals and their families from the "Third World." Initially most
entering Indian immigrants were young males, but after 1970 they were joined by their
Indian brides. According to Bhardwaj and Rao (1995, p. 199), "the reasons for AsianIndian
immigration of the post-1965 era have probably more to do with the American
pull than with the Indian push factors ." Most Indian immigrants in the United States,
therefore, tend to belong to the educated professional elite rather than the unskilled,
working class. Although in the 1990s Indian immigrat ion pattern s were slowly changing,
lending a more diverse complexion to the Indian diaspora in the U.S., the majority is still
composed of middle-class professionals and their families. Given this predominance, I
sought to interview women who belonged to such a socio-economic context, and who
came to the U.S. as wives, in order to make meaningful connections among texts,
readers and contexts.
41n the larger study I developed three core themes related to collective memory and
the politics of remembering, nationalism and the construction of cultural difference, and
gendered identities and resistance respectively.
5Literally translated from Hindi, desi means "native of a given country." Within the
Indian diaspora, desi refers to Indians and carries with it strong connotations (sometimes
used ironically and even pejoratively) of affiliation and identification.
6In my larger study, I spend considerable space reflecting on the number of
"home/field" dilemmas, mistakes and surprises. These reflections have forced me to both
rethink feminist ethnographic practice and my own positionality as a feminist scholar of
mass media.
7Examples of movies that have Sita imagery are Pati Parmeshwar (Husband/God,
1988);Naseeb Apna Apna (Different Destinies, 1986); and Daasi (Female Slave, (981).
"Notable film examples using the iconography of Ganga are lis Desh Mein Ganga
Beheti Hai (The Land Where the Ganga Flows, 1960); Ganga ke Saugand (As Ganga
is My Witness, 1976); Ram Teri Ganga Maili (Rama, Your Ganga is Polluted, 1986); and
the more recent film Pardes (Foreign Land, 1997).
9The names of the participants have been changed to preserve anonymity and
confidentiality. However, I have given some background details regarding each of the
women narrators quoted in this paper.
ID-rhese are terms in Hindi and are specifically employed in parts of North India.
In other parts of India, regional and linguistic terms differ in their designations of similar
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015
52 Women's Studies in Communication
kinship relationships. However, commercial, BombaylHindi cinema with its North
IndianlHindu hegemonic framework specifically uses North Indian/Hindi kinship terms
and presents them as being pan-Indian.
llExamples of such films are Sahib Bibi Aur Gulam (King, Queen and Knave,
1962), Silsila (Affair, 1981), Ek Chaadar Maili Si (A Soiled Quilt, 1982) and Satyajit
Ray's Charulata (1969 )
12Examples of such films are Silsila (Affair, 1981); Utsav (Festival, 1985); Umrao
Jaan (1981); Mukadaar ka Sikandar, (Conqueror [like Alexander] of Destiny, 1978);
Khubsurat, (Beautiful, 1980); Joothi (Liar, 1982); Izmzat (Permission, 1995); and
Aastha (Respect, 1997).
l3I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting that my use of
the term "framing" in the title could be unpacked.
Downloadedby[UniversityofWyomingLibraries]at08:5730March2015