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Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis
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Gender, Cinema,
Streaming Platforms
Edited by
Šarūnas Paunksnis
Gender, Cinema, Streaming Platforms
Šarūnas Paunksnis
Editors
Gender, Cinema,
Streaming Platforms
Editors
Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis Šarūnas Paunksnis
Kaunas University of Technology Kaunas University of Technology
Kaunas, Lithuania Kaunas, Lithuania
ISBN 978-3-031-16699-0 ISBN 978-3-031-16700-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16700-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Acknowledgments
This book is the outcome of a conference we organized in 2019 at the

Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities at Kaunas University of
Technology, Kaunas, Lithuania. The conference was envisioned as a forum
to assess the impact of new media platforms—specifically the subscription
video on demand (SVOD) platforms, on cinema, its practice, content and
viewing habits in India. We would like to thank all of our contributors for
addressing these questions from their respective vantage points. Our
research group—Digital Culture, Communication and Media headed by
Saulius Keturakis—supported us in different ways since we started gener-
ating the idea of holding a conference. We thank the administration, our
colleagues and our students for their support. We are especially grateful to
our Rector, Eugenijus Valatka, and our faculty’s Dean Ainius Lašas for
their encouragement and participation in the conference. Our heartfelt
gratitude goes to Rajinder Chaudhary, the Honorary Consul of India to
Lithuania, for supporting us financially and logistically. We would espe-
cially like to thank two of our keynote speakers—Rachel Dwyer and Ashish
Avikunthak. Without their critical interventions the conference would not
have been complete. We would like to extend our thanks to Lina Aboujieb
and Arunaa Devi at Palgrave for their help and support throughout the
process.
And last but not least, we thank our families in India and Lithuania for
their support and love.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis and Šarūnas Paunksnis
Part I Representations of Gender in SVOD Platforms 37
2 Biopolitics
of Hindutva: Masculinity and Violence in
Leila and Aashram 39
Šarūnas Paunksnis
3 Questioning
the “Great” in “The Great Indian Wedding”:
Streaming Feminism Through Bang Baaja Baaraat and
Made in Heaven 63
Mohit Abrol
4 Four More Shots Please!: Postfeminism, SVOD Platforms,

and “Empowered” Indian Women 87
5 Lust Stories and the Politics of Private Viewing on SVOD

Platforms113
Rutuja Deshmukh
vii
viii Contents
Part II Representations of Women in Postmillennial Hindi

Cinema 129
6 New
Feminist Visibilities and Sisterhood: Re-interpreting
Marriage, Desire, and Self-Fulfillment in Mainstream
Hindi Cinema131
Gauri D. Chakraborty
7 Gaze
Averted: Interrogating the Portrayal of
Menstruation in Hindi Cinema161
Garima Yadav and Ira Gaur
8 Gender
and Nationalism: The Journey of Sehmat in
Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi181
Anu Sugathan
Part III Women, Documentaries and Politics 201
9 India’s Daughter: The Banality of Rape203

Hannah Zalis-Anzi
10 Deeply
Personal Is Deeply Political: New Voices in
Women’s Documentary Practice in Indian Subcontinent223
Sudipto Acharyya
Part IV Interview with Ashish Avikunthak: An Experimental

Filmmaker 245
11 On
Cinematic Transformations, Gender, and Religion:
An Interview with Ashish Avikunthak247
Filmography269
Index281
Notes on Contributors
Mohit Abrol is a doctoral fellow (Literature) in the Department of

Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
(IITD), New Delhi, India. His research interests include the modernist
milieu and aesthetics, the postmodern condition, the rise of Fascism and
the Cold War era, continental philosophy, Marxist studies, cinema studies,
political violence and the idea of justice.
Sudipto Acharyya is an assistant professor at Whistling Woods
International-Mumbai, India, and an independent filmmaker. He is an
alumnus of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, and holds
master’s degree in Film Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He has
taught in FTII and several other film institutes. Sudipto is involved in
popularizing cinema viewing and appreciation among cinephiles through
a range of workshops. His academic interests are in aurality of cinema and
film philosophy. Sudipto is working as a senior faculty and Head of
Affiliations and Academics-Short Course Unit in the School of Filmmaking
at Whistling Woods International-Mumbai.
Gauri D. Chakraborty is a professor at Times School of Media, Bennett
University, India. She graduated from Film and Television Institute of
India (FTII), Pune, and has been a part of the audiovisual industry since
1995. She has worked with BBC WST on HIV awareness in India. Gauri
was the associate producer for the award-winning film Sheep Thief (Asif
Kapadia, 1997). Gauri has been a media educator for the last 16 years and
has co-headed the Amity School of Communication, Noida. Gauri was the
festival director for IAWRT Asian Women’s Film Festival 2019. She has
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
received the 100 Women Faces award from the Centre for Women
Entrepreneurs (COWE) in 2018. She has edited and conceptualized the
book Balancing the Wisdom Tree, an anthology featuring FTII women
alumni from 1963 to 2016.
Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis teaches at the Faculty of Social Sciences,
Arts and Humanities at Kaunas University of Technology, Kaunas,
Lithuania. Her academic interests include gender, caste, media representa-
tions and subaltern literature. Her scholarly articles have been published
in peer-reviewed journals including South Asian Popular Culture and
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and in several edited book col-
lections. She was awarded a fellowship for a collaborative research project
Manly Matters: Representations of Maleness in South Asian Popular Visual
Practice, granted by the Humboldt Foundation, Germany. She was a
Visiting Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She is
currently a member of COST Platform Work Inclusion Living Lab
(P-WILL) project. Runa is a creative writer and translator. Her translated
stories have been published by Orient Blackswan and Sahitya
Akademi, Delhi.
Rutuja Deshmukh is a doctoral candidate at Symbiosis Institute of Mass
Communication (SIMC), Symbiosis International University, Pune, India.
She is a visiting faculty of film history at Savitribai Phule Pune University
and FLAME University. Her research areas include film history, popular
cinema, popular culture and questions of representation at the intersection
of neoliberalism. Her work has appeared in The Feminist Review, FemAsia,
Himal SouthAsian and The Wire.
Ira Gaur is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delhi,
India. An alumna of the University of Delhi, she has taught undergraduate
courses on Victorian literature, popular fiction and modern European
drama. Her research interests include gender and women’s studies, media
and communication, literature of the Anthropocene.
Šarūnas Paunksnis is a Associate Professor in Digital Culture,
Communication and Media Research Group, Faculty of Social Sciences,
Arts and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology in Kaunas,
Lithuania. His research interests include new media, Indian cinema, digi-
tal humanities, science and technology studies, cultural theory and postco-
lonial theory. A Fulbright and Chevening alumnus, he did research at
Columbia University, New York, and SOAS, University of London, as well
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
as taught and did research at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi,

India, on numerous occasions. His edited book Dislocating Globality:
Deterritorialization, Difference and Resistance was published in 2016 and
his book Dark Fear, Eerie Cities: New Hindi Cinema in Neoliberal India
was published in 2019.
Anu Sugathan is a PhD student in the Department of English at the
University of Oregon. Her areas of interest include Visual Culture, Comics
and Graphic novels, Postcolonial Writings, and South Asian Literature
and Cinema.
Garima Yadav is an assistant professor at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College,
University of Delhi, India, and an alumna of Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Her area of interest lies in gender studies, cultural studies, postcolonialism
and Nordic detective fiction. She has published essays on indigenous
detective fiction, postcolonial literature and romanticism.
Hannah Zalis-Anzi is an associate professor at Amity School of Film and
Drama, Amity University, India. She is also an active filmmaker and mov-
ing image artist specializing in video, documentary, short fiction and fea-
ture films. She has directed, produced and edited several documentaries
and short fiction films. Her debut film The Unkosher Truth received the
Rehovot International Women Film Festival First Prize Award in 2008,
Israel; The Astra International Film Festival First Prize Award in 2008,
Romania; and The Jerusalem International Jewish Film Festival Special
Mention Award in 2006. Her recent documentary Family Typewriter
(2018) won the Special Jury Award at Rajasthan International Film
Festival, 2019.
List of Tables
Table 6.1 New feminist sensibilities in select Hindi mainstream films

released in 2011 143
Table 6.2 Dialogues targeting tradition, marriage, and female desire 152
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Introduction
On September 8, 2020, Rhea Chakraborty, an Indian actress, was arrested
by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) in Mumbai for purchasing and
consuming drugs (Hollingsworth and Mitra 2020). She was the girlfriend
of a Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, who was found dead at his
residence earlier that year, and Rhea’s arrest was part of the investigation
into Rajput’s death—a case that polarized not only the Bollywood film
fraternity but also the wider society and created a frenzy in the media in
India at that time. Shortly before her arrest, Rhea was seen walking to the
NCB office wearing a T-shirt, which said: “Roses are red, violets are blue,
let’s smash patriarchy, me and you”. Her T-shirt drew both anger and
camaraderie as she was turned into a villain as well as an icon of protest
against hyper-masculine media and other apparatuses of patriarchal oppres-
sion (Sengat 2020). Immediately after this incident, many Bollywood
actors posted the same message (as was in Rhea Chakraborty’s T-shirt) on
their respective social media handles and a campaign #JusticeForRhea also
R. C. Paunksnis (*) • Š. Paunksnis

Kaunas University of Technology, Kaunas, Lithuania
e-mail: runa.chakraborty@ktu.lt; sarunas.paunksnis@ktu.lt
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
R. Chakraborty Paunksnis, Š. Paunksnis (eds.), Gender, Cinema,
Streaming Platforms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16700-3_1
2 R. C. PAUNKSNIS AND Š. PAUNKSNIS
started circulating on social media. The sartorial choice seemed to have

started a debate about how sexist practices of Indian society violate a
woman’s personal space and Rhea Chakraborty, who was then being ques-
tioned by police for drug-related allegation in Rajput’s death case, became
a reference point for many to profess as well as to repudiate the issues
concerning women’s rights. However, an interesting aspect related to this
incident which was barely reported by the mainstream media channels was
the fact that the T-shirt worn by Rhea Chakraborty was part of a clothing
line designed by The Souled Store in collaboration with GiveHer5—an
NGO that manufactures affordable menstrual hygiene products (Nisar
2020). #Rosesarered is a collaborative campaign with GiveHer5 to increase
awareness about menstrual hygiene in rural areas across India. Earlier, the
campaign was supported and endorsed by various celebrities and many
Bollywood actors such as Dia Mirza and Rahul Bose (The Free Press
Journal 2020). While the underlying purpose of this campaign makes its
feminist concerns visible, its (mis) appropriation during the Rajput death
controversy underscores media’s skewed understanding of feminism in
postmillennial India. Our endeavour in this book is to identify how the
so-called feminist enunciations in the films and SVOD (subscription video
on demand1) content in twenty-first-century India are marked by a similar
ambiguous entanglement of feminist and counter-feminist rhetoric.
Although gender has been a “central issue” since the colonial time (Sen
2000, 1), its visibility in the discourse of India’s popular culture increased
manifold after the economic liberalization in the 1990s. The country’s
transition from a closed economy to an open market economy facilitated
the influx of global commodities and has also created a space for transna-
tional cultural exchange. At the same time, India’s media environment
transformed phenomenally with the advent of satellite and cable televi-
sion. Their policy of providing non-stop entertainment through multiple
television channels (contrary to two national channels in the pre-economic
liberalization period) not only changed audience’s daily engagement with
televisual content but also influenced their lifestyle and ways of perceiving
the world. Hence, the issue of gender representation in postmillennial
1
There is no universally accepted terminology in referring to a wide variety of video
streaming platforms. SVOD or OTT (over the top) as it is sometimes called is part of a larger
pool of platforms termed as VOD (video on demand), which also includes TVOD (transac-
tional video on demand), generally a pay-per-view or pay-to-download service (e.g. Apple’s
iTunes or Amazon’s Prime Video) and AVOD (advertising-based video on demand), which
is free to watch but includes advertisements (e.g. YouTube).
1 INTRODUCTION 3
India’s media ecosystem needs to be located not only within the historical
context of feminist movements in India but also within the pervasiveness
of a philosophy of consumption and pleasure brought in by a neoliberal
economic policy and popularized by a continually proliferating media
apparatus.
The term women’s movement in the Indian context often invokes con-
troversy because of its inclination to prioritize the claims of women hailing
from upper-caste, upper-class/upper-middle-class, urban, and educated
communities. Yet, it can be used to trace the trajectory of Indian women’s
engagement with feminist discourse in both pre-independence and post-
independence eras. The question of women’s emancipation, which was
deemed as a marker of modernity, progress, and civilizational status of a
society, became pre-dominant in the agenda of nineteenth-century social
reformers. Not only legislative remedies were sought to end oppressive
social practices against women (such as abolition of Sati2 in 1829 and
widow remarriage in 1856), but endeavours were also made to create the
New Woman “…who would share the sensibilities of the men and be able
to sustain their new class roles” (Sen 2000, 7). The achievements of “new
women” became visible in the early twentieth century as they formed asso-
ciations, participated in the nationalist movement, and criticized patriar-
chal society as well as the colonial rule. However, these groups consisted
mostly of elite upper-caste and upper-class women whose attempt to speak
for all Indian women certainly led to the marginalization of voices that
exist outside the dominant caste/class communities. Nevertheless, Indian
women’s movement gathered steam after the 1950s and 1960s—years
that are marked as the “silent period” (John 2009, 48). The second wave
of Indian feminist movement, which was visible during the 1970s and
1980s, grew out of women organizations’ active resistance to violence and
discrimination against women.3 In fact, the evidence of the declining sta-
tus of women was also reflected in the report Towards Equality (1974)
published by the Government of India. Yet, in spite of the presence of a
large number of autonomous women’s organizations, pro-women legisla-
tions made especially during the 1980s (Agnes 1992), and the formalized
2
Sati/suttee refers to the ritual immolation of a wife on her husband’s funeral pyre
(Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sati).
3
For example, women were subjected to rape and battering in police custody (Mathura
rape case) as well as in their marital homes (dowry death). Besides, they had to endure sexual
harassment in the workplace and on the street.
entry of women’s studies as a discipline in the academia, women’s move-

ment of this period failed to build a consolidated unified national cam-
paign as other intersectional axes such as caste and religion were not
adequately addressed in the discussion of women’s oppression in India.4
One major criticism that described Indian women’s movement during this
period as elitist and Brahmanical came from Dalit feminists. The need for
Dalit women to assert their identity outside the women’s movement as
well as the Dalit movement (Guru 1995) revealed, on the one hand, the
predominance of Brahmanism and patriarchy in counter-hegemonic dis-
courses, while on the other hand, it also led some scholars to fear the
growth of an identity politics if non-Dalit feminists are not allowed to
partake in Dalit women’s movements (Rege 1998, 2006). Another impor-
tant factor that further accentuated the fracturing of the second wave of
the feminist movement in India was the rise of the majority communalism
in the 1980s—a phenomenon which has been intensely pro-active since
2014, and at present, it is attempting to structure the social order in India
upon a strictly Brahmanical patriarchal value system. Interestingly, how-
ever, while the presence of a collective women’s movement led by
feminists-activists became increasingly confined within niche academic or
organization/political party-based communities, women’s issues, during
the 1990s, started gaining unprecedented visibility, especially in the media.
The advent of the new economic policy in India in the late 1980s and
early 1990s not only transformed India’s urban middle class phenomenally
but also recast the “New Woman” following the demands of a global capi-
talist market. The collective notion of women’s emancipation, which was
upheld by feminists of earlier decades, was reconfigured as “individual
desires and goals” to be fulfilled by “new opportunities offered by the
growing market” (Chaudhuri 2017, 215). The idea of freedom was also
modified as it disengaged itself from its nationalist connotation as well as
from its post-independence association with a holistic commitment to
bring growth with equity and, instead, it started emphasizing more the
neoliberal rhetoric of individual freedom to choose. In fact, women con-
sumers were more targeted by media and the market alike to popularize
this new concept of freedom. Unprecedented job opportunities, especially
for educated middle-class women who could be employed in the emerging
software industries or in the call centre jobs with high salaries, increased
the possibility of living a life of material comfort, pleasure, and
4
An apt example is the controversy around the Shah Bano case.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
consumption. It must be noted here that the notion of neoliberal con-

sumption is closely associated with the new middle class (Fernandes and
Heller 2006; Mankekar 1999; Mazzarella 2003) that emerged in the wake
of the liberalization of India’s economy. Although there are disagreements
regarding the conception of a homogenous middle class as the “undoubted
beneficiaries of globalization” (Ganguly-Scrase and Vandenbroek 2005,
3), what became most pervasive in the mediated representations is the
image of a middle-class (usually upper-caste, educated, mostly urban)
Indian woman who had been “freed” by the new economic policy. She is
represented as one who is (made) capable of pursuing a professional career
that not only gives her the power to purchase pleasure but also establishes
her as an independent subject, in control of her life’s decisions. Similarly,
themes that have long been tabooed on mainstream media representa-
tions, such as extramarital affairs, illegitimate children, same-sex relation-
ship populated television serials, although traditional (Brahmanical
patriarchal) family values that are more imposed on women than on men
were never effectively questioned. Thus the “New Woman”, who emerged
in post-liberalization India as a “freely choosing” customer consuming
brands from MTV to Pepsi, was carefully constructed in order to blend
the global/Western with the desi (Indian). In this process of amalgama-
tion, the overflowing of Indian market with foreign brands and the emer-
gence of sophisticated shopping malls or beauty salons were posed not as
a threat to the existing Indian culture but as a natural extension of the
local. An apt example of this curious integration is seen in the media craze
over beauty pageants that became a phenomenon, especially in 1994 when
two Miss India beauty queens won the Miss Universe and the Miss World
contests. An overwhelming section of Indian media not only advocated
for the Miss World pageant that was held in Bangalore in 1996, but they
also vehemently criticized those feminists who were protesting against the
organization of the event (Chaudhuri 2017). In mediated representations,
these pageants were upheld as opportunities for Indian women (upper-
caste, middle-class, urban/semi-urban, educated women) to attain inter-
national fame—an “honour” which had been elusive within the restraints
and austerity of a closed economy. Therefore, it is no wonder that beauty
queens, who are otherwise configured by the global/Western standards of
beauty, were presented as cultural ambassadors of India professing their
deep-rooted association with Indian values. Hence, it may be argued that
the “New Woman”, who had once been created to salvage national pride
from the clutches of the colonial rulers,5 was reconfigured after the eco-
nomic liberalization for furthering the same interest, albeit in a different
manner. Her newness now resides in her ability to be a consumer subject
and to choose, although the gamut of choices offered is controlled by
multi-national, capitalist, patriarchal, Brahmanical power centres.
Reflections of this New Woman, who oscillates between a sexually permis-
sive culture shaped by a global neoliberal market and the traditional roles
prescribed by a hetero-normative, (Hindu) patriarchal society were visible
in the Hindi film industry which underwent a dramatic transformation in
the post-liberalization period. Opportunities for global distribution,
investment of astronomical amount of money, and entry of advanced tech-
nology not only made films “(V)isually lush, replete, smooth, tight, and
fast-paced” (Anwer and Arora 2021, 8) but also reconfigured film narra-
tives as per the thematic priorities set by a global neoliberal culture. The
changes as argued by Anwer and Arora not only included the “absence of
the archvillain” and the replacement of conflict grown out of social ten-
sion by an “abstract clash between ‘tradition and modernity’” (2021, 8),
but they were also manifest in the body of the female protagonist who
became the site where the traditional virginal heroine merges with the
erotic, transgressive vamp. The New Woman who emerged out of this
“marriage” of the contraries, was posed as the modern liberated Indian
woman—a befitting representative of new “shining India” that aligns itself
with the superpowers in the global market while at the same time it claims
to be unsullied by foreign/Western values. Several blockbuster films of the
time (e.g. Diwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge 1995, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai 1998)
exhibited this seamless conflation of the local and the global. Similarly, the
coalescing of the traditional “innocent” heroine and the “lascivious” (for-
eign) vamp took an interesting form in films like Biwi No.1 (1999) as it
glorified the image of a modern independent global-Indian woman who
at the same time is a votary of the traditional Indian familial (read patriar-
chal) values. However, the rhetoric of women’s empowerment that
became the buzzword in the 1990s also created a space for feminist itera-
tion of women’s issues in mainstream Hindi film industry. Films like
Astitva (2000), Chandni Bar (2001), and Paheli (2005) engaged with
themes that in a more fundamental way focused on the question of wom-
en’s identity and freedom. While the numbers of such films are few and far
5
The idea was expounded by Partha Chatterjee (2010) in The Nationalist Resolution of the
Women’s Question (1989).
1 INTRODUCTION 7
between, women-centric issues remain visible in the popular discourse

through the reconfigured image of the New Woman.
Post-liberalization Indian woman, what we call “New Woman 2.0”, has
garnered persistent media attention in the present century. Not only media
representations are replete with themes concerning individual woman’s
freedom and her right to choose, but specific occasions such as International
Women’s Day are also increasingly celebrated in media with great pomp.6
While the full extent of the pervasive presence of gender rhetoric in popu-
lar culture is difficult to ascertain, it can be argued that the impact of a
particular kind of media-defined version of feminism on Indian audience,
especially on the millennial spectators, is varied and sometimes contradic-
tory (Komarraju and Raman 2017). However, as rightly indicated in the
analyses of Komarraju and Raman (2017), Indian millennial audience’s
encounter with the concept of feminism via media (as exemplified in the
reportage of 2012 Delhi gang rape case or in the endorsement of “femi-
nist” causes by Bollywood celebrities) does not necessarily facilitate in the
building of a feminist consciousness. We argue in this book that a popular
trend in contemporary India’s media ecosystem to engage in a postfemi-
nist celebration of “empowered” women diminishes the opportunity for a
critical engagement with the politics of feminism. In other words, while
the ubiquity of “feminist issues” in India’s media environment opens up a
possibility for gender discourse to make effective critical interventions in
the popular culture, media’s invocation of a commodified version of femi-
nism that is commensurate with market demands and patriarchal norms
negates that opportunity. Besides, the popularity of media-hyped notion
of feminism, which remains silent about subverting the hegemonic
Brahmanical patriarchal social structure, encourages right-wing groups to
impose stricter restrictions on women and other marginalized
communities.
In the following section, we provide an overview of the emergence of
postmillennial Hindi cinema and SVOD platforms in India and interro-
gate the ambivalent mediated space between feminism and postfeminism
through discussion of diverse representations of gender.
6
See Chaudhuri (2017).
Postmillennial Hindi Cinema and SVOD Platforms

For us, the term “postmillennial” refers to several issues. First, this points
towards chronology—a period starting with the turn of the millennium in
2000. Second, it refers to a particular transformation in cinema that
emerges during this time. The rise of multiplex cinema outnumbering
single-screen theatres triggered the popularity of small budget, non-
commercial films since roughly 2005 (Athique and Hill 2010). Before the
multiplex, the makers of small budget films found few avenues for screen-
ing their work. These new films, which are variously known as “New Hindi
cinema”, “New Bollywood”, “middlebrow cinema”, not only redefined
cinematic experience by coalescing mainstream commercial movies and
parallel films but also provided a suitable platform for initiating critical
dialogues on alternative representations (Dwyer 2016; Gopal 2012;
Paunksnis 2019). With “postmillennial cinema” a new kind of cinematic
imaginary began to emerge emphasizing realism and social and political
problems as well as signalling a reboot in gender representations. The
emerging cinematic imaginary also moved away from the lavish cinematic
extravaganzas that were synonymous with Bollywood in the late 1990s
and early 2000s. Some of the films marking the start of the new trend are
Being Cyrus (2005), Manorama Six Feet Under (2007), and Rang De
Basanti (2006), among many others.
New Bollywood is very diverse and here one can locate more commer-
cial cinema (e.g. the films by Vishal Bhardwaj, Prakash Jha, or Rakeysh
Omprakash Mehra), as well as—more off-beat cinema that is oriented
towards a smaller niche audience (e.g. films by Dibakar Banerjee or the
early work of Anurag Kashyap). Dwyer terms all of this cinema as “middle-
brow” (2016) and sees it as a wide spectrum that can accommodate the
multiplicity of forms and cinematic expressions without clear categoriza-
tion of cinema into mainstream and art. Paunksnis locates the change par-
ticularly in the emergence of new sensibility strongly influenced by the
aesthetics of film noir and dirty realist imagination (Paunksnis 2019).
Crucially, as he argues, New Bollywood, although seemingly critical in its
representations of everyday life in India at the turn of the millennium, is a
commodified version of politically engaged parallel cinema of the 1970s, a
pastiche offering an aesthetic commodity rather than a rethinking of social,
political, or economic problems (Paunksnis 2019). We argue that SVOD
media demonstrates similar modus operandi and majority of content
rather than interrogating the problems of contemporary India and
1 INTRODUCTION 9
especially the ones related to the gender questions, aestheticize and com-
modify them, as the content has become one of the best-selling cultural
commodities of the twenty-first century. The aesthetics of the content on
SVOD platforms, whether films or web series, owe a lot to New Bollywood,
and in many cases the themes and visual language of SVOD content can
be seen as a further development of New Bollywood—this time, or at least
till 2020, unconstrained by regulations.
Arguably, the original content produced for the streaming platforms
has become a major cultural phenomenon in just several years, since web
series Sacred Games was released on Netflix in 2018 marking the first
“Indian original” on this platform.7 However, it was not the first original
web series to come out of India targeting both local and global audiences.
The release of Inside Edge on Amazon Prime Video in 2017 marked
India’s entry into content production for the global platforms. The transi-
tion from cinema to streaming platforms in India is crucially connected
with the evolution of television as a medium of entertainment and its con-
vergence with the emerging information technology (IT) sector. Following
the liberalization of economy, many private companies launched television
channels, such as Star TV and Zee TV, which were the first private chan-
nels. In a little more than a decade, from 1995 to 2007, the number of
satellite channels in India reached 300 (Mehta 2008, 6). Mehta notes that
“satellite television came to India as an agent of global capitalism and
complex forms of globalization are embedded within Indian television’s
evolution” (2008, 6). Globalization and its impact on economy, culture,
and technological developments are crucial in understanding the historical
trajectory of media transformations leading up to the present moment.
The best instance is seen in the arrival of digital entertainment in India.
Different types of streaming platforms began to emerge shortly after
the transformations in the film industry became apparent in the first
decade of the twenty-first century. In India, VOD platforms began to
emerge in the 2000s. The first such platform was BIGFlix, launched in
2008, followed by dittoTV and SonyLIV in 2013. The biggest challenge
that the platforms then were facing was the complications of access.
Initially it was very limited due to slow Internet speed in the whole coun-
try and the lack of affordable devices on which the platforms could be
accessed. High-quality video streaming demands a minimum Internet
7
Sacred Games was co-directed by Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane and Neeraj
Ghaywan who are some of the most innovative filmmakers of the New Bollywood.
speed of 3 Mb/s, and until 2015 India’s average Internet speed was less
than that. This, however, changed in 2016 when Reliance launched Jio, a
new telecommunications company offering high speed at cheap prices,
making the Internet available and affordable to large sections of society.
This development is sometimes referred to as “Jio effect”, and it gener-
ated a proliferation of VOD platforms, including SVOD (Mukherjee 2019).
In terms of web series, the change started gathering pace in 2014, when
The Viral Fever (TVF), a production company, released Permanent
Roommates, a highly popular series focusing on the everyday life of the
millennials in India on YouTube. This company later released some of the
most popular web series, often premiering on YouTube, like Bachelors
(2017), Kota Factory8 (2019), and Panchayat 9 (2020), among others. In
2015, Y-Films, a subsidiary of Yash Raj Films, a leading Bollywood pro-
duction company, released Bang Baaja Baaraat, a web series, on YouTube,
which together with Permanent Roommates can be considered as the
beginning of web series phenomenon in India. In 2015, Star TV launched
Hotstar,10 its SVOD platform, which is one of the most popular platforms
of this type in India, and in 2019, the platform began offering its exclusive
online-only content, which was started with a documentary drama The
Roar of the Lion and a crime series Criminal Justice. The latter series was
co-directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia, one of the key New Bollywood direc-
tors, and starred Pankaj Tripathi and Vikrant Massey, who by the time of
writing have become some of the key actors appearing in films and web
series on various SVOD platforms. One year after the launch of Hotstar,
in 2016, Viacom 18 launched its SVOD platform Voot, which also imme-
diately started offering original content. These are just some major exam-
ples. Presently, there are over 30 SVOD platforms in India, and some of
the most popular ones are MX Player, Disney + Hotstar, Netflix, Amazon
Prime Video, Zee 5, and Voot, among others (MICA 2020). In 2016,
Netflix and Amazon Prime Video entered India’s market, and shortly
after, they started producing Indian original content.
8
The second season of Kota Factory was co-produced by Netflix and released on this plat-
form in 2021 as part of Netflix Originals.
9
Panchayat was co-produced by Amazon Prime Video and released as part of Amazon
Originals.
10
Star India media conglomerate was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in
1992 and merged with 20th Century Fox. In 2019, 20th Century Fox was acquired by The
Walt Disney Company and Hotstar was merged with Disney + SVOD platform, becoming
Disney + Hotstar.
1 INTRODUCTION 11
If we look at the global tendencies, we can see that an SVOD platform

emerged as an important new media phenomenon only when it started to
create an original content. We can see that these events caused seismic
shifts in cultural industries globally, and recent changes in India must be
understood as part of these global media transformations. However, India
is unique because Netflix and Amazon are facing a fierce competition from
local streaming platforms, like Disney + Hotstar, Zee 5, and MX Player, to
name a few. These two global players did not manage to dominate the
Indian market, unlike everywhere else in the world, where they are not
banned.11 Streaming platforms globally have become important sites for
cinematic content creators, and in terms of form, we can see that most of
the original content on any streaming platform is web series and not films.
It should be noted here that the form of web series was invented by
Netflix. Web series have become a defining element of popular audiovisual
culture of early twenty-first-century India with Netflix’s Delhi Crime
(2019) receiving the International Emmy award for best drama series in
2020 and with Amazon Prime Video’s Made in Heaven and Four More
Shots Please! getting nominated in the same year. They also impose a dif-
ferent type of consumption: binge watching, a method when the spectator
watches two or more episodes one after another and sometimes the whole
season at once. Most web series follow one single story throughout one or
several seasons, and given the fact that all episodes are usually released
together, it is almost guaranteed that the spectators would watch more
than one episode at once. This alone makes this new form more impactful
and addictive than a film or a broadcast television. The fact that leading
filmmakers and actors participate in the SVOD content creation makes
web series an attractive and “saleable” commodity. This proved to be the
case especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, which marked a massive
rise in SVOD content consumption globally in general and in India in
particular.
This brings us to the complex question of the impact of SVOD content
on Indian audience. However, a distinct change in the nature of content
that currently dominates SVOD platforms can be observed even before
11
Majority of SVOD markets in the world are dominated by Netflix, although local SVOD
platforms do exist—BritBox in North America and the UK, Viaplay in Scandinavian coun-
tries, Claro Video in Latin America, and so on. In China, where most of the popular plat-
forms, like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, and Google, to name a few, are banned, there is no
shortage of local ones, with iQIYI being the most popular one.
the formal emergence of web series. In 2013, Colors TV aired a new TV

series—24, which was an official adaptation (at least the first season) of the
eponymous American series. In India, 24 became a watershed moment of
televisual transformation. It was the most expensive TV series ever pro-
duced by an Indian television. It was the first seasonal fiction show, and
the first one having a Bollywood star, Anil Kapoor, in the lead role
(Jamkhandikar 2013). Tisca Chopra, a Bollywood actress who played a
supporting role in the series, has claimed that 24 would develop a new
type of TV audience and said that “TV as a medium had to grow and it is
growing. There are lots of formats on the small screen daily soaps, reality
shows, shows like CID and etc [sic]. Today’s audience is getting a lot of
variety to see” (The Indian Express 2013). Such position, retrospectively,
is well in tune with the developments that did happen later on in the
SVOD ecosystem. In 2017, when Amazon Prime Video released Inside
Edge, Nitesh Kripalani, the head of Amazon Prime India, said:
Our goal is to change the way Indian customers consume premium enter-
tainment in India, and to change the way content creators create content for
Indian and worldwide customers. For Amazon, this series will be the begin-
ning of new, bold original content in India, made with leading Indian con-
tent creators, talent and writers. (Brand Equity 2017)
What Kripalani, as well as Tisca Chopra before him, claim is that the
SVOD platforms offer a new type of entertainment and a chance for
Indian content creators to make new and bold content. As different
authors and news reports claim, SVOD platforms and the content they
offer have captured young millennial audiences who could no longer iden-
tify with the content that classical broadcast television was offering
(Lakhani 2015; Parmar and Pandit 2021). In this way, TVF and Y-Films,
followed by other major platforms, managed to capture the zeitgeist by
offering content that spoke to the young audiences specifically demanding
a different type of entertainment. Thus, the transformations from
Bollywood to New Bollywood and from TV to SVOD are not dissimilar.
Although not all SVOD content is necessarily about the young millenni-
als, the themes explored respond to the emerging culture of globally con-
nected, media-savvy audiences. As Parmar and Pandit (2021) demonstrate,
the characters, the language spoken, and the problems shown in the
SVOD content were something the young urban audiences (not necessar-
ily in megacities like Mumbai or New Delhi but also in smaller cities)
1 INTRODUCTION 13
could identify with. Moreover, the absence of regulation mechanism made

screening of sexuality and the consumption of alcohol and drugs, as well
as usage of uncensored language available to the viewers. Personalized
viewing and accessibility of this type of content on a hand-held device is a
very important question since most of the SVOD content in India is con-
sumed via smartphones. As of 2021, 79% of Internet users in India access
it via a smartphone (Kemp 2021). According to Varun Narang, Chief
Product Officer of Hotstar, “video streaming content has become popular
among Indians due to an ever-increasing prevalence of smart-phone and
secure internet access”(MICA 2020). With 550 million Internet users and
half a billion smartphones, the market for the platform ecosystem in India
is indeed vast (MICA 2020). Furthermore, relatively low cost of a smart-
phone in India makes it the most preferred device to consume SVOD
content.
According to the MICA report, India is only second to the USA in
terms of video content consumption in the world at 8.43 hours per con-
sumer per week (MICA 2020, 33). The SVOD market has grown
immensely in quite a short period of time, according to MICA—it grew
by 59% in 2019, and by the end of that year half a billion of Indians have
watched some type of streaming content. During the COVID-19 pan-
demic, SVOD viewership has risen from 16.1 to 18.7 billion minutes—
which is an immense increase (MICA 2020, 39).
It is important to note that these transformations are not limited to the
major metropolitan cities. If, due to the certain sensibilities evoked, New
Bollywood appealed more to urban audiences, this is not the case with
SVOD media. What we may call a “digital revolution” did indeed begin in
the metropolitan areas, but since then it has moved out of large and cos-
mopolitan cities into smaller towns. As MICA report outlines, the plat-
form content consumption is by far not limited to the Tier I12 cities:
In 2019, 60% of YouTube consumption happened outside of the metros,

and 95% of the vernacular content access came in from tier II and III cities.
In case of Hotstar, 40% of its traffic came in from regional content, and 63%
of total video consumption came in from non metro markets.
(MICA 2020, 32)
12
Cities in India are classified into three categories, namely, X, Y, and Z, commonly
referred to as tier I, tier II, and tier III (see https://doe.gov.in/sites/default/
files/21-07-2015.pdf for further information). X, or tier I, cities are metropolitan centres of
Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Pune.
It is expected that in the long run, the SVOD penetration in rural India
as well as in smaller cities will increase (KPMG 2020). However, despite a
significant digital penetration, there exists a deep digital divide in India, as
less than 50% of the population have Internet access in the first place
(Kemp 2021; MICA 2020). Digital penetration depends very strongly on
financial capabilities. The urban populations may be more susceptible to
this as media flows are far more intense in the cities. The urban upper
middle classes, a segment of society which emerged in neoliberal India in
the 1990s, have a better access to the global and local media flows because
they can afford the devices needed for this purpose—a computer, fast
Internet, or a mobile device like a smartphone or tablet. However, given
the popularity of smartphones and their otherwise low cost, the question
of digital divide becomes problematic when it comes to the issue of con-
sumption of SVOD content by the Indian audience. Here, we must
remember that the choice of a brand is also crucial, as the devices pro-
duced by the leading global smartphone manufacturers like Apple or
Samsung are expensive and therefore out of reach for a majority of the
population. The problem of such technological obstacle is, at least to an
extent, overcome by the entry of cheaper Chinese brands in India’s mar-
ket, like Xiaomi or Oppo. However, affordability is only a part of the pic-
ture, and the digital divide can manifest itself in different other ways. A
person or a population may afford the technology needed for using SVOD
platforms but may not be able to use the platforms due to low Internet
speed, or other infrastructural obstacles.
Yet in spite of the challenges of accessibility, SVOD platforms have
gained unprecedented popularity in India within a short span of time, and
one factor that contributed to its meteoric rise is flexible pricing system
launched by the multinational corporations that own these platforms. For
example, Netflix has a relatively high monthly subscription fee of Rs. 499,
but it offers a mobile device access for 199 Rupees. Many platforms offer
standard as well as premium packages, discounts if the user subscribes for
3 or 6 months instead of 1 month, or cheaper rates for mobile devices.
Some platforms, like MX Player and JioCinema, among others, are free, as
is a lot of content on YouTube, including the TVF’s web series. Many
platforms offer some of the content for free, some (e.g. latest web series’
episodes or international content) being available only to paying custom-
ers. This diversification which helps to further ease the digital divide inter-
ests us as it helps us to make a connection between the vast customer base
in India and the impact of SVOD content on the Indian audience. Another
1 INTRODUCTION 15
factor that is important in this context is the question of censorship. The

content of SVOD media, unlike cinema and television, has been unregu-
lated in India until late 2020. India’s history of cinema regulation is long
and at times controversial (Kaur and Mazzarella 2009; Mazzarella 2013).
Recent debates surrounding politically motivated roadblocks by the
Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) of films like Udta Punjab
(2016), Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016), or Padmaavat (2018) have
raised many eyebrows and contributed to discussions on free speech. The
controversy concerning censorship is relevant to the present context as it
directly addresses the issue of gender representation. For example, CBFC
demanded changes in Lipstick Under My Burkha because, as they claimed,
the film was “lady oriented, their fantasy above life” and contained “audio
pornography” (Wu 2017). Similarly, the makers of Padmaavat were
forced to change the title of the film from Padmavati due to political pres-
sure from a Rajasthan-based extreme right-wing group Karni Sena (NDTV
2017). In contrast, the content of SVOD platforms was outside the pur-
view of state regulation since they designated themselves as Internet com-
panies. However, they were under a form of “self-regulation” or
self-censorship which continued till November 2020,13 when the SVOD
platforms came under the regulatory watch of the Ministry of Information
and Broadcasting. This transformation brought several significant changes,
the most immediate being the curtailing of scenes from the web series
Tandav, released on Amazon Prime Video in January 2021 (The Indian
Express 2021). Many other web series, such as A Suitable Boy (Netflix,
2020), Mirzapur (Amazon Prime Video, 2018), Bombay Begums (Netflix,
2021), and Aashram (MX Player, 2020) were also targeted for allegedly
showing “inappropriate” material that “pollute young minds” and “insult”
Hindu religious sentiments (Ellis-Petersen 2020; Rashid 2021; The
Tribune 2021). A Suitable Boy was criticized for a scene where a Hindu
woman is shown kissing a Muslim man with a Hindu temple in the back-
ground (Ellis-Petersen 2020). On another instance, in March 2021, the
National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) under
the Parliament of India issued a notice to Netflix asking to remove Bombay
Begums, a new web series directed by Alankrita Shrivastava, for the
13
In 2019, many of the leading SVOD media companies signed a document called a Code
of Best Practices for Online Curated Content Providers, which outlines the commitment of
these platforms not to have certain type of content in their media libraries. The signatories
are Netflix, Zee5, Viacom 18, ALTBalaji, Eros Now, Hotstar, Sony, Jio, and Arre.
“inappropriate portrayal” of children (Malik 2021). Another significant

change the new censorship rule brought was that the content would have
to be classified. Moreover, it underlined that the evaluators would have to
take into consideration the context, the theme, tone and impact, and tar-
get audience while classifying the content (“The Information Technology
(Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021”
2021). Such reactions are hardly surprising, as film censorship became
more rigorous in the 1990s due to the liberalization, the influx of foreign
films and cultural influences, and the rise of Hindu right14 (Mazzarella
2013, 7). Mazzarella claims that the establishment has always understood
the spectator as someone who is “at once passive and hyperactive: easily
duped by any passing demagogue and constantly on the brink of violence”
(Mazzarella 2013, 17). Therefore, the establishment feels that it needs to
protect the audience from sensitive and potentially damaging information
(Mazzarella 2013, 17). The new regulations of digital content are the
extension of this problem—the outcome of inability to see the spectator as
a reflexive subject.
While at this point it is difficult to speculate what kind of impact the
new regulations will have on the freedom of expression, they indicate a
forthcoming change, which is exemplified by a string of controversies,
involving largely Netflix and Amazon Prime Video web series that we
mentioned earlier. We can see that many of the objections involve repre-
sentations of sexuality that the Indian audiences, allegedly, should be pro-
tected against. Given the popularity of SVOD media in India and its
growing reach, the repercussions of regulations on gender representations
can have massive consequences. Next, we shall look at the transformations
in gender representations in postmillennial cinema and SVOD platforms.
Representations of Gender
Hindi cinema witnessed many transformations of gender representation
throughout its history in response to varying social, political, and eco-
nomic context. Before we analyse representations of women and feminin-
ity, it is important to look at the shifts in the representations of masculinity
that were never unproblematic. In pre-liberalization period we can trace
several dominant types of masculinity on screen: a “Five-year-plan (FYP)
14
Examples of it were seen in the violent protests against films like Fire (Deepa Mehta,
1996), Kama Sutra (Mira Nair, 1996), and Water (Deepa Mehta, 2005).
1 INTRODUCTION 17
hero” of the 1950s and 1960s (Srivastava 2014), a vigilante, and an “angry
young man” (Gabriel 2010; Mazumdar 2007) as well as an “affable young
man” of the 1970s (Poduval 2012). While the FYP hero, a non-violent
version evoking masculinity not through physical power but through intel-
lectual capacities, was the Nehruvian hero building a new nation, the vigi-
lante type, embodied by Amitabh Bachchan’s characters in the 1970s,
emerged as a response to the disappointment with Nehruvian develop-
mentalist project. However, as Poduval (2012) argues, violent masculinity
of the time co-existed with the “affable” middle classness popularized by
filmmakers like Basu Chatterjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee in what Prasad
terms a middle-class cinema (Prasad 1998, 160–187). Such man was
“clumsy but well-meaning, self-absorbed but likeable, vulnerable but
determined, bungling but triumphant” (Poduval 2012, 43). We argue
that such “bi-polarity” with many shades in-between frames the represen-
tations of masculinity in the times of SVOD media as well. The immediate
post-liberalization period is equally ambivalent, as we have contradictory
masculinities that co-exist in cinematic representations. On the one hand,
with the rise of Hindu right, we can see the emergence of a more assertive,
violent (Hindu) man, who, as Gabriel suggests, in the persona of Nana
Patekar takes over the vigilantism from Amitabh Bachchan (Gabriel 2010,
204). On the other hand, the 1990s is the time when an otherwise non-
violent, middle-class hero, like Shah Rukh Khan or Aamir Khan, does
dominate the popular imagination as well. New Bollywood continues this
tradition of opposites, as it were. On one hand, New Bollywood is exem-
plified by the emergence of masculine anxiety, which is uncritically repre-
sented in many prominent films of this period and, on the other hand, by
proliferation of “new middle class” hero not dissimilar to the “affable”
young man of the 1970s. Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D (2009), Ugly (2013),
and Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016) are some of the best examples of mascu-
linity plagued by anxiety (Paunksnis 2019). This particular trend illustrates
the uncertainties brought about by drastic social, cultural, and economic
changes in terms of gender balance and a challenge to patriarchal status
quo (Paunksnis 2019; Paunksnis and Paunksnis 2020). If the “angry
young man” of the 1970s was fighting social problems that the state was
no longer able to solve and the vigilante of the 1990s exemplified the com-
munal identity crisis, the anxious man of the twenty-first century is fight-
ing his own demons and in the film noir fashion attempts to assert his
masculinity vis-à-vis the “New Woman 2.0” whom he perceives (not nec-
essarily consciously) as a threat (Paunksnis and Paunksnis 2020). Similarly,
as in the earlier cinematic periods, there are other types of masculinity

emerging as well—non-violent and seemingly non-hegemonic. We could
term this archetype of a young, middle-class man an “affable young man
of the digital age”. This archetype is best illustrated by the rise of actors
like Ayushmann Khurrana and Rajkummar Rao. Films like Vicky Donor
(2012), Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015), Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017),
Dream Girl (2019), or Bala (2019), among others, established Ayushmann
Khurrana as a peculiar everyman, a “middle class” or “small town” unglam-
orous hero. Interestingly, the characters he played often reflected the
transforming positions in terms of manhood in twenty-first-century India.
Sperm donation, erectile dysfunction, and premature baldness are some of
the topics his films engage with. Importantly, in films Shubh Mangal Zyada
Saavdhan (2020) and Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021), his characters
dealt with non-normative sexual themes: in the former his character was a
homosexual man trying to get married to his boyfriend, and in the latter
his character falls in love with a transgender woman. Similarly, many of
Rajkummar Rao’s characters also displayed sensibilities of a good-hearted
man in his 20s seeking romance but being clumsy and unsure of himself.
Films like Bareilly ki Barfi (2017), Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aana (2017), Stree
(2018), Made in China (2019), and Roohi (2021) are just some of the
examples. This type of masculinity can also be seen in many films and web
series on various SVOD platforms, where actors like Pankaj Tripathi and
Vikrant Massey illustrate this trend. Tripathi’s characters, both lead and
supporting, in cinema and SVOD, are men in their 40s, often unmarried
and exhibiting a peculiar type of masculinity that borders on asexuality
(e.g. Stree or Mimi, 2021). His character in Hotstar’s web series Criminal
Justice (2019) is also a low-key, effeminate lawyer seemingly not interested
in romance or sex at all, although he is a newly married man. Massey’s
characters often resemble the ones portrayed by Khurrana or Rao. In films
like Netflix’s Haseen Dillruba (2021), Zee5’s 14 Phere (2021), and even
in Amazon Prime Video’s Mirzapur (2018)—a web series that is notori-
ous for its violence—Massey essays the role of a low-key, shy young man.
However, there is an overall tendency of portraying patriarchal benevo-
lence of a man even in these instances. For example, in Haseen Dillruba,
Rishu, played by Massey, is constructed as a non-toxic man, but the woman
he marries, Rani, played by Taapsee Pannu, is portrayed as a cunning
femme fatale engaging in an extramarital affair and in effect ruining Rishu’s
peaceful life. Here, the toxicity emanates not from a violent man but
through the film’s attempt to juxtapose a “progressive” and loving
1 INTRODUCTION 19
husband with his betraying wife. On one hand, the film depicts Rishu as a
supportive and emotional man (contrary to the traditional portrayals of
man), while on the other, the film transforms him into a vengeful man
attempting to murder his wife. Thus, a woman is constructed as a source
of ruin for an unsuspecting man. Isn’t this a silent call for reinforcing
hegemonic masculinity? However, non-toxic renditions of masculinity do
exist. Examples of it can be seen in Netflix’s Little Things (2016) and
Amazon Prime Video’s Panchayat. Simultaneously, there are complex ren-
ditions that express toxicity in a more subtle manner, like Netflix’s web
series Decoupled (2021), which celebrates a sexist urbane writer’s negotia-
tion with what the series depicts as assertion of women’s empowerment.
Another important trend of masculinity that dominates the screens in
postmillennial period is muscularity. From mainstream Bollywood heroes
showcasing their six-pack abs, like Hrithik Roshan in Dhoom 2 (2006),
Shah Rukh Khan in Om Shanti Om (2007), or Ranveer Singh in Goliyon
Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013), to militaristic masculinity in a multitude
of war films and spy thrillers, many films attempt to negotiate manliness
through physical display of musculature. Such emphasis on physique as
well as display of a gym-trained male body is, according to Baas, an exam-
ple of universalization of American masculinity ideal in post-liberalization
India (Baas 2020). As Mubarki argues, such masculinity as well as
“Hindutva need for machismo” is visible in various films including war
films where, a physically strong, usually Hindu male is employed as a com-
mon trend (Mubarki 2020, 247). Indeed, post-liberalization period in
India is marked by the increasing power and influence of Hindu funda-
mentalism, which was and is patriarchal, violent, and misogynistic (Desai
2016; Kaul 2017; Chatterji 2019; Kinnvall 2019). This type of masculin-
ity is showcased through militaristic portrayals of heroic men fighting the
enemies of the nation (usually Muslims and/or Pakistanis). It can be
found in commercial cinema, and men in these films are examples of virile,
traditionally masculine Hindu men, often appearing in an army or police
uniform. Such men in films like Baby (2015), Satyameva Jayate (2018),
Uri: The Surgical Strike (2018), Romeo. Akbar. Walter. (2019), or
Shershaah (2021) don’t have any second thoughts of what it means to be
a man, unlike troubled and often self-destructive noir anti-heroes in
Anurag Kashyap’s films or confused young men like the characters of
Khurrana or Rao. Proliferation of such cinematic imaginary has intensified
especially after 2014, when political power dynamics changed in India.
Apart from postmillennial cinema, SVOD platforms also contain such
imaginary. Web series like Netflix’s Bard of Blood (2019), Sony LIV’s
Avrodh: The Siege Within (2020), Hotstar’s Special Ops (2020), and Zee5’s
State of Siege: 26/11 (2020) are just some of the key examples.
Similarly, LGBTQ+ representations in New Bollywood as well as on
SVOD media are highly problematic. Mainstream Bollywood tends to
portray queerness in grotesque manner, as, for example, in Dostana (2008)
or Student of the Year (2012). With the rise of New Bollywood, we can see
more progressive representations emerging in a variety of films, like My
Brother…Nikhil (2005) and Aligarh (2015), as well as in anthology films
like I Am (Onir, 2010) or Bombay Talkies (2012). SVOD media adopts an
ambiguous stance towards queer identity. ALTBalaji’s web series, like
Romil and Jugal (2017) and Dev DD (2017), engage with queer themes,
but the latter series simultaneously portrays some queer characters in a
realistic manner, and some, in stereotypical fashion. Amazon Prime
Video’s Made in Heaven (2019) stands out as a series which emphasizes
realistic and non-stereotypical portrayal. Here Karan (played by Arjun
Mathur), one of the principal characters of the series, is a homosexual
man. However, the third season of the same platform’s Inside Edge por-
trays Rohit (played by Akshay Oberoi) as the captain of Indian cricket
team, whose relationship with his boyfriend is not without problematic
stereotypes.
The ambiguity that muddies the representations of new masculinities
and LGBTQ+ identities also obfuscates the image of the New Woman
who has come a long way after its emergence in the 1990s. While her dis-
cursive presence has still remained an essential part of the transforming
narrative of new “shining India”, her mediated representations manifest in
myriad avatars. It must be noted in this context that the New Woman does
not necessarily have to showcase only one facet; she can be constructed as
a composite figure incorporating various personas that are bestowed on
her by market-controlled media machinery. One of these many forms of
“New Woman 2.0” appears in what Sangita Gopal terms as “take-action”
genre where “women characters are forced to take action owing to various
contingencies” and yet, “they access certain ‘new’ forms of selfhood”
through their actions (Gopal 2021, 40–41). However, expression of such
actions whether through self-transforming initiatives (e.g. English Vinglish
2012, Queen 2014) or through the tropes of “violent femmes and femme
fatales” (Gopal 2021, 42) indicates the New Woman’s alignment with a
neoliberal social order that dictates self-actualization by overcoming “cri-
ses” through individual’s ability to show courage, cunning, and
1 INTRODUCTION 21
determination. While cinematic depiction of women “taking action”

against physical and sexual abuses was also present in earlier decades (e.g.
Mirch Masala1987), what distinguishes postmillennial films (as in NH10
2015, Mom 2017) is their insistence on promoting individual woman as
agential subject. Instead of emphasizing the need for redressing structural
inequalities that cause gender discrimination, these films and SVOD con-
tent largely celebrate the self-inventing and enterprising skills of modern
Indian women. The New Woman emerging out of a trans-nationally
located neoliberal cinematic and digital-entertainment space is often
shown to be acting alone—a phenomenon which posits “New Woman
2.0” in opposition to feminist exhortation to build collective movements
against structures of oppression. Instance of such individuated agency of
New Woman who finds her “selfhood” via a series of unfortunate situa-
tions can be found in Hotstar’s popular web series Aarya (2020–2021)
where Aarya, who calls herself a “working mother”, constructs her new
self (combining a caring mother and a manipulative drug cartel boss)
through her relentless endeavours to keep her family safe. However, at the
same time, there are some films and web series that offer hints and sugges-
tions of the possibility of organizing a collective struggle against sexual
and domestic violence (e.g. Thappad 2020, That Day After Every Day
2013). Nevertheless, it seems their protest rhetoric is not always enunci-
ated with what may be termed as feminist consciousness.
Depiction of “New Woman 2.0” in India’s postmillennial media eco-
system is also marked by filmmakers’/content providers’ interest in explor-
ing the largely unchartered realm of female bonding(both sexual and
non-sexual). It seems the polyvocal cultural space that opened after the
liberalization in the 1990s is more abuzz now than before with themes
that have generally been deemed “transgressive”. However, when com-
plexities of lesbian relationship are explored subtly in Geeli Pucchi (2021),
15
their absence or facile representation in a film like Ek Ladki Ko Dekha
Toh Aisa Laga (2019) reinforces the argument that mere incorporation of
such a contested topic as same-sex relationship in a film narrative cannot
validate the presentation of “New Woman 2.0” as an agential empowered
subject. The issue of non-sexual female bonding is also an increasingly
ubiquitous theme surrounding the image of the New Woman (e.g. Four
More Shots Please! 2019–2022, Veere Di Wedding 2018). The theme
gains a wider significance when it is located within the patriarchal tradition
15
Geeli Pucchi (Sloppy Kisses) is part of an anthology film Ajeeb Daastaans (2021).
of positing women as rivals, the most common rendition of which is found

in mainstream television serials. Besides, its importance is furthered by the
fact that non-sexual male bonding has always been a part of Hindi film
industry (e.g. Sholay 1975) or its corporatized version—Bollywood (e.g.
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara 2011) while depictions of non-sexual female
bonding have largely been rare. Changing this pattern in favour of female
bonding based on friendship, indeed, indicates a new beginning. An inter-
esting example is found in Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016)—a film that
explores how four women attempt to defy patriarchal injunctions by using
their individual ingenuity. Their relationships with each other transform
the prevailing notion of non-sexual female bonding while the film navi-
gates through the conflicting terrains of feminism and postfeminism.
Another interesting form in which “New Woman 2.0” manifests herself
is the one of “everyday woman” who hails (mostly) from an upper-caste,
middle-class, educated urban, or semi-urban background. Representations
of this form revolve round subtle and intimate issues that are often encoun-
tered by middle-class women in India, such as body-shaming (e.g. Dum
Laga Ke Haisha 2015) or gaslighting (e.g. English Vinglish 2012, Tumhari
Sulu 2017). However, while these representations, on the one hand, tell
celebratory narratives of self-actualization, on the other hand, they never
unsettle the hegemonic patriarchal status quo completely. The fascinating
narratives of triumph of these otherwise non-descript, middle-class (con-
sumer) women certainly create a space in popular discourse for the “wom-
en’s issue” to be discussed, but they do not allow feminist demands to
gain traction since inclusion of an overtly feminist agenda may intimidate
the overarching patriarchal arrangement of Indian family and soci-
ety. Hence, despite the popularity of woman-centric themes in India’s fast-
growing media ecosystem, the fact that women in India are still far from
having control over their own lives is hardly represented. At the same
time, this practice of careful incorporation of the language of women’s
emancipation within the existing patriarchal discourse seems to be a com-
promise that the hegemonic Brahmanical patriarchy has been forced to
make as it needs to re-structure itself with the ideals and technologies of a
globalized, neoliberal India.
“New Woman 2.0’s” subject position is also underscored through vari-
ous other roles ranging from police officers fighting against crime, corrup-
tion, and sexism (e.g. Delhi Crime 2019, She 2020, Hundred 2020,
Aaranyak 2021) to professionals encountering work-place harassment
and glass ceiling (e.g. Inside Edge 2017–2021, Bombay Begums 2021,
1 INTRODUCTION 23
Sherni 2021). Many of these working women are depicted as single

women (unmarried, divorced) or single mothers who prefer live-in rela-
tionships (sometimes sex only) to marriage. While such “non-traditional”
portrayals of Indian women foreground the ever-debated feminist issue of
women’s freedom, they also seem to proclaim that the “New Woman 2.0”
is capable of self-assertion in terms of sex, marriage, and family—a terrain
that has always been a contested site from a feminist standpoint.
Interestingly, however, these depictions, which include professional com-
mitment and working long hours outside home, largely posit women as
better caregivers who are more dedicated than their male counterparts,
especially when the heteropatriarchal family’s unity is threatened. Needless
to say, such representations nullify the mediated claim that new profes-
sional woman of postmillennial India has broken herself free from earlier
gender stereotypes and traditional gender roles. It must be mentioned
here that the postmillennial cinematic and SVOD space is also marked by
the presence of some sensitive and friendly male characters who seem to
have subverted the conventional portrayal of Indian man as the macho
dominating figure. As we have argued earlier, these “affable” men display
patriarchal benevolence and set a benchmark against which the leading
female characters are often judged (e.g. Haseen Dillruba 2021, Tumhari
Sulu 2017). Another aspect that is related to the portrayal of “New
Woman 2.0” is the mediated proliferation of the image of modern edu-
cated Indian women as housewives (e.g. Thappad 2020) or “supermoms”
(e.g. Mentalhood 2020). Her “self-created decision” to refrain from par-
ticipating in formal workforce connects “New Woman 2.0” with the post-
feminist culture which, as argued by Tasker and Negra (2007), underscores
that a woman’s retreat from the public world of work is to be regarded as
an exercise of her choice, although postfeminism supports women’s eco-
nomic freedom. The instance of such postfeminist ambivalence that marks
its alliance with the consumerist economy is also seen in the formulation
of New Woman as home-based entrepreneurs (e.g. English Vinglish 2012)
who do not participate in the formal labour force in order to maintain
family’s “integrity/honour”, but at the same time are capable of partaking
in the neoliberal process of consumption. In other words, while the cul-
ture of enterprise facilitates “New Woman 2.0” to forge a new self, it
simultaneously restricts her agency within the purview of a new patriarchy
that is manufactured by the dynamics of a global neoliberal market.
However, the most ubiquitous and puzzling expression of postfeminist
ambivalence is visible in the representation of “New Woman 2.0” as a
sexually assertive independent subject who, unlike her traditional counter-

part, is unabashedly vocal about her sexual desires. While social taboos
concerning sexual freedom of Indian women are still far from being with-
drawn, mediated representations of “New Woman 2.0” often depict
her as a sexually-liberated subject who freely indulges in extramarital affairs
(e.g. Hassen Dillruba 2021) or polyamory (Four More Shots Please!
2019-2022, Dev DD 2017-2021). Her “ability” to have on-screen sexual
escapades (which are often deemed as men’s prerogatives) is presented as
contemporary Indian women’s ability to explore their feminine sensual
selves, and it is also celebrated as a marker of their “empowered” status
which they have allegedly attained in the wake of India’s economic liber-
alization and subsequent globalization. Representations such as these con-
firm contemporary Indian media’s association with a postfeminist culture
which proclaims that the possession of a sexy body is “women’s key (if not
sole) source of identity” (Gill 2007, 149). However, equating feminist
understanding of sexual autonomy with individual woman’s ability to
gratify sexual pleasure not only involves misreading but it also forecloses
the future of feminist activism. Instead of criticizing deeply- embedded
structural inequalities that perpetuate gender disparity, contemporary
mainstream media content in India attempts to endorse a postfeminist
belief that modern Indian women’s agency lies in the sexualization of their
bodies (Four More Shots Please! 2019-2022). This not only defeats the
purpose of feminism in a country like India where female feticide, domes-
tic violence, and marital rape are part of many women’s everyday reality,
but it also reveals how the reconfigured patriarchy uses market dynamics
to make women complicit in their own subordination. Needless to say,
pervasiveness of such mediated notion endangers the advancements that
have been made over the decades because of collective feminist struggles.
It also proves to be detrimental if we take into account the escalating vio-
lence against women in India and the decreasing rate of Indian women’s
participation in the formal workforce.16 According to recent statistics,
India’s rate of female participation in the formal labour force is currently
at only 24%— among the lowest in developing nations (Council on Foreign
16
According to a World Bank report, female labour force participation (FLFP) in India
declined to 20.5% by 2019—a fall from 30.3% in 1990 (Kamdar 2020, 2).
In 2020, the number of dowry deaths is 7045, the number of murder with rape/gang rape
is 226, the number of rape (without murder) is 28,153, and the abetment to suicide is 5132
(source: National Crime Records Bureau on crimes against women in India).
1 INTRODUCTION 25
Relation n.d.). Therefore, the gross disparity between the reel and the real
urges a closer scrutiny of contemporary Indian media’s engagement with
postfeminism and neoliberal feminism17 which encourage a process of
selective participation that is “simultaneously a form of sharing in the
spoils and a displacement” (Sunder Rajan 1993, 132).
We believe that the practice of simultaneous entanglement of feminist
and counter-feminist themes has dangerous implications. While it offers a
narrow definition of freedom that can be enjoyed at a personal level, it
negates the prospect of annihilating gender-based subjugation at a wider
sociological level. It should be mentioned here that a patriarchal backlash
has already started formulating within India’s media environment in both
blatant (e.g. Kabir Singh 2019) and subtle (e.g. Decoupled 2021, Haseen
Dilruba 2021) forms, while the grim reality continues to manifest through
everyday misogyny which ranges from brutal gang rape to abetment to
suicide and workplace harassment.18
Although it is true that engagement with women’s issues and represen-
tations of liberated women create a space for bringing hitherto suppressed
themes concerning women’s desire and subjecthood to popular discourse,
they seem to further, in Banet-Weiser’s term, the economies of visibility
rather than the politics of visibility (Banet-Weiser 2018). In recent times,
some effective mass protests against sexual atrocity were organized in
India, a glaring example of which is pan-Indian outrage against the rape of
a student in Delhi in 2012.19 Commenting on the uniqueness of this pro-
test, Chaudhuri and Fitzgerald (2015) argue that the protest was horizon-
tal as it drew participants from diverse social and political backgrounds and
hence was not led by any specific interest group such as women’s organiza-
tion. Although the nature of the movement that was built after the 2012
Delhi gang rape20 or the efficacy of #MeToo movement that began in
India in late 2018 can be questioned, the potential of these otherwise
horizontal, mostly urban and social media-centric protests to generate col-
lective resistance to socially repressive forces may not be denied.21 What,
therefore, can act as a catalyst to translate the possibility of building a
gender-just society into a reality is the spread of a feminist/
17
See Rottenberg, Catherine. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, 2018.
18
In spite of overwhelming popularity of #MeToo movement in India, gender justice
remains elusive (see Mini, Darshana S. The Indian Express, 2022).
19
This is often referred to as Nirbhaya rape case.
20
See Agnes (2015) and Shandilya (2015).
21
See Philipose (2019) and Kesavan (2019).
counter-hegemonic consciousness which, under an overwhelmingly post-

feminist neoliberal culture, is not only held in check but also continually
distorted. However, it should be noted here that although postmillennial
Hindi/Indian cinema and SVOD platforms contribute in a major way to
this ongoing celebration of what Andrea Cornwall terms as “empower-
ment lite” (Cornwall 2018, n.page), endeavours from within the same
mediated space are also being made (e.g. Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid
2012 Natkhat 2020) to disseminate messages that may aid in achieving
gender equality.
Keeping in mind the complex paradoxes that such concomitant process
of the contraries can invoke, we invited myriad responses from our authors
who view the shifting gender representations in postmillennial Hindi cin-
ema and SVOD platforms from their specific ideological standpoints. We
have also included a wide array of genres—from commercial Hindi films
to SVOD content and documentary films—since we wish to record the
transformation facilitated by economic as well as technological revolutions
in contemporary India across various media formats. Moreover, to further
our interest in situating the theme of the book within a wider heteroge-
neous context, we have included an interview with Ashish Avikunthak—
an Indian experimental filmmaker. Avikunthak’s repertoire, which includes
films made in Hindi, Bengali, and English, explores, among other themes,
gender fluidity and the interaction between the mundane and the divine
against the backdrop of a globalized, consumerist, and politically belliger-
ent India.
While heterogeneity of our contributors’ ideological standpoints offers
an opportunity to negate every act of conformity to a specific singular
hegemonic position, their voices, nevertheless, in unison, advocate for a
gender-just society.
Overview of Chapters
The book is divided into four parts: Representations of Gender in SVOD
Platforms; Representations of Women in Postmillennial Hindi Cinema;
Women, Documentaries and Politics; and Interview with Ashish
Avikunthak: An Experimental Filmmaker.
The first part begins with Šarūnas Paunksnis’ (Chap. 2) interrogation
of masculinity in SVOD content—web series Leila (2019) and Aashram
(2020). In his chapter he claims that the cinematic landscape in India has
been replete with representations that are in line with the dominant,
1 INTRODUCTION 27
hegemonic power structures in India, especially after 2014. Indeed, we

can clearly see the increased saffronization of political and cultural land-
scapes, and SVOD space, as Paunksnis claims, is a digital frontier and a
new ideological battlefield. Despite the abundance of content celebrating
Hindutva ideology, there is broad spectrum of critical imaginations that
have emerged in attempts to present a more nuanced portrait of contem-
porary India. In his chapter Paunksnis analyses several converging prob-
lems. By referring to two web series, both highly critical towards the state
of affairs in India, he looks at representations of what he terms the politics
of anxiety in post-2014 India and the subsequent biopolitical manage-
ment as well as cultural re-fashioning of India. His chapter specifically
emphasizes a gendered aspect of such anxiety which strongly stands out.
The main object of the chapter not only is the biopolitics of Hindutva,
which is the main ideological force behind the violence, but also the inter-
rogation of this violence in the cinematic mode—a means part of which is
an active participant in the Hindutva discourse.
Mohit Abrol’s chapter (Chap. 3) asks: How is the digital space helping
to deconstruct the absurdity of traditional representations of Indian
women? According to Abrol, new media has dethroned Bollywood in
offering a hybrid space for newer visual narratives and media spectacles. In
his chapter he argues that the web series Bang Baaja Baaraat (2015) and
Made in Heaven (2019) serve to disrupt and demand a serious engage-
ment with the libidinal circuits which inform the subjective activity of
watching a particular movie or series especially based on the portrayal of
Indian women. He claims that new media’s intervention in our everyday
life is not limited to the controlling, surveilling, and monetizing acts high-
lighted by the neoliberal discourses. It functions as a site of resistance as
well, which undoubtedly places the so-called platform economy into an
ambiguous position—creating the digital space where stereotypes and
commodified representations were constantly recycled but at the same
time offering dissenting artists a platform to deconstruct the same stereo-
types it simultaneously creates. The “on-demand culture”, as Abrol dem-
onstrates, has allowed the emergence of newer subjectivities which go
beyond the socially conditioned and Bollywood-centric portrayals of
Indian women.
In her analysis of SVOD content (Chap. 4), especially Amazon Prime
Video’s web series Four More Shots Please!, Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis
argues that the post-liberalization media portrayal of modern Indian
women often invoked the image of a sexually liberated woman whose
claim to sexual assertion was largely represented through her hyper-sexual

behaviour. However, according to the author, the message of empower-
ment, which is delivered without engaging with real, everyday ordeals that
average Indian women encounter regularly, renders the series problematic.
As Chakraborty Paunksnis argues, most of the SVOD contents that are
streamed in India are marked by postfeminist shift and neoliberal interests
which resist critical feminist interpretations of women’s location within a
reconfigured patriarchal culture. Their thrust on unleashing the potential
of individual woman rather than addressing the persistent structural
inequality makes their apparent feminist intention suspicious. Moreover,
the attempts of media texts to popularize a version of empowerment which
is premised upon neoliberal postfeminist ideologies not only exacerbate
anti-feminist sentiments but also weaken the strength of a collective femi-
nist movement. Finally, according to the author what makes the media-
circulated postfeminist myth of empowerment more pernicious is its ability
to turn women into enthusiastic architects of their own subordination.
This is particularly dangerous at a time when right-wing fundamentalist
power has been dominating over India’s political, social, and cul-
tural milieu.
Rutuja Deshmukh analyses Lust Stories (2018) (Chap. 5), a Netflix
anthology film and argues that the postfeminist cinema, to which this film
belongs, manoeuvres around the issues of sexual liberation and issues of
expression of desires by the lead woman characters and claims that the
affective registers that an anthology film sets off are unique, since the
reception of an anthology film is starkly different from that of a long-form
content like a web series. In approaching the film through the questions
of scopophilia and the idea of private viewing, she claims that most of the
short films in this anthology provoke not merely the scopophilia but also
a sense of guilt associated with private viewing. Deshmukh argues that
although these films manage to start a conversation around gender and
sexual liberation on individual level, structural changes remain a distant
possibility. The questions surrounding the formation of gender identities,
structural changes, and politics of personal viewing in postmillennial digi-
tal media remain unanswered. When the postfeminist content is created
for SVOD platforms, it aids structural redesigning of narratives to recon-
figure the audience experience and introduce the notion of private viewing
through an affective engagement with the portrayal of romance, intimacy,
violence, and retribution, among other topics.
1 INTRODUCTION 29
Gauri D. Chakraborty in her chapter (Chap. 6) also looks at the

“female-led” narratives and claims that while these narratives redefine
gender roles and responsibilities, they also question and explore desire in
a patriarchal society struggling with layers of power renegotiations. The
success of women-led commercial Hindi films, according to her, has also
revealed the potency of the multiplex to host alternate narratives and the
vibrancy of global Indian audiences. Neoliberalism and instrumentality in
appropriating this new form of feminism along with postfeminist influx
from the West, as she argues, exemplified daily engagement with brands,
products, and celebrity rhetoric which has enabled contemporary direc-
tors to boldly interpret desire and sexual fulfilment in cinema for an aspi-
rational youth emboldened with the neoliberal narrative. Commodified
femininity promoting perfect bodies, manicured hands, accentuated facial
features with international makeup brands as part of the neoliberal econ-
omy ensured a well-chiselled professional camaraderie of filmmaking with
the fast-growing fashion, lifestyle, and beauty business in India. The chap-
ter looks at one particular film illustrating this trend, Veere di Wedding
(2018), where capitalism and materialism get associated with identity for-
mation. The film appropriates and generalizes neoliberalism’s impact on
urban educated girls. Alcohol, cuss words, and filling up of sexual absences
become a tangible reference in a society invested with neoliberal ideology.
The western ways and contemporary feminist narratives of life are often
pitched in this negotiation. Sisterhood is projected as soul searching with
interchanges of freedom and choice.
Garima Yadav and Ira Gaur (Chap. 7) look at the cultural imagination
mediated through cinema that has constructed period blood as an unde-
sirable category. They 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, as Yadav and Gaur claim, 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 there-
fore 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
lacks any real subversion as it is still nascent and tokenistic. The authors
argue that Padman falls short of the nuanced portrayal as it becomes a
man’s project to invent a sanitary pad while Period. End of a Sentence’s

exposé is tinted with patronizing capitalism.
Anu Sugathan’s chapter (Chap. 8) focuses on the critique of gendered
political imaginary by analysing the film Raazi (2018). She explores the
ways in which Hindi cinema has portrayed the notion of femininity in the
movies that dealt with the idea of nation and terrorism, especially in the
aftermath of the Kargil War of 1999 and the growing tensions between
India and Pakistan. The figure or image of the terrorist and/or Pakistan
army, as her chapter explores, became the main impetus behind the rise of
nationalism in films in the late 1990s and 2000s. Sugathan claims that the
cinematic depiction of females’ stories in espionage films or war movies
revolves around either the obedient figure who dutifully waits at home or
the seductress spy or agent who uses her sexuality and body in fulfilling
her mission. Raazi, however, subverts this traditional notion of female
character. In her chapter Sugathan argues that the popular Hindi cinema,
largely, articulates nationalism through narratives of women and Muslims
as the other against whom nation must be protected. The role of women
is reduced for the male protagonists’ screen space or dissolved into the
broader social construction as the stereotypical mother, lover, vamp, and
other characters.
Mainstream cinema and web series, importantly, is not the only media
to engage with gendered aspects of violence. Hannah Zalis-Anzi (Chap.
9) analyses the controversies surrounding India’s Daughter (2015), a doc-
umentary film by Leslee Udwin on the notorious 2012 Delhi gang rape.
The screening of the film was banned in India under the pretext that it
might disrupt ongoing court proceedings and reveal the identities of the
convicts despite the fact that their identities were already disclosed earlier
in the media. Her chapter explores the ways in which sexual violence
towards women is perceived and represented in India—an issue that gen-
erated a widespread public debate in the media in recent years. Zalis-Anzi
analyses the cultural complexity of postcolonial societies via Frantz Fanon’s
psychological analysis and dissects the representation of rape as well as
gender tensions and patriarchal dynamics through Luce Irigaray’s feminist
theory and Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the differend. As Zalis-
Anzi argues, India’s Daughter does not interpret rape only as an act of
sexual violence but as a product of an ideology. Though this narrative
provides significant insights into the issue of sexual violence in India,
according to her, it presents the problem narrowly and blocks other pos-
sibilities of understanding the social realm in India. Subsequently, it
1 INTRODUCTION 31
creates a crude and simplistic analogy between patriarchy and sexual vio-
lence against women while ignoring other factors that impact social
dynamics in India, such as class tensions and caste disparities.
Sudipto Acharyya in his chapter (Chap. 10) also engages with docu-
mentary cinema, which receives much less exposure than feature films,
web series, or controversial documentaries. His chapter looks at women
documentary practitioners in Indian subcontinent who, provoked by the
post-digital condition of proliferation of image production and dissemina-
tion, have charted a fresh path in non-fiction filmmaking. Acharyya analy-
ses two films: I Am Yet to See Delhi (2015) and Bare (2006) and argues
that they construct an identity of the self that is complicated and informed
by these specificities and also has a bearing on the personal choices which
the protagonists of these films make thereby giving a clear political dimen-
sion to them or rather one might say that the political is inseparable from
the personal. Some of the filmmakers that Sudipto Acharyya discusses
were making art or middle of the road films without the big male super-
stars of their times. The distinctively original voices that their work brought
in did find a mark in the Bombay film industry and yet was insufficient to
dent into the largely patriarchal setup that the Bombay film industry stood
for. Documentary cinema, however, provided for them the alternative
space where women filmmakers were at home, experimenting with a wide
range of narratives and articulating a nebulous aesthetic.
The book concludes with an interview with Ashish Avikunthak, an
experimental filmmaker (Chap. 11). The interview focuses on the role of
filmmaker in challenging the epistemological obstacles in contemporary
India in terms of representation of gender and sexuality, impact of digital
cinema and new media platforms, and the problems of censorship.
Avikunthak argues that even though the emergence of SVOD platforms
initially was a “breath of fresh air” for the independent filmmakers, big
Bollywood studios have colonized the multitude of platforms that have
mushroomed in this new exhibition ecology by 2019. Ideologically, he
claims, these platforms continue to proliferate retrograde version of earlier
forms of cinematic representations—feudalistic, patriarchal, hyper-
nationalistic, and brazenly narcissistic. Avikunthak explains his problem-
atic relationship with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), the
fluidity of gender that he represents in his films, and the philosophy of
cinema that is uniquely non-conformist.
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And how beautifully they sang after a few lessons! Troubles sang
high and Bubbles sang low.
But best of all they loved to play dead! They lay so still when
Jimmy covered them with an old shawl, that sometimes it frightened
him!
Then Jimmy had a birthday. His father said he might have a circus
in the garage! They trimmed it with flags and bunting, and fixed up
some soap boxes for a stage. Jimmy was so thankful for such a nice
father, that he gave him a BIG HUG!
At last it was time for the circus. All the boys and girls in the
neighborhood came. Jimmy charged a penny admission. He wanted
to buy a gift for the little lame boy who lived in the alley. He let him
come in without paying anything.
When the children were all in the garage Jimmy closed the doors.
Then he went to get the performers. THEY WERE GONE! Jimmy
looked and looked but he could not find them. His father looked and
looked, but he could not find them! His mother looked and looked,
but she could not find them! The children looked and looked but they
could not find them!
Jimmy felt like crying, but he didn’t! Instead he gave back a penny
to each girl and boy who had come to the circus. They all went
home! Only the little lame boy from the alley stayed. He and Jimmy
sat on the garage steps with their faces in their hands and their
elbows on their knees. They were thinking.
“Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!—Yip!—Yip!”
Jimmy looked at the lame boy. The lame boy looked at Jimmy!
“Where are they?” asked Jimmy. “It sounds as if they’re in the
garage,” answered the lame boy. But when they got into the garage
it was EMPTY and VERY QUIET!
Once more they went out and sat on the steps. Soon they heard
the crying noise again. Jimmy called his father. Then they all
listened.
“Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!—Yip!—Yip!”
It came from the corner where the automobile stood. But when
they went in to the car it was EMPTY. Jimmy’s father was as much
puzzled as the boys. Soon they heard it again. “Yip! Yip! Yip! Yip!” It
was very weak.
Suddenly Father laughed! Then he lifted up the big front seat!
Huddled in the corner, frightened out of their wits were the
puppies! He lifted them out by the back of their necks and placed
them on the hood. “You scamps!” he said, “You hid in there while I
was getting some tools, and I shut you in because I did not see you!”
Soon the children heard that the circus dogs were found! They
came rushing back with their pennies! In a few minutes the garage
was as noisy as THE BIG TENT! Such clapping! Such shouting!
Such barking!
When it was all over the children went home. The little lame boy
got his present. The puppies had a good supper. Then Jimmy took
them for a nice long walk. Across the street was THE BIG BLACK
CAT!
But the twins paid no attention to her. They were too happy and
full and sleepy.
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Gender, Cinema, Streaming Platforms:

Shifting Frames in Neoliberal India

Dark Fear, Eerie Cities: New Hindi Cinema in Neoliberal

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN INDIA: THE SHIFTING

The refugee woman : partition of Bengal, gender,and the

Deities and Devotees: Cinema, Religion, and Politics in

Social Norms, Gender and Collective Behaviour:

The Politics of Marriage in Medieval India : Gender and

Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women: Gender, Space

Fiscal Policy for Sustainable Development in Asia-

ISBN 978-3-031-16699-0 ISBN 978-3-031-16700-3 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Amlan Mathur / Alamy Stock Photo.

This book is the outcome of a conference we organized in 2019 at the

Part I Representations of Gender in SVOD Platforms 37

4 Four More Shots Please!: Postfeminism, SVOD Platforms,

5 Lust Stories and the Politics of Private Viewing on SVOD

Part II Representations of Women in Postmillennial Hindi

Part III Women, Documentaries and Politics 201

9 India’s Daughter: The Banality of Rape203

Part IV Interview with Ashish Avikunthak: An Experimental

Mohit Abrol is a doctoral fellow (Literature) in the Department of

as taught and did research at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi,

Table 6.1 New feminist sensibilities in select Hindi mainstream films

Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis and Šarūnas Paunksnis

R. C. Paunksnis (*) • Š. Paunksnis

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

started circulating on social media. The sartorial choice seemed to have

entry of women’s studies as a discipline in the academia, women’s move-

consumption. It must be noted here that the notion of neoliberal con-

between, women-centric issues remain visible in the popular discourse

Postmillennial Hindi Cinema and SVOD Platforms

If we look at the global tendencies, we can see that an SVOD platform

the formal emergence of web series. In 2013, Colors TV aired a new TV

could identify with. Moreover, the absence of regulation mechanism made

In 2019, 60% of YouTube consumption happened outside of the metros,

factor that is important in this context is the question of censorship. The

“inappropriate portrayal” of children (Malik 2021). Another significant

as in the earlier cinematic periods, there are other types of masculinity

determination. While cinematic depiction of women “taking action”

of positing women as rivals, the most common rendition of which is found

Sherni 2021). Many of these working women are depicted as single

sexually assertive independent subject who, unlike her traditional counter-

counter-hegemonic consciousness which, under an overwhelmingly post-

hegemonic power structures in India, especially after 2014. Indeed, we

claim to sexual assertion was largely represented through her hyper-­sexual

Gauri D. Chakraborty in her chapter (Chap. 6) also looks at the

man’s project to invent a sanitary pad while Period. End of a Sentence’s

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

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Part I Representations of Gender in SVOD Platforms 37

4 Four More Shots Please!: Postfeminism, SVOD Platforms,

5 Lust Stories and the Politics of Private Viewing on SVOD

Part II Representations of Women in Postmillennial Hindi

Part III Women, Documentaries and Politics 201

9 India’s Daughter: The Banality of Rape203

Part IV Interview with Ashish Avikunthak: An Experimental

claim to sexual assertion was largely represented through her hyper-sexual