Nobody puts Rani in a corner: Making of the new Indian woman in Queen (2014)

ABSTRACT

Queen (dir. Vikas, 2014) is a coming-of-age Bollywood film that uses the travel trope to illustrate the female protagonist’s awakening. This article examines the journey and transition of Rani, a middle-class upper-caste Punjabi heterosexual Hindu Indian woman, into the ‘New Indian Woman’. Through its female protagonist, Queen offers an iteration and embodiment of the new Indian woman who emerged in the context of upheavals caused by India’s economic liberalization in 1991, one who came to be viewed simultaneously as a marker of modernity and the last bastion of India’s commitment to traditional values. Rani’s refashioned self carefully straddles tradition and modernity desired of the new woman in India. Organized around four interrelated sections, the essay traces Rani’s remaking into a new woman within the context of global travel, new kinship networks, assertion of desire and consumptive practices. Through Rani’s particular embodiment, we see how Bollywood’s new Indian woman can function as a strategy of containment whose object lessons on screen offer moral instruction in maintaining authentic Indian-ness even as economic and cultural markets open themselves up to women. With its possibilities and its limitations, Queen, along with a slew of other New Bollywood films, is symptomatic of a society in transition, one that continues to navigate the effects of changes set in motion since the early 1990s.

KEYWORDS:

• Bollywood
• New Woman
• Gender
• India
• Neoliberal
• Globalization

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Megha Anwer and Gohar Siddiqui for their insights and generous feedback on different drafts of this article. The article owes much to conversations with Megha Anwer on ‘Bollywood’s New Woman’ (also the title of our co-edited collection, under contract with Rutgers UP). I am also grateful for the anonymous reviewers’ feedback from which this article has benefited.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘Item number’, is a journalistic term used in Bollywood for song and dance sequences by female performers (‘item girls’) outside the larger diegesis of the film and initially associated with ‘B-grade’ actresses in skimpy clothes dancing provocatively and gyrating suggestively in settings such as the nightclub or discotheque or bar (settings previously associated with the vamp).

2. See Anwer.

3. Bollywood has a long tradition of portraying religious minorities (Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis) in reductionist ways, marking them as different through language, dress, culture, and religion. For instance, films are replete with examples of Christian female characters appearing typically ‘as bar girls, cabaret dancers or gangsters’ molls’ (Chadha and Kavoori 143). Similarly, Muslims (the largest religious minority in India) have especially been variously exoticized, marginalized and demonized in post-Independence Bollywood – as courtesans, nawabs or aristocratic elite, sidekicks and terrorists. Muslim female characters have either been hypersexualized or fetishized as mysterious or suffering veiled and burqa-clad women who speak stylized Urdu in courtesan films or ‘Muslim Socials’ (Mere Mehboob, 1963; Pakeezah, 1972) or portrayed as modern and ‘good’ Indian subjects and citizens, set up as contrast to ‘bad Muslims’ in cinepatriotic films (Rai) since the late 1990s (Fiza, 2000; Mission Kashmir, 2000; Sarfarosh, 1999).

4. Shohini Ghosh has argued that the appeal of Bollywood for queer subcultures comes from its privileging of romantic love as the most important of emotions, and from its conventions that don’t distinguish too sharply between romantic love and friendship. So, while explicit depictions of homosexual love are missing or marginalized in Bollywood, it has had a long tradition of framing narratives with the love of two male friends; ‘and these buddy films can be read as evocative of homoerotic love, suggested through overlapping boundaries between love and friendship’ (208).

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Anupama Arora

Anupama Arora is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She is co-editor (with Rajender Kaur) of India in the American Imaginary 1780s–1880s (Palgrave 2017), and has published in a variety of journals including Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Women’s Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, among others.