New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. vi, 213 pp. US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9781978814448.
Since the 2010s, in examinations of popular culture in India there has been an increasing preoccupation with gender discourse. The most identifiable major source of this change is the Nirbhaya rape case of 2012, which brought the so-called woman question to the forefront of mainstream conversations. Further, the Me Too movement that gained traction on social media in 2018 is another indicator of the growing presence of gender discourse in the public sphere. Bollywood too has become aware of the debates surrounding the representation of women in its films, as evidenced by a recent study titled O Womaniya! conducted by Ormax, a media consulting firm, and Film Companion, a website dedicated to film reviews and related interviews, with support from the streaming platform Amazon Prime. It is in this context that Megha Anwer and Anupama Arora’s Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies enters the fray. The book reignites familiar debates linked to the representation of women in mainstream Hindi cinema in order to explore a new iteration of womanhood that emerges in the shadow of the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991 and the cultural upheaval and remolding that followed.
Anwer and Arora argue that the “new woman” who finds representation in a quickly corporatizing Bollywood, post-liberalization, can also be linked to Victorian, colonial, and global lineages, in that she too grapples with questions of familial responsibility, social expectations of domesticity, and financial independence like her international counterparts. Despite the kinship with Western models, this new woman is also uniquely Indian in that she must balance her impulse to modernize and develop a cosmopolitan identity with her role as the embodiment of the nation. In the figure of the post-liberalization new woman in Bollywood, the previously existing binary between the heroine and the vamp collapses as she carries within her the tussle between tradition and modernity. Actresses Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit become the key sites of articulation of this womanhood in the characters they played in the 1990s. Anwer and Arora are keen to point out that the new woman is not an archetype but exists across a gradient where tradition and modernity are differently balanced. This gradient accommodates top-level actresses performing risqué item numbers as well as the mainstreaming of Sunny Leone, a former adult film performer.
Collating 14 essays across four sections, Anwer and Arora present an examination of the new woman through different lenses and debates—ranging from the corporatization of Bollywood and the glorification of entrepreneurship to cultures of self-fashioning linked to the beauty industry— and from her entanglement with the evolving structures of patriarchy to being refracted through new media cultures and as new media texts. A common thread that underscores the essays is the link of this new woman and her attendant characteristics to the rise of the neoliberal individual in the Indian cultural landscape—figuring particularly in the exploration of aspiration and empowerment in English Vinglish and Queen in the essays by Banerjee and Desai and Anjali Ram, the individualized feminist rebellion in Lipstick Under My Burkha as unpacked by Gohar Siddiqui, and the queer sexuality of the protagonist in Margarita with a Straw that is facilitated by her privileged positioning as a global citizen in Debadatta Chakraborty’s essay.
On the whole, the volume is coherent and the argument that runs through it is cohesive. The introduction dwells a tad too long on the contributions of big budget films from major production houses such as YRF and Dharma which, even as they have had a significant role in shaping Bollywood as it exists today, have also been matched by what the editors themselves call as hatke films. A greater focus, both in the introduction as well as in the choice of essays, on these off-the-beaten-track films would have further enriched the volume. In addition, in unpacking the star-texts of the likes of Sridevi, Madhuri Dixit, and Katrina Kaif, greater attention could have been paid to the emergence of new actresses and the figure of the small town female protagonist in Hindi cinema (in addition to the excellent essay on Bhumi Pednekar by Ajay Gehlawat) who in the past decade has become an assertive presence due to the growing popularity of the small town Hindi film. The negotiations of the new woman with the forces of globalization while contending with local social pressures and patriarchal forces would add to the balancing of the traditional and the modern to which the new woman is inescapably tied. Despite this, the editors manage to successfully weave together the myriad concerns that intertwine with the figure of the new woman over an unenviable timespan of three decades to produce a cogent text that adds depth to the existing scholarship on Bollywood and brings into the conversation new and hitherto unexplored filmic texts.
Sonal Jha
Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, Bhilai