The incest wound in Hindi cinema: childhood trauma and feminist futures in Monsoon Wedding and Highway

ABSTRACT

In this essay we ask questions about the ideological and diagnostic function that the incest trope serves in post-liberalization India-based cinema. We examine Monsoon Wedding and Highway to argue that the incest trope operates as a sign-post of globalized Bollywood’s altering relationship with the family, as a metonymic signifier of the discursive shifts in India’s relationship to liberalization, as well as a filmic mechanism that enables us to envision the place of women both inside and outside bourgeois families and fantasies. Through a close study of the cartographic vision and the forms of masculinity espoused by the two films, we demonstrate their sharply varied politics. The incest-crisis in Monsoon Wedding finds resolution within the four walls of the family-home and the incest-victims’ relationship with the family is able to return to a state of pre-crisis “normalcy.” Highway, on the other hand, regards the family not as bastion-against-the-world, but as a reflective microcosm of all that is wrong with the world, and as the cornerstone of social and gender inequality. This is why, the incest-survivor in Highway comes to terms with childhood trauma by removing herself from her family, and from bourgeois domesticity, altogether.

KEYWORDS:

• Incest
• Hindi cinema
• spatial and sexual politics
• masculinities
• liberalization

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Dr. Gloria González-López and Dr. Anupama Arora for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Kahaani 2 is a thriller that kicks off with the kidnapping of Mini, a wheelchair-bound teenager living with a doting mom, played by Vidya Balan. Through flashbacks we discover how Mini and the woman we think is her mother came to live together. The movie foregrounds the chase between Mini’s villainous, incestuous uncle who wants to kill her, and the protagonist Vidya Balan, who has formed a deep maternal connection with Mini, in part because of her own experience of child sexual abuse that is alluded to but not detailed in the film. Onir’s I am is a loosely linked collection of stories about people negotiating their variously marginalized identities in the India of today. One of these stories is Sanjay Suri’s, a filmmaker living in Bangalore, whose stepfather’s illness brings to the surface unresolved trauma around the incestuous abuse he was subjected to by the stepfather through his childhood years. He opens up to a friend about his experiences and the self-loathing it has left him with. He visits his mother, and while the stepfather has passed away by then, he confronts his mother about her willful ignorance through those years.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megha Anwer

Megha Anwer is a clinical assistant professor at Purdue University’s Honors College. Her doctoral work “Navigating the Necropolis” explores the criminal and terroristic narratives of the city, and investigates the mobility practices of marginal populations as they navigate the violent city. Currently, she is working on two book projects. The first looks at the everyday micro-aggressions that women in Victorian London faced as they navigated public spaces of the city. The second, is an edited volume (co-edited with Anupama Arora) on the New Woman in Bollywood. She has published several articles in her areas of interest and her work has appeared in The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Short Film Studies, Victorian Studies, Widescreen, Global South and A Review of International English Literature. E-mail: [email protected]

Vrinda Marwah

Vrinda Marwah is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology, at the University of Texas, Austin. She received her Masters from the University of London and her Bachelors from the University of Delhi. Her research interests are in political sociology and gender, specifically in reproductive justice and the Indian state. She is the co-editor of the book Reconfiguring Reproduction: Feminist Health Perspectives on Assisted Reproductive Technologies (Zubaan 2014). She has published in journals such as Economic and Political Weekly, Globalization and Health, and The Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, and contributed to several anthologies. Her doctoral research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and the PEO. E-mail: [email protected]