Chapter 4 - Where Labour is Performed: The Public/Private Dichotomy and the Politics of Stigma in Bhumika and Mandi

Summary

In recent years, the Hindi film industry has seen a number of ‘women oriented’ films that create narratives of women’s empowerment. From Queen (2013, directed by Vikas Bahl) to Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016, directed by Alankrita Shrivastava), such films usually define women’s liberation in terms of their challenging the boundaries of their roles as defined by marriage/family and often, in the process, exploring female desire. Such conceptualisation of feminist agency, however, implies an unquestioning acceptance of the domestic/public binary as the defining feature of patriarchy, which raises some troubling questions when examined through the lens of socialist Dalit feminism. As socialist feminists have pointed out, the idea of the ‘breadwinner husband’ with his economically dependent ‘housewife’, which underpins this gendered domestic/public binary, far from being a natural phenomenon is, in fact, the creation of capitalist patriarchy which is a relatively recent and ongoing historical process. Within the specifically Indian context, the formulation of this domestic/public division has been further complicated by anti-colonial Brahmanical nationalism which re-visioned this division in terms of the inner/spiritual versus the outer/material. In this formulation, women became the protectors and transmitters of ‘Indian culture’ that was preserved within the familial domestic sphere while men provided the necessary material sustenance through their engagement with the world of the colonisers. And this ‘Indian culture’ was defined in upper-class/upper-caste terms whereby this domesticated ‘Indian’ woman was carefully distinguished from the lower-class/lower-caste women who necessarily worked outside their homes and were, as such, seen as unchaste. Within the Indian context, therefore, the gendering of the domestic/public binary is both class and caste specific, making any idea of women’s liberation premised simply upon crossing the lakshman rekha of marital domesticity potentially complicit with casteist capitalism.

Interestingly, this complexity of the ‘woman’s question’, while largely glossed over in contemporary Hindi cinema, is evident in the ‘women-oriented’ films of the so-called parallel cinema from the 1970s and 1980s. Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika (The Role, 1977) and Mandi (Market Place, 1983) exemplify this earlier phase of Hindi feminist cinema. While Bhumika focuses on the life of an actress struggling to define her sense of selfhood in relation to the various public and private roles imposed upon her by a patriarchal society, Mandi focuses on a house of prostitutes where women negotiate with the economy of sex work within a society structured by capitalist patriarchy.