Introduction

“I argue that women, even as subordinate players, always play an active part that goes beyond the dichotomy of victimisation/acceptance, a dichotomy that flattens

out a complex and ambiguous agency in which women accept, accommodate, ignore, resist, or protest – sometimes all at the same time.”1

The works of Guru Dutt Padukone, now widely recognised as some of the

masterpieces of Indian cinema’s ‘golden age’ of the 1950s, although melodramas2,

are not feminist or even ‘women’s films’. In almost every case (Baaz perhaps

excepted) they chart the social and emotional development and economic ‘arrival’ of

the impoverished but educated lower middle class man in the urban society of

modern India. In some of these cases, the films convey an intensely narcissistic and

individualistic focus – through their realist mise-en-scène and use of close-up – of

the psychological and physical condition of the male artist-protagonist, and his

1 Quoted from A. MacLeod in Signs, 17, 3, 1992 by Shoma. A. Chatterji, 1998, Subject: Cinema, Object: Woman, p. 222.

2 Melodrama is ‘used to describe cultural genres that stir up emotions’ often structured around tragic notions and ideas of good and evil, and focused on the family: ‘In melodrama, the emphasis is not on the psychology and lifestyle of a unique individual but on the functioning of characters in situations that push their emotions to extremes. Melodrama needs to be read metaphorically rather than for its literary or other values.’ (Dwyer, 2000 p. 108.)

See also Cooper, 2005, who discusses melodrama in comic and tragic registers (pp. 8-12). Classic studies include Peter Brooks, 1995, The Melodramatic Imagination and Thomas Elsaesser, 1985, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’. Melodrama is by definition the cinema of ‘excess’ (L. Williams, 1991, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess’, quoted in Gabriel, 2005, Imaging a Nation).

The ‘women’s film’ is a sub-genre of melodrama, often also called a ‘weepie’, particularly prevalent in the 1930s to 1950s in Hollywood, focused on a central female character and often leading to her punishment or tragic end as a consequence of her independence. See Molly Haskell and Annette Kuhn’s chapters in Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory. Both forms are seen by many (western/male) commentators as lesser than the western, privileged mode of ‘realism’, as are other popular ‘Third World’ cinema genres.

suffering at the hands of an unforgivingly conservative social order. Guru Dutt’s films

are among other things pleas for the social acceptance of artistic creativity,

interrogations of that creativity and its value, investigations of new social realities

and individual entrepreneurial struggle in a rapidly modernising state in the process

of (postcolonial) redefinition, and politically-founded social critiques and

contestations of the colonial legacy, of the family and its feudal traditions, and of the

promises of a new Nehruvian post-Independence constitutional settlement. Like

many of the classics of the era, they are explorations of ‘modern’ concepts of social

mobility and social relations, of the corrupt nature of old value systems, of

citizenship and relation to the state, and of morality, individuality and identity in an

economically-defined newly-capitalist and newly-fluid world. They are also

explorations of the economies of modern romance, and of the unpleasant truths of

family and society behind a hypocritical veneer. Unsurprisingly, it is particularly

within these contexts that women feature.

I emphasise these themes over the representation of women as it is precisely

because Guru Dutt’s films are examples of mainstream – if middle class – popular

cinema, and because they are not dedicated to any special exploration of or focus on

women and women’s roles but, on the whole, fall within the broad bounds of

cinematic convention, that the portrayal of women in them is worth investigation.

Guru Dutt’s women are interesting because they emerge from a context of

conventional patriarchal cinematic and social norms, and must contend as individual

characters with these circumstances. Guru Dutt’s female characters are almost

always strong women, but are not feminist symbols. In some ways, Guru Dutt’s films

can be read as ultimately endorsing the conservative status quo, and as containing

reactionary themes and concerns on the subject of women – for example the

mockery of Sita-Devi, Anita’s feminist divorce-campaigning aunt in Mr & Mrs 55. As

Chakravarty argues,3 films in the 1950s were expected to provide ‘the right solution

to moral dilemmas’ not psychological truth. The women characters are bound within

Indian cinematic and social conventions of the 1950s, yet, as I argue, in many ways

the women of Guru Dutt’s films engage critically with audiences and offer a more

progressive ‘narrative excess’4 over and above the plot resolution on issues relating

to women’s social position.

Guru Dutt’s life and influences

It is difficult to produce any kind of analysis of Guru Dutt’s work without referring to

his career development and personal life, as his early death has overdetermined

readings of his films, giving him an almost mythic status, in which his own romantic

view of the tortured artist is read onto his films. Nasreen Munni Kabir, in her

biographical study,5 emphasises the autobiographical aspects particularly of his later

films, suggesting that ‘Guru Dutt’s films, starting with Pyaasa, seemed to reflect his

own emotional life.’6 She reads Guru Dutt’s films as interpretations of and parallels

3 Sumita S. Chakravarty, 1993, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, p. 99.

4 ‘Narrative excess’ is the residue of meaning or emotion arising from a character or scenario that is not contained within the resolution of the plot or plot-strand. It may remain as a problem, challenge or sensation beyond the diegetic limits of the film: a sort of spill-over of meaning, feeling, implication or consequence. See also M. Citron, J. Lesage, J. Mayne et al. in Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory, who discuss the power of women figures to exceed the plot structure for women spectators.

5 Nasreen Munni Kabir, 2005, Guru Dutt: A Life In Cinema.

6 Ibid., p. 107.

to reality, and his career as intimately interwoven with his personal life – from his

troubled marriage to playback singer Geeta Roy, with whom he had three children

but from whom he later separated; to his friendships with Dev Anand and comedy

actor Johnny Walker; his discovery of Waheeda Rehman and subsequent alleged

doomed relationship with her;7 to his own experiences of unemployment, family

financial struggle and artistic rejection and his several suicide attempts, culminating

in his death by overdose in October 1964, at the age of just 39. It is hard, from this

distance, to establish how much of this context was relevant to 1950s and 1960s

audiences, and my intention is to focus primarily on the films as cinematic texts

independent of their autobiographical element. Nevertheless, there are scenes

where (subsequently) audience appreciation of the overlaps between art and reality

give an added dimension to the drama on screen, or to a character, and these

aspects are likely to be relevant to an analysis of the portrayal of women, and of

men’s relationships with women, in his work.

Kabir’s book also points to sources of influence for Guru Dutt, from the development

of his expertise in choreography, dance and ‘expression’ (the projection of emotion)

during his training at Uday Shankar’s Almora dance academy, then as dance director

at the renowned Prabhat Film Company, where he befriended Dev Anand and

Rehman; his work as assistant to Amiya Chakravarty, a leading director of the 1940s,

and to Gyan Mukherjee, a role model to Guru Dutt and director of hit 1943 film

Kismet. These, along with a feeling for Bengali literature and culture from his

7 Neither Guru Dutt nor Waheeda Rehman, nor any of their colleagues, has ever confirmed any relationship beyond the professional between them. It was said that Waheeda, a Muslim, was insistent that she would marry a Muslim; and in any case Guru Dutt was by then a married man. Abrar Alvi says that they were barely speaking by the final scenes of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (Saran, 2008).

upbringing in Calcutta (a connection perpetuated through his marriage to Geeta Roy)

form the main Indian influences.

But Guru Dutt had an international focus to his work. The interviewees in Kabir’s

book, as well as his script-writer (and nominal director8 of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam)

Abrar Alvi’s account of his years with Guru Dutt,9 suggest the many western

influences on his work. His enjoyment and admiration western films, and his

occasional borrowing from them, are mentioned, for example Drive A Crooked

Road,10 and an Italian film named Bitter Rice.11 So also is his Orson Welles-like habit

of appearing in cameo in the early films, and, as Darius Cooper points out, his ability

to lift and reinterpret scenes from western films.12 In his own essay, ‘Classics and

Cash’13 he cites a range of examples including Ben Hur, How Green Was My Valley,

and Wuthering Heights.

Darius Cooper argues of Guru Dutt that ‘Hollywood was his consummate teacher and

inspiration’. Guru Dutt’s adoption of Expressionist-derived ‘noir’ elements, including

lighting and mise-en-scène, particularly in the earlier films such as Aar Paar, and

8 Abrar Alvi wrote the script for Mr & Mrs 55 and was credited as director of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, including winning a Filmfare award, but it is generally accepted (though denied by Alvi) that the film was ‘ghost-directed’ by Guru Dutt himself, a position I have accepted in the context of this dissertation.

9 Sathya Saran, 2008, Ten Years With Guru Dutt: Abrar Alvi’s Journey.

10 Cited in Kabir, p. 86. A Hollywood film: no date or director cited.

11 Cited in Kabir, p. 55. Jaal was based on Riso Amara (1949), directed by Giuseppi De Santi, according to Guru Dutt’s brother.

12 Darius Cooper, 2005, p. 5, for example, he cites Dutt’s use of ‘screwball comedy’ and also similarities to Citizen Kane (Orson Welles), as well as Mozart’s 40th Symphony in G Minor, (p. 80-1), Singin’ In The Rain, and others (p.82, 85).

13 Reprinted in Kabir, p. 209-13.

Baazi, and his focus on modern technique, such as Cinemascope (Kaagaz Ke Phool

was India’s first Cinemascope production), the entry of his films to international film

festivals including the Oscars, and later that he sent his cinematographer, V.K.

Murthy, to Greece to learn about colour filming on the set of The Guns of Navarone

(1961), all indicate his ability to draw inspiration from a wide range of sources. They

also suggest that his eye was on an international context, and on techniques of

filming and narration that would engage a wider audience than Indian cinema-goers

alone.

Cooper goes on to say: ‘All his films show a very conscious adoption of the

Hollywood ‘modernist’ mode,’ and reads Guru Dutt’s films as largely derivative of

western cinema adapted for an Indian context. These elements certainly make it

easier for western audiences to understand his films. For example, they rarely

depend on a religious context, as most Hindi films do.14 His subjects, as director

Farhan Aktar is quoted as saying,15 ‘are contemporary… Guru Dutt’s films were about

human emotions and they don’t change.’ And his themes are those of modern life:

the city, relationships, poverty and unemployment, ambition, recognition, isolation

and loneliness, success and failure, artistic creativity, sexuality and desire, identity,

death and despair.

14 The only film with religion as a motivation for action is Jaal, which is set in a South Indian Christian fishing community (see Kabir, p. 50). Other films, for example Pyaasa, also contain Christian references. The characters, however, are from a range of faiths and are not seen practicing their religion. As Kabir points out, “Guru Dutt always showed a secular India in which his screen characters, all belonging to different castes and creeds, interact freely.” This statement doesn’t include Chaudvin Ka Chand, a Muslim social directed by M. Sadiq and produced by Guru Dutt, which I have not generally speaking included in this analysis as it doesn’t bear all the hallmarks of a Guru Dutt film.

15 Kabir, 2005, back cover blurb.

Yet however recognisable these themes and tropes may be to a westerner (as I am),

it is not possible simply to apply western cinema theory or feminist criticism

directly.16 Theories of melodrama do not fit neatly onto Guru Dutt’s work either,

particularly in representations of women, given their cultural specificity. As Mishra

says: ‘The point is that there is no exact match between an Indian film and a Western

melodrama. What happens is that melodramatic features are selectively used…

because melodrama in this cinema is not simply a genre, it is collectively

representation, narrative structure, and a “mode of cultural

production/assimilation”.’17 Darius Cooper’s readings, for example, sometimes feel

contrived, overlooking essential cultural perspectives. Understandings of the ‘male

gaze’,18 the fetishisation of female stars19 or women’s roles in film noir20 and other

feminist film theories do not offer unproblematic sources either. Guru Dutt

16 Authors such as Dwyer (2000, 2006), Dwyer and Pinney, eds, (2000), Nandy (1998), Das Gupta (1991), Vasudevan (ed.) (2000), Chakravarty (1993); Prasad (1998), and Mishra (2002), have theorised Indian Cinema and its development extensively, delineating differences in spectatorship, genre, aesthetics, myth, and socio-political context that shape the way meanings in Indian cinema are constructed. Chatterji (1998) elaborates strategies of feminist film criticism derived from western sources that provide useful methodologies for reading films critically (pp. 3-9) but highlights the problems these raise, namely their cultural and epistemological specificity. She says: ‘I myself found them difficult to understand and place within the context of Indian Cinema’ (p. 11), saying that they are ‘too Western’ in their constructs and therefore an ‘artificial, superficial imposition from without would have intruded into the specifics of Indian cultural, mythological and social foundations’ (Ibid.) This position is one that Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty have elaborated in greater detail.

17 Vijay Mishra, 2002, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, p. 36, (quoting Rajadhyaksha, 1993, p. 59).

18 Laura Mulvey, 1999, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in S. Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory. Mishra (2002, p. 100-1) criticises this as ‘post-Enlightenment individuated subjectivity’, while Prasad (1998, Ideology of the Hindi Film, p. 74) says that ‘darshan’ (see explanation on p. 14 n. 27 below) prevents the effect of voyeurism from occurring where it is used in Indian films.

19 Mulvey, in Thornham (ed.).

experimented consciously with most of the genres of Indian cinema – the social

(generally family-based melodrama and romance21), the historical or period film, the

thriller, and the Muslim social, as well as effectively creating a new ‘confessional’

genre of his own in Kaagaz Ke Phool. He also worked closely with traditions of Urdu

and Bengali writing, particularly its aspects of the ‘renouncing’ hero22 and tropes of

love and romance, including the work of the Marxist-aligned Progressive Writers’

Movement, which included figures such as lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi.23 Thus, Guru

Dutt’s films may have a western sheen in their technical aspects such as editing,

camera angles, lighting, close-ups and mise-en-scène and certain themes or scenes,

but remain deeply embedded in the historical development of Indian cinema, the

20 See E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), 1998, Women in Film Noir, and particularly Sylvia Harvey in Kaplan. The readings of women specific to post-World War II US/European situations do not apply with the same effect in India and the understanding of the ‘vamp’, while borrowed in Guru Dutt’s films, is reworked in much less sexually threatening Indian style but is set against different standards including nationalist meanings, for example.

21 Rosie Thomas defines the ‘social’ as: ‘the broadest and, since the 1940s, the largest category and loosely refers to any film in a contemporary setting not otherwise classified. It traditionally embraces a wide spectrum, from heavy melodrama to light-hearted comedy, from films with social purpose to love stories, from tales of family and domestic conflict to urban crime thrillers.’ (Rosie Thomas, 1987, p. 304, quoted in Prasad, 1998, p. 46). Prasad explains how the social became the dominant form and included fragments of other genres within itself, during the period of transition from studios to independent producers (late 1940s, early 1950s).

22 Exhibiting a fatalism and passivity typical of the Devdas tradition originating from the Bengali writing of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and picturised by P.C. Barua (1935), Bimal Roy (1955), and more recently Sanjay Leela Bhansali (2002). For this reason, Devdas is the film Suresh is making in Kaagaz Ke Phool. The Devdas tradition is a self-referential trope indicating great Indian cinema and tragic heroes. Dutt’s films followed on from the Devdas era but his male protagonists in Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool, and also for example in songs in Baaz and Mr & Mrs 55, exhibit many of the same qualities.

23 Ludhianvi wrote lyrics for Baazi, Jaal and Pyaasa.

structural composition of Indian so-called ‘masala’24 films including in their adoption

of a mix of genres subsumed within melodrama, their blend of song and dance

(adopting both western and Indian musical styles with often highly poetic Urdu

lyrics) with narrative plot,25 their innovative (and often comic) use of regional and

local dialect, and some of their the visual modes, for example the ‘tableau’26 and

‘darshan’,27 that characterised earlier mainstream Indian cinema.

Guru Dutt’s films are also situated firmly within the social, cultural and political

milieu of one of India’s most convulsive periods, the time immediately preceding and

following Independence and Partition. As such, the political, legal and social context

of decolonisation and of the constitutional process that determined the shape of the

new Indian nation loom large within his films, from social unease and fractured

families to the passage of the divorce laws in 195528 to planning and political

processes setting out new modes of citizenship and utopian ideals for the state’s role

24 Mixture (of genres, styles, song and narrative, separate elements, different influences etc), see for example Dwyer, 2000, p. 106; Pendakur, 2003, Indian Popular Cinema: Industry, Ideology and Consciousness, p. 169.

25 Guru Dutt was innovative in making songs integral to the plot.

26 See Vasudevan (ed.), 1998, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, p. 108, re: Andaz (Mehboob Khan, 1949). A tableau is a static, posed arrangement of figures on the screen in symbolic relation to one another, often seen frontally, as in religious symbolism or a mythological film.

27 Darshan is the practice of looking at devotional object or being, based on an exchange of looks between worshipped and worshipper, and the notion of seeing and being seen. Darshan is given by the person/deity being looked at, and taken by the looker. Prasad, calls it a ‘message from the symbolic’, while Dwyer explains it is ‘dissimilar to elite western disembodied, unidirectional and disinterested vision’. Darshan interrupts the cinematic gaze and notions of fetishisation; and as Gabriel (p. 102) argues, it ‘precludes the possibility of voyeurism’ because it is a two-way process. See also Prasad, p. 75-7; Dwyer and Pinney, 2000; and Dwyer, 2006, p. 19.

28 The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. See Patricia Uberoi, 1996, in P. Uberoi (ed.) Social Reform.

and relationship to families and individuals, among which was the fraught question

of the role of women, and the control of women’s bodies and femininity.29 Women’s

roles were contested nationally, as well as cinematically (as nationalism was

contested through women), with the almost ubiquitous trope of the mother – the

idealised, self-sacrificing, but also morally avenging woman-as-nation – taking centre

screen. However, while his films contest almost every other aspect of women’s

roles, the role of mother in Guru Dutt’s films is curiously absent (see chapter 3,

below).

Feminist film criticism

29 See for example Maitrayee Chaudhuri in Patricia Uberoi (ed.) 1996, Jyotika Virdi, 2003, The Cinematic Imagination, and Partha Chatterjee, 1993, The Nation and its Fragments. Chatterjee argues that Indian nationalism’s focus on women as the locus of differentiation from the colonial power, upholders of tradition and essential Indianness, and symbols of the nation, was in part because women were associated with ‘home’ as opposed to the ‘world’ – the male domain – where colonial rule had applied. It was also a material/spiritual dichotomy. ‘Nationalists asserted it [the colonial power] had failed to colonize the inner, essential, identity… which lay in its [India’s] distinctive, and superior, spiritual culture.’ When home/world was seen as divided into gender roles, Chatterji says, this gives the framework on which nationalism responded to the question of women, thus making women bearers of the spiritual and symbolic production of the nation. (Chatterjee, 1993, p. 121).

Jyotika Virdi (2003, p. 67) says: “The female figure as mother and nation also embodies sacrifice and forebearance. Fixing the figure of the woman in this context within the national unconscious occurred culturally along with the idea of reclaiming a reinvented “Indian” past.’ Why, she asks, have women been constructed so relentlessly in this idealised mode in the period following Independence, when in other respects Indian cinema was relatively progressive? Her response is that the figure of ‘woman’, usually as the mother, ’was once again deployed to shore up a sense of unity.’

Chaudhuri discusses the Sub–Committee on Women of the National Planning Committee (1938, headed by Nehru), which produced a Utopian document on Women’s Role in Planned Economy, setting out paths to equal citizenship through family, work, education, law and social customs, see Chapter 2 p. 34 and n. 72/3 below for further discussion of this.

Film studies were early on influenced by feminism, particularly with

psychoanalytically-based theories such as those of Laura Mulvey30 and Mary Ann

Doane.31 Mulvey’s study provides the foundation for much feminist film analysis. It

theorises the ‘gaze’ or look as a masculine one and bearer of power within the film

and between character, camera and spectator, creating a relation of voyeurism

(scopophilia) from which spectatorial pleasure is derived, but in the process dividing

male and female viewing pleasure into active (male) identification with the male

protagonist and passive or ‘masculinized’ female identification – either as the ‘object

of the look’ or having to identify with the male protagonist in fetishising the female

characters. Subsequent theorists have critiqued this and other psychoanalytic views

as insufficiently ‘resistant’,32 for failing to take into account women’s capacity for

critical or oppositional readings of film. Feminist theory went on to explore issues

such as ideology, subjectivity, agency, genre, the spectator, and the relations of

gender to all of them.33 However, as Gabriel says, ‘the non-western subject remained

outside the field of vision’.34

30 Mulvey, (originally 1981), in Thornham (ed.), 1999.

31 Doane, 1999, in Thornham, (ed.).

32 See Judith Mayne and Julia Lesage in Thornham (ed.), and Thornham’s own commentary, p. 111-2; See also Annette Kuhn in Thornham (ed.), p. 161.

33 See Gabriel, 2005.

34 My own approach to feminist analysis is based on literary theories, which share many of the same psychoanalytic, structuralist and socialist roots with film studies, including the works of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bhakhtin, along with theorists from Kate Millett to Mary Daly and Toril Moi among others, and on to sociological and cultural studies and postcolonialist writers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhaba. I have not cited these in the bibliography unless they have been directly quoted elsewhere in the text.

Feminist theories have been gradually problematised as they became applied out of

their original contexts in the increasing globalisation of knowledge. One of the most

important critiques to arise from this process with relevance to applying feminst

theory to Indian culture has been that of commentators such as Gayatri Spivak and

Chandra Mohanty. Mohanty, for example, seeks to unpack the western globalised

capitalist bias and assumptions of much of feminist theory, arguing that western-

written or western-published writing on women and feminism tends to lump ‘Third

World women’ together as an undifferentiated lot, thus often overlooking or eliding

problems of race, class, nationality, colonisation and decolonisation, sexuality,

‘identity’, and ways in which knowledge is produced and privileged, while assuming

that US or European culture is the norm upon which theoretical assumptions can be

predicated. She argues particularly that there is no single monolithic construction of

patriarchy and that western feminism is often constructed as imperialism by women

from South/Third World nations.

The notion of ‘woman’ as a ‘cultural and ideological composite Other constructed

through diverse representational discourses’ is produced differently within different

cultural contexts, Mohanty points out, as women are constructed by the social

relations into which they are inserted as subjects: ‘That women mother in a variety

of societies is not as significant as the value attached to mothering in these societies.

The distinction between the act of mothering and the status attached to it is a very

important one – one that needs to be stated and analyzed contextually.’ The concept

of women in 1950s’ India was further complicated by decolonisation which, Mohanty

says, involves: ‘profound transformations of self, community, and governance

structures. ‘35

Women in Indian Cinema

Although there are studies specifically about women in Indian cinema, there is only a

limited body of work on which to base feminist analysis rooted in Hindi cinematic

tradition.

Shoma A. Chatterji36 states that she set out to write her book precisely because she

realised that it was not possible to map western feminist cinema theories onto

Indian film, and that women’s roles in Hindi popular cinema deserved exploration

and understanding within their own context. Instead of psychoanalytic or

Marxist/socialist methodologies, she examines the place of women in Hindu myth as

one foundational source for the representations of women in cinema – both as ideal

and as deviant – and goes on to look at themes of marriage and divorce, rape,

adultery, suicide, prostitution and male masquerade, suggesting that the ways in

which women are figured in cinematic texts are inevitably almost always linked to

their sexuality and their family roles.

Jasbir Jain and Sudha Rai37 examine women’s representation from a range of

perspectives, though mainly in relation to films from the 1970s onwards, including

how female bodies are presented, courtship, Muslim women and marginalisation, 35 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 2003, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, p. 7. See Mohanty pp. 4-12 for an outline and p. 19 and ff. for notions of constructions of ‘woman’ and feminist imperialism.

36 Chatterji, 1998, Subject: Cinema, Object: Woman. A Study of the Portrayal of Women in Indian Cinema.

37 Jain and Rai (eds), 2002, Films and Feminism: Essays in Indian Cinema.

Bengali cinema, women and Hindu nationalism, gender and caste, comedy and

space, offering a range of different ways of reading specific aspects of women

characters in Hindi and other Indian cinema.

Karen Gabriel38 looks at the sexual economy of Indian film since the 1970s,

investigating the construction and articulation of gender in cinematic discourses and

the process of exchange between gender, sexuality, representation and nation

involving the transfer of meanings and values, and the shaping of desire and forms of

femininity and masculinity in mainstream Indian films.

Other texts look at gender and women more or less incidentally, as one part of a

broader set of interpretations, whether that is about a particular era or genre, in the

context of sexuality and romance, or cinematic figurings of nationalism, citizenship,

and the shaping of the national psyche, or investigating ways in which films create

cultural meaning. While a number of authors place the roles of women in cinema at

the heart of national cultural symbolism – much has been made, for example, of the

iconic role of Nargis as Radha in Mother India39 – few make an investigation of the

38 K. Gabriel, 2005, Imaging a Nation: The Sexual Economies of the Contemporary Mainstream Bombay Cinema (1970-2000).

39 See Gayatri Chatterji, 2002, Mother India; Vasudevan in Uberoi (ed.) 1996, p. 97; Chakravarty, 1993, p. 149-56; Dwyer, 2000; and Mishra, 2002, among others, on the iconicity of Nargis/Radha in Mother India. Vasudevan quotes a publicity release on Mother India: “The woman is an altar in India. She is loved and respected, worshipped and protected. Be she child, a wife, a mother, or a widow, she is so jealously protected that the entire culture of a nation revolves around her person.” Mishra calls her a ‘supermother’ and a ‘semantic and structural invariant’ in Hindi cinema. The role was consistent with and symbolic of the mythification of the essence of womanhood – defined as motherhood – in nationalist thought (see p. 14, n. 29 above). Indira Gandhi later also adopted an association with Mother India to call on values that would embue her with populist power, when she claimed: “India is Indira”.

representation of women’s roles as central to their thesis,40 perhaps because of the

cultural predominance of this single trope of motherhood, as well as the multiplicity

of necessary ways of analysing women’s roles: both India and women are too

diverse, yet are held together symbolically and culturally in a unity of value(s)

signified by motherhood. Similarly, texts specifically on the works of Guru Dutt have

not given the portrayal of women in his films a central place.41

Chatterji lists the generalised facts of women’s representation in Indian popular

cinema, and cites also the findings of a Delhi feminist group, the Committee on the

Portrayal of Women in the Media in the 1980s.42 This committee found that the

characteristics of women’s portrayal were focused on domesticity and

submissiveness, that the ‘good’ woman did not work or assert herself, but remained

directed toward marriage and the family.43

40 Karen Gabriel (2005) is one exception. Most have focused on nation and looked at women, the construction of ‘woman’, and women’s roles in film in relation to the nationalist context, while others have focused on the ongoing struggle between the modern and the traditional, both of which use women as signs for and measures of cultural or psychological shift.

41 See N.M. Kabir, 2005/1996 Guru Dutt: A Life In Cinema; R. Doriaswamy, 2008, Guru Dutt: Through Light and Shade; D. Cooper, 2005, In Black and White: Hollywood and the Melodrama of Guru Dutt. Cooper does refer to feminist film theory, particularly in relation to melodrama. He also gives quite extensive consideration to some of the women’s roles in what he calls the ‘trilogy’ of Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke Phool and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam.

42 Chatterji does not give an exact date or reference for this quote from the report or for the Committee itself. See Chatterji, p. 261-2.

43 The full quotation reads:

“ a woman’s place is in the home

- the most important and valuable asset of a woman is physical beauty

- a woman’s energies and intellect must be directed at finding the right man and keeping him

According to this committee, the media defined ‘deviant’ females as dominating

their husbands and staying away from home, having selfish personal ambitions,

breaking up family ties and being sexually promiscuous. Chatterji adds that from her

own study of cinema, mainstream films reaffirm and reinforce social definitions of

women, seeing them in gendered categories only in relation to men and the family,

and as subordinate to men.44

While it is not clear from Chatterji’s book how these conclusions were reached, or

how the Delhi Committee on the Portrayal of Women in Media established their

definitions, I am not here going to question their premises but to accept as a given

- Women are dependant, coy, submissive….masochistic….

- The good woman is the traditional housewife, long-suffering, pious and submissive. The modern woman who asserts herself and her independence is undesirable and can never bring happiness to anybody nor find happiness herself.

- The working woman is the undesirable exception who must be brought into the marriage fold and must be made to submit to the norms of society.”

44 Ibid. The full quote reads:

- “By and large, Indian mainstream cinema reaffirms and reinforces social definitions of women.

- This underlines the fact that women are constantly defined in relation to men, different from or complementary to them.

- Men, masculinity and male behaviour are always the reference points for women.

- Women are defined in familial terms as carers and nurturers.

- Women’s identity and status derive from their relation to the explicitly gendered categories of mothers, daughters and wives.

- Therefore, women are defined not only in relation to men, but also as dependent on men and subordinate to them.

Men on the other hand are never defined in relation to women…. but, in relation to a larger ‘public’ world in which they function as workers, colleagues, citizens.”

the analyses on which they are founded and use these criteria as a reference point to

establish where, and in what manner, Guru Dutt’s films conform and deviate from

these perceived Indian cinematic ‘norms’.45

This essay does not argue, therefore, for an understanding of Guru Dutt as a

‘feminist’ director, although his was a radical vision and several of his films featured

trenchant social criticism of the treatment of women. Instead, it hopes to lay the

ground for a more ‘resistant’46 reading against the grain of the women characters in

his films, a reading that shows where Guru Dutt consciously broke the mould in his

portrayal of women’s lives, but also where those characters go on to resist the

closure and re-absorption of their dilemmas and desires into the bourgeois narrative

structures imposed on them: where convention is upheld, but ‘narrative excess’

remains.

45 The notion, and deification, of the ideal woman is all-pervasive in Indian culture. Dwyer (2000) says the ideal is Sita-Savitri – the submissive and faithful wife, drawn from Hindu myth, and that conceptions of sexuality are different from those in western culture. Dwyer and Manjunath Pendakur (2003, Indian Popular Cinema: Industry, Ideology and Consciousness) both also quote the Laws of Manu, which define women as ‘not fit for independence’, and view their sexuality as dangerous unless it is controlled and positively channelled by marriage where women are subjected to mandatory sex with the aim of reproduction. Chatterji gives a range of different feminine ‘ideals’ from goddesses in myth including Sita, Draupadi and Radha (see chapter 1 in Chatterji (1998)). Dwyer also quotes the 18th Century Stridharmapaddhati (Guide to the religious status and duties of women), which exhorts: “Not only may a woman not worship any god other than her husband, but she is also forbidden to engage in any religious observance other than devotion to him.” (See Dwyer, 2000, pp. 23-7). Gopalan, in Vasudevan (ed.), 2000, says women are seen as ‘embodying and sustaining tradition,’ see p. 227.

46 See Julia Lesage in Thornham (ed.), p. 111-12 and p. 115-21. See also Annette Kuhn and Christine Gledhill, also in Thornham (ed.).