Introduction: Masculinities

Gender has been a critical modality in the study of South Asia. Feminist scholarship over the past three decades has delineated not just the gender-sexual regimes that mark life on the subcontinent, but also how the figure of woman has been the lynchpin of various literary, cinematic, and historical discourses. Emerging from this important critical and theoretical work, there is now a growing corpus of literature that also focuses on masculinity in all its diverse iterations. Some studies elaborate how the politics of raced manhood were crucial to the history of colonialism in South Asia (Krishnaswamy; Nandy; Sinha), while others connect these gendered histories of colonialism and nationalism to aggressive, violent upper-caste masculinities of the Hindu right today (Banerjee; Chakraborty). A handful of edited anthologies explore the range of performative masculinities in contemporary South Asia (Chakraborty; Osella et al.; Dasgupta and Gokulsingh). More recently, anthropological and historical studies have traced the construction of Dalit masculinities during the colonial era and the present day (Gupta; Jeffrey et al.). Our special issue, with its focus on representation of masculinities across forms and media, contributes to and intervenes in this masculinity studies turn.

Building from R. W. Connell’s ground-breaking conceptualization of hegemonic masculinity, this collection of essays considers masculinity relationally and discursively. We understand that masculinity is not synonymous with patriarchy and nor is it simply a corollary to femininity. Rather, it emerges at the intersection of caste, religion, class, sexuality, gender and other constructs, and it must be theorized as such. To conceive of a certain iteration of masculinity as hegemonic–to identify how it legitimates unequal relationships–is to acknowledge masculinity itself as a plural concept, one that is structured by power differentials. Social scientists typically frame gender in terms of lived experience and practice. Masculinity is a way of ‘doing gender’ in relation to, and in tandem with, other individuals in particular spaces and social settings (West and Zimmerman). As such, it cannot be reduced to unchanging ideals or types. Further, the interconnections among different social locations and vectors of identity mean that to ‘understand [masculinity] … we must constantly go beyond gender’ (Connell 76). We must take into account not just imbalances between men and women, but also the myriad social structures and hierarchies that grant some men (and women) cultural and political authority, while subordinating and marginalizing a host of others.

The intersectional and relational nature of masculinity is as important to feminist literary and cultural studies as it is in the aforementioned empirical work. In the Foucauldian/Butlerian model, gender and sex are discursively produced. Masculinity is a contingent and iterative self-fashioning that takes shape via discursive structures and practices of everyday life. In South Asia, discourses of caste, class, sexuality, region, and gender contour ways of being, both authorizing and restricting the range of gender practices, even as they leave gaps for change. Questions of representation become key as we move from a sociological to a discursive heuristic framework. Here, we refer to representation in terms of literature and cinema as well as (other) technologically mediated genres such as television shows, advertisements, and WhatsApp videos. The chosen representational form both enables and constrains how gender plays out in the text. It renders visible and re-presents certain styles of masculinities, masculine praxis, and relationalities (Rajan 1101); it recontextualizes and reinforces others; and it also makes and circulates new masculinities, potentially shifting existing gender-sexual regimes.

In this special issue, we interrogate literary, cinematic, and other media representations of masculinity. We have assembled a collection of articles that span a wide array of media, regions, and languages, and that trouble existing narratives about masculinity in/and South Asia. We are interested in the following broad questions: How and why are certain forms of masculinity prioritized, vilified, and marginalized in Indian cultural and literary texts in the contemporary moment? How do mass media, film, and literature establish, challenge, or negate masculinities? To what extent is the nation a fruitful or pertinent category through which to understand these particular performances and representations of masculinity? How might the vernacular enable a critique of the languages and regions that have dominated the study of masculinity in South Asia? To what extent is the much-challenged theoretical concept of hegemonic masculinity still a productive one – even in its pluralized form, hegemonic masculinities – as we probe the ways in which manliness is articulated across geographical contexts? How might the juxtaposition of diverse vernacular masculinities put pressure on the notion of hegemonic masculinity?

In our CFP for the 2018 ACLA seminar that led to this volume, we cast a wide net, welcoming papers ‘focus[ed] on the territorial nation-state (whatever shape that takes), the regional, the local, the transnational, and the diasporic, or indeed, any combination of these.’ Using ‘South Asia’ as a rubric, we sought papers that reached beyond the nation-state and beyond India, in particular. What we received, in the main, were essays that sidestepped the category of nation altogether. While all of our contributors’ examples fall within the boundaries of India, they demonstrate that nation is often beside the point. Despite repeated scholarly attempts to move beyond the nation, the concept continues to exert an incredible affective pull. And yet, what we glean from these papers is that other discourses are equally salient in everyday life. Nation is sometimes mapped onto regional, caste, class, and/or communal identity, but not always and not necessarily so. Other dimensions of masculinity come into view when we understand nation to be just one among many vectors of identity and belonging that intersect with gender.

Further, the fact that the Bengali bhadralok babu (Chattopadhyay; Sinha), the ‘Five-Year Plan Hero’ of the 1950s Hindi cinema (Srivastava), and the martial figure of the Sikh man (Kohli; Streets) do not occupy a prominent position in any of the contributions we received is telling. Their absence indicates not so much of saturation or tiredness with them in masculinity studies scholarship–after all, there is much more to be said to complicate our understanding of these figures–but a collective scholarly sense that the subcontinent is littered with many more such configurations of hegemonic masculinity.

Chakraborty‘s important-edited volume Mapping South Asian Masculinities extends discussions of gender and masculinity in the South Asian context by including case studies from diverse national contexts. Our special issue takes a different approach to de-centering India. While neither ‘India’ nor ‘South Asia’ is an adequate descriptor for the work collected here, we see the latter as the more apt analytical category for our purposes. A concern with the regional (or the vernacular, as we argue below) drives a number of our papers. Rather than conceiving of South Asia as an umbrella term for eight nation-states that are adjacent to each other, we take it to be a general marker of regional identity and cultural practice. South Asia keeps locale in play without making nation or the nation-state (and India, in particular) the Ur-category. The term is also a useful reminder of the global geopolitical history that has demarcated the region and given it shape in the popular and scholarly imagination.

Through this focus on the regional, the essays gesture at new ways of thinking about the mobile and contingent concept of hegemonic masculinities. Masculinity studies in the last two decades have nuanced the original theorization of hegemonic masculinities: for instance, recent work has made visible the production of the individual ‘masculine’ subject within the relational structure of gender (Whitehead 93); the dialectical relationship between masculinities; and the appropriative tendency of hegemonic masculinity, the way it borrows from other masculine forms in order to maintain its hegemony (Demetriou 355). This special issue elaborates on these processes in the South Asian context, but it also intercepts this ongoing conversation. In foregrounding the regional, the essays in this collection ask us to consider how and when, in what context, particular instantiations of hegemonic masculinity cease to be hegemonic. At first glance, this intervention fits Connell and Messerschmidt‘s revision of the original concept to include three levels of analysis: the local, the regional (and national), and the global (849–851). This multi-layered model accounts for tensions and connections between various levels of enactment. It would seem that our special issue fleshes out the middle level, multiplying and adding granular detail to regional masculinities that are hegemonic in their particular context. The problem (Connell and Messerschmidt’s protestations notwithstanding) is that the model remains stuck in a nested and hierarchical geography. It also imagines more overlap between local instantiations of masculinity than is evident on the ground–certainly in South Asia, but elsewhere in the world, too, we suspect.

The juxtaposition of different regional and linguistic contexts in this special issue reveals very clearly that what is hegemonic in, say, a particular part of Haryana is quite different from what would be considered hegemonic in a region of Kerala. Indeed, even the process and means of legitimating certain forms of masculinities and delegitimizing others differs. What is (or is not) hegemonic is thus even more context dependent than it would seem from the ascendancy of Hindutva masculinity in India today. Our collection also complicates the idea that there is any sort of resemblance between hegemonic masculinities at the local, regional, or global level. That it does so even as it draws its examples from a single level of analysis and from within the borders of a single nation-state is significant.

In moving away from the national, transnational, and nation-state and generating nuanced analyses of the discursive production of masculinities, the essays enact a more dynamic approach to thinking about masculinities. As they move between, and across, social relational structures and sites, they carefully foreground and unpack the contingent and fluid nature of disparate masculinities. They track the mediated continuities, disruptions, and deviations in masculine praxis and performance across the quotidian and the catastrophic, undoing the separation between the two categories.

In lieu of a summary of our contributors’ arguments, we offer below a few ways of reading their work in relation to each other. We highlight particular arguments in the essays but also read them contrapuntally in order to think through some of the broad questions noted above.

Vernacular masculinities

One of the most useful interventions of this constellation of texts is its elaboration of vernacular masculinities. No matter the descriptor they use–vernacular, provincial, local, or regional–our authors study masculinity as it emerges in specific linguistic and regional contexts. Our own critical preference for ‘vernacular’ stems from the way it links language and locality. Given how ongoing contestations over language shape geopolitics on the subcontinent, attending to masculinities deemed provincial or regional in some way promises to disrupt the fixities of nation and its gender politics. The sheer ordinariness of the term, moreover–its emphasis on ostensibly unremarkable and everyday practices–reminds us of the power of the mundane in both solidifying and challenging gender-sexual regimes. The vernacular also carries with it a sense of the non-hegemonic and the non-normative, which brings to fore questions of power, hierarchy, and difference. At the same time, the focus on the vernacular foregrounds the processes whereby the vernacular itself might be entrenched within hierarchical structures of power. Often used in contradistinction to the national, the vernacular (like its affiliated terms) is most useful when it provincializes the nation. It can reveal the power dynamics that sustain claims to the national (or the universal) and paper over the particular places and contexts from which those hegemonic claims arise.

Laura Brueck’s close reading of Hindi detective fiction mobilizes these diverse connotations of the vernacular. The gendered aesthetic of the genre prioritizes the common man and his lived experiences, rescripting heroic masculinity even as it rehearses misogynist tropes and narratives. In Sucheta Choudhuri’s article on Aligarh (Hansal Mehta, 2016), we learn that even though our protagonist Siras is keenly aware of his marginalization as a Marathi academic in an Urdu milieu, he resists participating in discourses that would render him a coherent and legible subject of the nation-state. Such vernacular critiques do not just challenge contemporary masculine ideals. They undermine claims to a pan-Indian identity that Bombay cinema has long made and that Amitabh Bachchan continues to forward in his Benevolent Patriarch avatar. As Sreya Mitra observes, even as Bachchan defends his decision to act as brand ambassador for Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh using the rhetoric of citizenship and national responsibility, various public figures have called out both his paternalism and the parochialism implicit in his ideological affiliation with the Modi government. Navaneetha Mokkil’s essay on figurations of fatherhood in Malayalam cinema opens up yet another avenue for unsettling the nation, gesturing to the caste dimensions implicit in the category of the vernacular. Here, the victimized Dalit Christian father is read against the triumphant figure of the upper-caste, middle-class Syrian Christian hero. The question is not whether the lower-caste man is figured as sufficiently or appropriately Indian (or even Hindu). The emphasis, rather, is on unpacking the visual and aural registers that render Dalit masculinity at once spectacular and abject.

Forming gender

Given our focus on discursive representation of masculinities, the essays here pay attention to how particular forms or genres delineate the histories and the fluidity (or lack thereof) of gender practice. In addition, they focus on how the temporal logics of each literary and/or media text organize masculinity. Brueck’s essay attends to the heterosexist tropes of detective fiction where strong, virile men interact with women who are either sexually cunning or sexually vulnerable. And yet, she argues, this reductive binary is collapsed through the ‘everyman’ hero, whose continuous spatial and spiritual marginalization produces a masculinity that eschews this heteropatriarchal view of the world. The novels gesture towards an undoing of the heterobinary even as it reinforces the misogyny of the always already sexualized female victim implicit in the detective form. Furthermore, it is the quotidian temporality of the detective protagonist that disrupts the mythic timescale of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ on which the Hindi detective form is predicated. Mokkil’s essay, too, considers the visual and aural grammar of melodrama in the representation of the Dalit Christian father, Samuel, as a powerless man, and the sexually exploited daughter, Lisamma, as perennial hapless victim. However, the split between identification and distanced observation implicit in crucial melodramatic moments destabilizes the film’s own formulation, compelling the viewer to re-notate masculinity itself, or as Mokkil argues, to ‘reimagine familiar scripts of masculinity as revenge, retribution and agency.’ In other words, it is the deliberately crafted stillness of the visual and sonic moment of the melodrama that enables this divided affective attention.

If suspension of time in the melodramatic form opens up the possibility of new scripts of masculinity in Achanurangatha Veedu (Lal Jose, 2005), then the calculated switch between temporalities in the realist frame enables the rethinking of the male body, ideas of masculinity, and identity in Aligarh. Choudhuri points to how the play between past, present, and future within Aligarh reworks the camera’s apparently objective gaze. Indeed, the fragmentary repetition of the voyeuristic recording of Siras’ encounter (and the subsequent violence wreaked upon his person) continuously shifts the film’s realist linear time-scale. The temporal disruptions caused by the film-within-the-film produce different affective and ethical responses from disparate viewers within and without the diegetic space of the film. To put it differently, the realist form calls attention to the contingency of the body, masculinity, and personhood through these temporal shifts.

In Mitra’s transmedial approach, Bachchan emerges as a benevolent, forward-looking patriarch within the temporal scales of diverse media forms. For example, in television advertisements, his bodily presence recalls pre-liberalization India, even as he sonically brings into being the new–the nation poised to take its rightful place on the global stage. Bachchan’s baritone voice, which evokes an earlier national culture with which he was long associated, now also resonates with the confidence and heft of a glorious global future. The condensed, forward-looking form of the advertisement and Bachchan’s historically grounded star masculinity inflect and remake each other. If time is compressed in advertising, it is sped up further in Rahul Mukherjee’s exploration of WhatsApp as a platform for Hindutva masculinity. Paying close theoretical and textual attention to the affective build-up in what he calls WhatsApp virality, Mukherjee tracks the truncated, participatory form of the WhatsApp video as well as the speed of its circulation in his analysis of gaurakshak (cow protector) violence. The jumpy visceral immediacy of the WhatsApp video form helps craft an ‘authentic’ and ‘righteous’ Hindu masculinity. Its viral spread ensures that this manufactured affective immediacy becomes affective truth for ever larger groups of people. Mobility is thus key to the production of, and alterations in, masculinities.

Mobile manhood

Movement across media, genres, regions, languages, and forms is implicit in a number of other papers in this issue as well. In certain cases, such traffic is a fundamental feature of the masculinity in question. Movement itself becomes constitutive of specific masculinities, while it decomposes other forms. The essays also demonstrate the extent to which mobility facilitates a critique of the status quo, and the ways in which it might produce specific forms of shifting masculinities. In Brueck’s essay on Hindi detective fiction, we learn that the novels routinely subvert dominant and seemingly desirable upper-caste, middle-class ideas of masculinity, while deliberately rendering the peripatetic everyman protagonists–who not only travel easily between classed sites and urban spaces, but multiple identities as well–as true heroes. Fluid movement, in this case, entails the ability to inhabit multiple forms of masculinity, and it is key to the successful detective. The catch is that these fluid vernacular masculinities are predicated on the static and misogynist representation of women’s bodies (and on women-as-bodies).

The violence that gaurashaks enact is premised, as we learn from Mukherjee’s essay, on their ability to travel on, and police, literal and virtual highways. Driving along Haryana’s highways and/or going viral define(s) this upper-caste, regional masculinity. Interestingly, this real and virtual mobility intersects with the ‘consumerist ontology’ of Hindutva India (Mazzarella 13), where the regional form of Hindutva manhood folds up with a desire for upward mobility as manifested through consumption of branded clothes and music. In contrast, Choudhuri’s essay on Aligarh explores how moving to a different place renders the protagonist Siras’ an outsider and represents his coping strategies in the face of enforced abjection. Movement here allows for the emergence of Siras’s resistant masculinity, a non- or anti-hegemonic masculinity, that repudiates both heternormative (the university) and liberal (LGBTQ) structures. In other cases, mobility provides the context for the emergence of new forms of masculinity. Mitra examines how actor Amitabh Bachchan’s stardom – the particular form of masculinity he enacts in different moments of his career – has morphed over the years, as he navigates new media and roles. Shifting depictions of this star male body tells us as much about the changing social and political context as it does about his savviness as a public figure.

Embodiment and power

Almost all of our essays investigate the ways in which the material body is constructed by, even as it constructs, forms of masculinity. As James Messerschmidt and R. W. Connell have argued, the reflexive formulation of gender (as well as sex and sexuality) occurs ‘in situated, interactional and embodied accomplishments’ (Messerschmidt 109). In the South Asian context, sociological work by Radhika Chopra, Deepak Mehta, among others, focus on the spatial and cultural (and religious) processes that inscribe the material body as male and create modes of masculine behaviors. In Aligarh, Choudhuri explores how Siras’s aging ‘outsider’ body, culturally prescribed as desire-less, is reconfigured as disruptive precisely because of its desires. The camera’s focus on a body that does not fit cinematic ideas of the desiring and desirable (hetero) male body reworks what a masculine body looks like on screen. Though not as radically disruptive as Siras’ in Choudhuri’s reading, Bachchan’s star masculinity is embodied anew in Mitra’s analysis of his post-liberalization persona. Bachchan’s body is visibly rendered as one that is aging; but the aging male body here becomes a ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ representation, while still being invested with patriarchal wisdom. Mitra argues that Bachchan’s body in his later films carries the residual imprint of his hypermasculine Angry Young Man. However, it now manifests cool, wise sophistication, desiring and desired by women of all ages, and envied by men, young and old.

In direct contrast, Mokkil reveals the process whereby discourses of caste constitute the representation and reception of the father in Achanurangatha Veedu. Samuel’s body is produced as emotional and powerless, and hence implicitly unable to conform to normative masculine bodily praxis or embody hegemonic masculinity as an upper-caste hero might. Mokkil’s persuasive argument unpacks how the film’s cinematic grammar and the genre of the melodrama naturalize Samuel’s body as always already ‘unmanly.’ And yet, she points to how such as binary understanding of gender and caste is destabilized at key affective moments, suggesting more fluid configurations of masculine action. Finally, in Mukherjee’s analysis of the WhatsApp gaurakshaks, the very identity of the young upper-caste men as Hindu men and gaurakshaks emerge through their bodies. It is through physical, homosocial vigilante violence that they establish themselves as virile, purposeful, upper-caste men, a community of men who see and show themselves as powerful protectors of cows and of the Hindu nation. Their Hindutva masculine selfhood is predicated on the necessary filming and broadcast of their bodily violence and the forceful abjection of bodies of Muslim and Dalit men.

Encounters with neoliberalism

This issue also encourages us to think about how cultural texts offer alternative narratives than neoliberalism as structural forces in shaping masculinities. While neoliberalism, especially in the wake of post-liberalization reform, has become increasingly central to the political-economic policies of the nation-state, it has also become a cultural and ideological project. The number of books and articles on the neoliberal entrepreneurial identity and cultural inflections in India, for example, is a testament to this change (Gooptu, Murty, Kaur). Taking our cue from Aihwa Ong, we look at neoliberalism as ‘mobile calculative techniques of governing that can be decontextualized from their original sources and recontextualized in constellations of mutually constitutive and contingent relations’ (13). As a mobile assemblage, then, it comes into ‘uncomfortable encounters with local cultures and politics’ (Clarke 138), wherein it becomes one of the many discursive formations in a particular place.

The essays in this collection engage with these encounters. They reveal that neoliberal processes and ideation, rather than being all-encompassing master narratives, are just one of the many vectors along which masculinities are produced and/or negotiated. For instance, in Choudhuri’s essay on Aligarh, the protagonist, Siras, exists in stark contrast to the young, cosmopolitan, neoliberal and progressive Sebastian. Siras repudiates the identitarian terms imported from the West that circulate as liberatory models and insists on inhabiting a subjectivity that resists the easy categories of victim, gay, and traditional that the media and the LGBTQ legal team and activists seek to impose upon him. Meanwhile, in Mukherjee’s article on violent Hindutva gaurakshaks, neoliberal consumerist modernity is but one dimension of their masculine enactment, intersecting with group violence, caste, religion, and spatial dominance.

Together, the essays in this special issue remind us that, like neoliberalism, region, sexuality, caste, and class are not, in any straightforward way, sub-national or supra-national categories. They may not necessarily intersect with conceptions of ‘Indian’ (or ‘South Asian’) manhood, and may in fact put pressure on notions of gendered subjectivity and national identity. Casting masculinities as mobile, provisional, and ongoing projects–ones that are (or seem) more precarious than one would expect–the essays in this special issue hold the promise of change. They suggest that both the overarching concept and specific forms of hegemonic masculinities may be dismantled, disrupted, and re-scripted. And in so doing, they gesture to the possible emergence of non-normative and egalitarian masculinities, forms of gender practice not predicated on hierarchies of power between masculinities and femininities and between masculinities.

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Notes on contributors

Praseeda Gopinath

Praseeda Gopinath is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York. She is the author of Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (Virginia, 2013). She has published in Contemporary Literature, Oxford Bibliographies of Literary and Cultural Theory, Textual Practice, Journal of Celebrity Studies, and Studies in the Novel, among other journals and anthologies. Her current transdisciplinary project explores disruptive and vernacular masculinities and the idea of India.

Pavitra Sundar

Pavitra Sundar is Assistant Professor of Literature at Hamilton College, where she teaches global film and literature. Her publications appear in Meridians; Jump Cut; Communication, Culture, and Critique; and the Sounding Out! blog, among other journals and anthologies. On the horizon are a monograph on Hindi film soundwork and work with the Accent Research Collaborative, theorizing accent from an intermedial, intersectional, and interdisciplinary perspective.