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Gender, Cinema,
Streaming Platforms
Shifting Frames in Neoliberal India
Edited by
Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis
Šarūnas Paunksnis
Gender, Cinema, Streaming Platforms
Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis
Šarūnas Paunksnis
Editors
Gender, Cinema,
Streaming Platforms
Shifting Frames in Neoliberal India
Editors
Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis Šarūnas Paunksnis
Kaunas University of Technology Kaunas University of Technology
Kaunas, Lithuania Kaunas, Lithuania
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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Switzerland AG.
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Acknowledgments
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis and Šarūnas Paunksnis
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
vii
viii Contents
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
10 Deeply
Personal Is Deeply Political: New Voices in
Women’s Documentary Practice in Indian Subcontinent223
Sudipto Acharyya
11 On
Cinematic Transformations, Gender, and Religion:
An Interview with Ashish Avikunthak247
Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis and Šarūnas Paunksnis
Filmography269
Index281
Notes on Contributors
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
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
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.
4 R. C. PAUNKSNIS AND Š. PAUNKSNIS
4
An apt example is the controversy around the Shah Bano case.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
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
6
See Chaudhuri (2017).
8 R. C. PAUNKSNIS AND Š. PAUNKSNIS
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.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
— Enhän tuota vielä ole tullut tehneeksi, miten sitten vasta
käynee, sanoi isäntä huolettomasti ja poistui tuvasta.
Aapo hölmistyi.
9.
Ja sitten vielä toinen hyöty, kun saa olla hallan käynniltä turvattu.
Naapurikyliin asti kuroitteli halla siitä pesästään, mutta nyt siltä on
selkä poikki, eikä se nosta enää päätään. Likimmäiset naapurit
ihailivatkin Simon jättiläistyötä ja olisivat mielellään antaneet
apuaankin, jos Simo sitä olisi tarvinnut.
*****
10.
Otto oli käynyt kysymässä, minkä verran hän saisi maata, jos sitä
anoisi. Lain mukaan tulisi sitä vain kaksi hehtaaria, ja sitä hän ei
sanonut ottavansa. Parempi oli olla maattomana kuin omistaa
tyhjänveroista tilkkua. Mistä hän metsää saisi?
*****
— Mihin liittoon?
Ja Otto alkaa jälleen miettiä, että jos olisi maata, niin mikä olisi
vielä aloittaessa elämää. Alkaisi todellakin kuin alusta. Näkisi vaikka
nälkääkin, kun tietäisi kerran pääsevänsä helpommille päiville. Saisi
näyttää, että vielä tässä turve kääntyy niinkuin nuoremmiltakin.
— Mitkä niin?
Riikka naurahtaa.
— Hävittäisit.
11.
*****
*****
Aaposta oli tytön kiukku niin lapsekasta, ettei hän voinut muuta
kuin nauraa.
Taisi nyt siis tämäkin satu olla niinkuin lopussa. Minkä hän sille, jos
oli jäykkä ja harvasanainen, työn kovettama peltomyyrä eikä joutanut
joka toinen päivä tytön luona käymään. Hänellä oli ollut
kotikonnustaan omat surunsa, joita ei tahtonut tulla tytölle heti
haastamaan, kun ei tietänyt, olisiko tämä sellaisesta välittänyt tai sitä
edes ymmärtänytkään.
Aapo nousi raskaasti ja poistui hiljaa. Talon peltoveräjälle päästyä
tuli ahdistava ikävä. Näinkö se kaikki hajosi? Sillä tytöllä oli niin
runsaat suortuvat ja kirkkaat silmät ja voimakas, notkea vartalo. Tyttö
oli ollut hyvin usein hänen mielessään työtä tehdessä.
— Miten niin? Olethan sinä nyt talon mies, itsenäinen isäntä, sanoi
Aapo.
— Niin ottaa tiukalle väliin, että unen vie, valitti Vikki. — Ja jos ei
tässä mitään keinoa keksi, niin maantielle on lähdettävä muutaman
vuoden kuluttua. Herrat huutaa, että laita maasi voimaperäiseen
kuntoon ja jalosta karjasi. Kyllä minä sen olen tietänyt jo aiemminkin,
mutta ennenkuin nuo tenavat saa miehiksi, niin liiat jalostamiset jää
varmasti. Ja tuleehan sitä meillä mikä muuallakin, mutta nyt kun
pitää pari tuhatta maksaa vuosittain lisämenoja, niin ei riitä. Velka
kasvaa, jos häntä velkaa saakaan.
— Kyllä sitä velkaa yhden miehen osalle tulisi. Joka vuosi menee
koroista enemmän kuin tähän asti veroista. Petäjäniemen Antti on
oikeassa, kun sanoo, että maita ei pitäisi niin korkealle hinnoittaa,
kuin näissäkin paikoin on hinnoitettu. »Velan alle vain nääntyvät»,
sanoo. Omilta alustalaisiltaan ei liikoja nylkenytkään.