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Bending bodies, borders and desires in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India and Deepa Mehta's Earth

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14746681003633267

1474-6697

Rani Neutill,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Abstract Deepa Mehta's Fire gained much attention, both in India and internationally, as the first film to document a queer relationship between two South Asian women. What has been underexplored in Mehta's feminist trilogy – Fire, Earth, and Water – is how each film is set upon representing one particular form of violence against women within South Asia. Fire deals with the suppression of female desire, Earth with the violence against women during the Partition and Water with the treatment of widows in Hinduism. Mehta is so firm in documenting these oppressions individually that she is ultimately unable to capture the complexities of what she seeks to represent. This is best illustrated when comparing her second film Earth to its original narrative form: Baspsi Sidhwa's semi-autobiographical account of her childhood in Lahore during the Partition, Cracking India. Given that Mehta's trilogy documents different forms of women's subjugation, it is no surprise that Sidhwa's novel and the Partition would be an ideal fit for her feminist explorations. However, Mehta does not fully represent women and men's bodies in their different forms of agency the way that Sidhwa's novel does. In this essay I explore how Mehta's film represents the multiple violences against women and men as they are figured in the novel, but ignores the queer identifications and desires that saturate Cracking India. While Mehta's Earth stresses the violent reality of women's bodies as national metonyms, Sidhwa's Cracking India is able to represent both the violent repercussions on women's bodies during the Partition and simultaneously the queer bonds and bodies that emerged during India and Pakistan's creation. Sidhwa's Cracking India asks us recognize formations other than the national, through creating a queer liminal space. I argue that Mehta's traditional feminist perspective of representing women's subjugation obscures her ability to represent Sidhwa's novel beyond the heterosexual matrix of nationalist violence. As a result Mehta misses the radical sites of queer and feminist resistance that Sidhwa's narrative offers. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International Studies and the Program in Ethnicity Race and Migration at Yale University for support instrumental in the creation of this project. I want to thank my fellow Postdoctoral Associates Lourdes Gutierrez Najera and Raymond Orr. I would particularly like to thank Jigna Desai, Avak Hastratian, Gita Rajan and Nguyen Tan Hoang for their invaluable intellectual and editorial advice while configuring the arguments of this essay. Notes 1. Mehta's first film in the trilogy, Fire, brought the question of non-heteronormative sexuality to the forefront of Indian politics. When the film was distributed in 1998, the Hindu Right vehemently attacked it. The assault brought out public demonstrations against homophobia and censorship to the cities of Mumbai and Delhi in numbers that were previously unseen in India. Menon, in her essay, ‘Outing Heteronormativity: Nation, Citizen, Feminist Disruptions,’ argues that, although there have always been private and public forms of what she terms ‘counter-heteronormative’ sexual practices and identities in South Asia, the 1990s were a defining moment in terms of the creation of a visible queer movement, and the reaction to Fire is indicative of this moment in Indian political movements (Menon 16). Paola Bacchetta has argued that to label the 1990s as a definitive moment for the emergence of a queer movement in India ignores the existence of queer identities that stretch back before the ‘U.S.’s existence as a settler colony itself' (Bacchetta 111), and the 2000 publication of Same Sex Love in India by historians CitationRuth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai documents queer love back to the Vedic texts. I agree that to claim the 1990s as any ‘origin’ of queer social movements in South Asian is deeply problematic. What interests me, however, is not a question about the beginnings of a social movement. Although Mehta's Fire provides the first transnational representation of a queer relationship and the ensuing backlash against her film spawned political mobilizations around queerness, she fails in Earth, to narrate the complexities of subjectivity and desires that Sidhwa's novel documents, and instead turns the history of the Partition of Punjab into a tale of politics, class, heterosexual romance and betrayal. 2. What is most striking about the Partition is the fact that over 100,000 women were raped and mutilated. As post-colonial feminists Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin describe the distinctiveness of the different atrocities: ‘Stripping; parading naked; mutilating and disfiguring; tattooing or branding the breasts and genitalia with triumphal slogans; amputating breasts; knifing open the womb; raping, of course; killing fetuses’ (43). 3. As CitationGita Rajan has argued in her essay, ‘Pliant & Compliant: Colonial Indian Art and Postcolonial Cinema,’ in Fire Mehta creates a lesbian coupling only as a default or choice by necessity option after the failed heterosexual relations for each woman with her husband (one is ascetic and the other is a lothario – without critiquing their deliberate withholding of sexual engagement). Consequently, homosexual desire or, rather, homosexuality itself in Fire follow a default trajectory that Deepa Mehta charts to stay within the safe limits of nostalgic, diasporic audience acceptance and conservative nationalist depictions of feminine subjectivity (Rajan 48–69). 4. South Asian feminist criticism and postcolonial criticism of nationalism explain how the female body has been constructed as the symbol of purity and distinctiveness in nationalist discourses. This critical illumination spans through the work of political and colonial historians, most notably Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, Partha Chatterjee, Lata Mani, literary critics such as Sangeeta Ray, and the invaluable work of feminists Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi de Alwis, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, sociologist and feminist Veena Das and the oral histories of women, children and dalits documented by Urvashi Butalia in her book The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Partha Chatterjee's groundbreaking work The Nations and its Fragment: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories details the category of woman as critical to Indian nationalist rhetoric. Chatterjee shows how the discovery of tradition was a nationalist strategy used to create an identity distinct from that of the colonial powers through distinct gendered and dichotomized categories of inside/spiritual/female and outside/material/male. While, as I have mentioned earlier, CitationGopinath points to the omission of the production of discourses of heterosexuality and homosexuality within nationalist rhetoric and state violence in the above body of work, Daiya ponders, ‘[w]hat happens to men's roles, male bodies, and conceptions of masculinity in the discursive articulation of nationalism in the postcolonial sphere?’ She further argues that we need to ‘complicate the question of “gender” and “woman” to offer a fuller account of the gendering of nationalism… [and] that it is imperative to examine the construction of both masculinity and femininity together in the articulation of cultural and national belonging in public and political discourse’ (Daiya 41). 5. Bombay, Hey Ram, Pinja, Gadar Ek Prem Katha to name a few. 6. The rumblings of the ‘cracking of India’ happen as early as page 22 where the question of governing a nation is compared to the governing of a household. Lenny's mother states: ‘And you all want Pakistan! How will you govern a country when you don't know what goes on in your own house!’ (Sidhwa 22). 7. Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhashin, Urvashi Butalia, Veena Das, Kavita Daiya. 8. The acronym MSM is not South Asia specific. In the US the neutral social science term used in HIV/AIDS education is MSM as well. 9. Sidhwa 95. 10. There has been much work on Gandhi's sexuality, most notably CitationSudhir Kakar's Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality in which Kakar provides a psychoanalytic reading of Ghandi's sexuality, arguing that his obsession with celibacy and self-discipline were a means to desexualize women and feminize himself. 11. As argued by Sangeeta Ray, Ambreen Hai, Kamran Rastegar, and Mehta's Earth to name just a few.