Reading patriarchal manhood, violence and love in Kabir Singh (2019)

ABSTRACT

The present essay discusses the visual representation of masculinity in Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Kabir Singh (2019). Kabir Singh is a macho-melodrama and a romantic account of the eponymous character, Kabir Singh, and his spiralling into self-destruction following his separation from his love interest, Preeti Sikka. Through the strategic exploitation of masculine tropes and symbols in the cinematic narrative, Vanga aims to construct the male protagonist, Kabir, as the public face of the hegemonic masculine ideology. The film, which offers to its audience a heteronormative heterotopia, also reinforces the patriarchal agenda through the portrayal of a sentimental, submissive woman with negligible autonomy. The article aims to develop its argument of masculinity and its association with pervasive power in the film through the reading of specific scenes through the intellectual and theoretical apparatuses of R.W. Connell, Michael Kimmell, and Michael Kaufman. It looks at the construction of masculinities as a homosocial enactment and also reads the protagonist’s borderline toxic behaviour through the theories of machoism and overcompensation of masculine identities. The paper concludes with situating Kabir Singh in Bollywood’s continuum of toxic masculinity. Through the deployment of masculinities and its nexus with sexism, this research paper also aims to query how machoistic scripts of masculinity implicate heterosexual romantic relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Kabir Singh
• hegemonic masculinity
• hypermasculinity
• machoism
• overcompensation of masculinity
• gender studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Kabir Singh, 2019 directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga is a romantic drama hindi language remake of Vanga’s own debut Telgu film, Arjun Reddy, 2017. Starring Shahid Kapoor and Kiara Advani. The film received an ‘A’ (adults only) certificate from the Central Boards of Film Certification (CFBC) owing to the high number of drug abuse scenes and was the second highest grossing film of the year, 2019. It grossed over ₹ 379 crore (See Kabir Singh - Wikipedia).

2. A newspaper article, ‘More women study medicine but few practise’ reports that the number of women pursuing medical postgraduate degrees is reduced to one-third. More women study medicine, but few practise | India News - Times of India (indiatimes.com).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Debapriya Ganguly

Debapriya Ganguly is a Research Scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, ISM, Dhanbad. Her primary research interests include gender studies and women’s writings, and feminist histories. Email id: [email protected].

Rajni Singh

Rajni Singh is Associate Professor of English at IIT Dhanbad. Her areas of interest include Women’s Writings and Gender Studies. She has published articles in journals, for instance, Archiv Orientalni, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Time Present, Folklore Fellows, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) and authored books on Indian Writing in English and T.S. Eliot. She may be reached at [email protected].