Sex, Songs and the Desi Feminist Noir1

Home , Abhishek Chaubey, Dedh Ishqiya, Ishqiya

NCJCF 12 (1+2) pp. 97–111 Intellect Limited 2014

Krupa Shandilya Amherst College

The long smouldering night: Sex, songs and the desi feminist noir1

Abstract Keywords This article argues that the films Ishqiya/Romance (Chaubey, 2010) and Dedh film noir Ishqiya/Romance 1.5 (Chaubey, 2014) by Abhishek Chaubey, represent a new genre feminism of films, namely the ‘desi feminist noir’, which is characterized by all the elements of Ishqiya film noir, such as the murky distinction between good and evil, the lawlessness of the Dedh Ishqiya streets and the femme fatale. However, in these films the figure of the femme fatale is Bollywood used to forward explicitly feminist trajectories of love, romance and sex. I give a brief queer desire history of romantic coupling in Hindi cinema, and analyse the films’ departure from these articulations of romance. Next, I focus on a song sequence from each of the films to explicate the desi feminist femme fatale’s subversion of the romantic conventions of the Hindi film song and her inauguration of a new aesthetic of romance. In conclusion, I consider the implications of this new genre for Bollywood cinema.

This article argues that the films Ishqiya/Romance (Chaubey, 2010) and Dedh 1. Many thanks to Crystal Parikh, Naomi Schiller, Ishqiya/Romance 1.5 (Chaubey, 2014) represent a new genre of films, namely Jini Kim Watson and the ‘desi feminist noir’. The ‘desi feminist noir’ is characterized by all the Joseph Keith for their elements of film noir, such as the murky distinction between good and evil, invaluable comments on an early draft of the lawlessness of the streets and the femme fatale. However, in these films this article. the figure of the femme fatale is used to forward explicitly feminist trajectories

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of love, romance and sex. I give a brief history of romantic coupling in Hindi cinema, and analyse the films’ departure from these articulations of romance. Next, I focus on a song sequence from each of the films to explicate the desi feminist femme fatale’s subversion of the romantic conventions of the Hindi film song and her inauguration of a new aesthetic of romance. In conclusion, I consider the implications of this new genre for Bollywood cinema. The film Ishqiya opens with a dark screen and the humming of a woman’s voice. As the frame lightens, we see a woman, Krishna, lying on her side and singing:

Ab mujhe koi intezaar kahan Woh jo behthe thhe … abshaar kahan/ I don’t wait any longer Those tears that flowed (from my eyes) Flow no more

As the camera comes closer we see she displays all the signs of married Hindu femininity: bangles on her wrists, a red sari, and most prominently, the vermilion in her hair. The song ends as a pendant of the Taj Mahal, the tomb emperor Shah Jahan built for his wife Mumtaz, dangles before her. Krishna holds the pendant in her hand and turns. The camera zooms out and we see a man, Vidhyadhar, lying beside her. She turns to him and says, ‘Jahapaana, makabaraan tou banwaa hee laye ho, ab dafna bhi do humein’/‘Your highness has prepared the tomb, now bury me in it’. The mise-en-scène of the rumpled bed sheets, the half-naked Vidhyadhar, and Krishna’s own heaving bosom implies that we are in the middle of a scene between two lovers. In this context, the song suggests that Krishna’s lover is here and hence the stream of her tears is finally stalled. The dialogue that follows is not a death wish, but rather a request for sexual pleasure and its culmination, an orgasm. This veiled request is both unexpected and subversive, for it foregrounds female sexuality, hitherto repressed in Bollywood cinema. The purposeful double meaning of the opening sentence of this film – both death and desire – sets the tone for the rest of the film and for its sequel, Dedh Ishqiya, both of which portray the unbridled sexual desires of their female protagonists and the dangerous games they play to fulfil these desires. Ishqiya is the story of two small-time crooks – Khalujaan and Babban, on the run from their boss, Mushtaq, who seek refuge with and are seduced by the newly widowed Krishna. Once she has secured their affections, Krishna manipulates them into a carefully orchestrated kidnapping, designed to exact revenge on her husband, Vidhyadhar, whom she believes is still alive. The plot is successful and Vidhyadhar is forced to return to Krishna who confronts him about his staged death and his attempt to kill her. When Vidhyadhar turns violent, Khalujaan and Babban return to rescue Krishna, who abandons her dying husband and walks away with the two men. Dedh Ishqiya is not so much a sequel as an extension of the themes of Ishqiya, namely lust, romance and guns in contemporary small-town India. Once again we meet Babban and Khalujaan on the run from Mushtaq, this time seeking shelter in Mahmudabad where Khalujaan poses as a Nawab/ prince as he attempts to woo Begum Para, the wealthy, beautiful widow of the late Nawab of Mahmudabad. While Khalujaan falls in love with Begum Para, Babban, posing as his servant, falls in love with Begum Para’s companion, Muniya. The two women manipulate the men into an elaborate kidnapping

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plot, to which the men readily acquiesce. In the course of events, the men 2. The word desi means South Asian, discover that the two women are lovers and have used them to escape the and here I use it confines of the palace. The film ends with the two men in jail and the two adjectivally to connote women living together with the money they extracted from the men. South Asian-ness. This article argues that Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya inaugurate a new genre 3. Film critic Anupama of films namely the ‘desi feminist noir’,2 to expand on the term ‘desi noir’ Chopra describes 3 Ishqiya as a ‘desi noir … that film critic Anupama Chopra uses to describe Ishqiya. In keeping with so feverish, it makes the conventions of noir, the noir films of Bollywood cinema such as Satya/ everything else look Truth (Varma, 1998), No Smoking (Kashyap, 2007) and Company (Varma, 2002) anemic in comparison’ (Chopra 2010, original among others are largely set in the urban metropolis, (Bombay, Dubai) and emphasis). Although as Ranjani Mazumdar argues, the films use ‘the crime narrative to invoke a she coins the term to describe this particular cynical worldview and an entirely different perceptual entry into the city. We film, this article argues see a complete absence of tradition and a gradual destruction or absence of that the term can be romance’ (2010: 152). Unlike these films, Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya, set in the used to describe a new cinematic oeuvre. small-town rather than the urban metropolis, invoke older Indian art forms in their cinematic and aural aesthetic. Most significantly, the crime narrative is 4. As Elizabeth Bronfen argues, the femme interwoven with an unconventional romantic plot driven by a feminist femme fatale of film noir is fatale. A particularly While the traditional femme fatale is a proto-feminist figure who rejects resilient the heteronormative conventions of patriarchal society only to be punished for contemporary her transgressions,4 the desi feminist fatale who drives this genre is rewarded example of tragic sensibility …. rather than punished for her infractions of the patriarchal order. This femme [S]he functions fatale is feminist because she rejects the institution of marriage in favour of both as the screen for fantasies of sex and erotic playfulness, and in doing so inaugurates a feminist narrative omnipotence and trajectory of romance characterized by unconventional romantic liaisons. She as the agent who, is desi because she rejects the linkage between sexual autonomy and western- by ultimately facing the ization, and seduces men through the affective registers of romance specific to consequences of Hindi film songs of the 1950s and 1960s to articulate an alternative paradigm her noir actions, of femininity and sexuality. comes to reveal the fragility not only of any sense of omnipotence Forbidden kisses: A brief history of the Bollywood that transgression of the law affords, film song but, indeed, of Romantic love and marriage have been the primary preoccupation of Hindi what it means to be human. films from their inception. The injunctions of the Indian censor board against (2004: 105 original depictions of sexual relations on-screen prompted film-makers to deploy emphasis) innovative techniques to depict romantic coupling in Hindi cinema from 5. See especially Madhava the 1950s to the 1980s.5 In visual terms, scenes from nature – a bee kissing a Prasad’s Ideology of the flower, two sunflowers nodding in the sunlight, a field of flowers bobbing in Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (1998). the wind – became the simulacra for the on-screen kiss. Songs whose lyrics elaborated and expanded on these tropes usually accompanied these visuals. For instance, in the film Silsila/Continuance (Chopra, 1981), the protagonist Amit sings to his lost beloved, Chandni:

yeh raat hai, ya tumhaari zulfein khuli hui hai/hai chandni ya tumhari nazrein se meri raatein dhuli hui hai/yeh chand hai ya tumhara kangan/ sitaarein hai ya tumhara aanchal/Is this the night or are your locks in disar- ray/Is this moonlight or are my nights awash with your gaze/Is this the moon or your bangle/Are these stars or your sari draped on your body

Penned by the famous Urdu poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar, it is little wonder that the tropes utilized in this song are drawn from a vast array of Urdu poetry,

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6. Javed Akhtar writes in which the moon, the night and the stars are evoked to convey different about renowned 6 lyricist, Sahir Ludhianvi, states of love. For instance, a similar set of tropes animate the renowned twentieth-century Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry: ‘jaane us zulf ki Sahir would synthesize nature mahoun ghaani chaaon main/timtimata hai ko awazey ab tak ke naheen’/‘I with the love of a wonder if in the thick dark shadow of her long hair/A moon still glimmers and man and a woman. shines’.7 The tropes of Urdu love poetry infuse the vocabulary of film lyrics, so It was a fusion between the two. much so that Urdu poetry’s affective registers become the primary means for Song after song expressing romantic love in the Hindi film. he would have With the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991, Indian consum- lines which first describe nature ers for the first time had unmediated access to the ‘West’ in terms of new and then go on to consumer products and satellite television. The films that emerged after this address romance … Because of nature’s have been termed ‘New Bollywood’ by Sangita Gopal because they inaugu- participation rate new circuits of desire and consumption. More specifically, foreign invest- the affair would ment in the Indian economy and film industry led to the proliferation of films become ethereal and larger than that made extensive use of foreign locales in the United States, the United life. Kingdom and Australia, and did spectacularly well in both the Indian and (2013: 88) diasporic box offices. This contact with the West was also evident in their As we see, Akhtar cinematography, music scores, and most importantly, their subject matter, adopts similar tropes in which could be sexually explicit. his own poetry. The kiss, so long repressed in the films before 1991, returned with a 7. The verses are vengeance and films depicted romantic love as including sex. The emergence from Faiz’s poem ‘Mauzon-e-Sukhan’/‘The of overt displays of sexual desire within the narrative of the film made the Subject of Poetry’. romantic duet redundant. As films increasingly aimed at realism, the song 8 8. Gopal writes: ‘New receded into the background and was often entirely absent from the film. Bollywood cinema In contrast, Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya make use of the film song to artic- no longer needs the song-and-dance ulate sexual desire. In Ishqiya, Krishna uses Hindi film songs from the pre- sequence to deliver liberalization era to seduce Khalujaan, an old-world romantic. The morning the sensations of after Khalujaan arrives, Krishna hums the first line of a song from the 1978 coupling, and the narrative allows the film Tumhare Liye/For You (Chatterjee, 1978) for him: couple access to sovereignty’ (Gopal and Tumhein dekhti hoon tou lagta hai aise ke yugon se tumhein jaanti Moorti 2008: 58). hoon/When I see you I feel as though I have known you for eons 9. Although the lyricist of the film is renowned Urdu poet and lyricist, Krishna intends for the song to draw Khalujaan closer to her and she Gulzar, the film-makers succeeds: he willingly complies with all her demands. Later on in the film, had a luminary of Urdu poetry, the renowned the song ‘Kucch Dil ne Kaha’/‘My Heart Whispered Something’ from the Urdu poet, Bashir Badr, 1966 film Anupama/Incomparable (Mukherjee, 1966) plays on the radio when pen the ghazals for the Krishna and Khalujaan are in the midst of a fight. The song acts as a salve film, thus emphasizing their authenticity. that temporarily heals the rift between them. Songs serve a similar function in Krishna’s second seduction. Appropriately enough, when Krishna is seducing the younger, sex-crazed Babban, the song that plays on the radio is from the 2006 film Apna Sapna Money Money/I Dream of Money, Money (Sivan, 2006). Lyrics such as ‘Dekha jo tujhe yaar dil main baji guitar’/‘When I saw you my love, a guitar strummed in my heart’ and the overtly sexual mise-en-scène of the original song accurately depict the raw sexual tension between her and Babban. Thus, as we see, the Hindi film song plays a crucial role in forwarding Krishna’s agenda. Similarly, Dedh Ishqiya revels in the world of Urdu love poetry, whose images and vocabulary saturate the Hindi film song of the pre-liberalization era. Khalujaan spouts Urdu ghazals (mono-rhymed lyric poetry) to woo Begum Para.9 In addition, the film makes ample reference to the Urdu literary world, from the renowned Urdu poet and singer Begum Akhtar’s songs – which

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also form part of the soundtrack – to a subtle reference to Urdu writer Ismat 10. ‘[O]ne could speak of her [the femme fatale] Chugtai’s short story ‘Lihaaf’ (1941). Rather than being redundant, the Hindi as a figure of male film song and its antecedent, Urdu poetry, perform a crucial role in forwarding fantasy, articulating the plots of both films. both a fascination for the sexually aggressive woman, as well as anxieties about Erotic play and the thumri: The feminist femme fatale feminine domination’ (Bronfen 2004: 106). There has been much debate about whether the femme fatale of Hollywood cinema can be described as a proto feminist character. Feminist film scholar, Janet Staiger, describes the femme fatale of the Hollywood film as the inver- sion of the fallen woman, ‘where traditional fallen women are excessively weak, their inversions, the femmes fatales, are excessively strong. Fallen, yes, but rather than being victims, they become victimizers … the affect they invoke is closer to fear than pity’ (1995: 35). The noir usually ends with the femme fatale’s death and the hero’s reunion with his true beloved. In this, the noir, despite its strong female character, simply reinforces patriarchal conceptions of women’s sexuality as deviant, fearful and destructive.10 The femme fatale of Hollywood cinema is a sensuous seductress who uses sex and violence (guns, knives) to achieve her goals. In the context of Bollywood cinema, the femme fatale becomes a prominent character in the rape and revenge films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as Khoon Bhari Maang/The Bleeding Wife (Roshan, 1988), Damini/Lightning (Santoshi, 1993) and Dushman/The Enemy (Chandra, 1998). With the collapse of the social and legal order, the raped woman takes up arms to avenge herself, but is curtailed or punished when she exceeds patriarchal norms of women’s roles in society. As Lalitha Gopalan argues, the raped woman’s ‘unfettered power is undercut by finally reeling in the authority of the state and revealing the avenging woman’s own overwhelming investment in the restoration of the social imaginary’ (2002: 49). Conversely, Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya inaugurate a feminist femme fatale who wields guns with the same ease that she has sex, but is rewarded rather than punished for her subversion of patriarchy. To begin with, the protagonists of both films are widows and therefore outside the norms of conjugality. Yet they are not ‘fallen women’, as both women have social approval. This allows the men to assume that the women are helpless and need male protection. Unlike the quintessential femme fatale, they do not evoke fear but pity. This assumption allows the women in turn to perform the affective and erotic registers of the thumri (a semi-classical musical genre set to poetry) to great effect. The thumri was largely performed by courtesans, who both wrote the poetic compositions and set them to music. While the thumri derives from Hindustani classical music traditions, its association with courtesans prevented its classification as classical music. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the thumri was considered a low form of music. Ironically, the thumri regained respectability after the advent of Hindi film music, which replaced it at the bottom of the hierarchy. In the films, the thumri acts as a masquerade for the women, who conceal their manipulation behind its emotive registers, while the men believe that the thumri is an expression of their feminine grace and delicacy, rather than seeing it for what it is – an instrument of manipulation. Krishna and Begum Para both use the thumri to beguile Khalujaan and entrap him in their own designs. In Krishna’s case, the thumri disguises her love–hate relationship

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to her husband, while in Begum Para’s case it disguises her sexual desire for Muniya. In the film Ishqiya, Krishna sings a thumri the night of Babban and Khalujaan’s arrival. It is late at night; Khalujaan and Babban are asleep. Krishna returns to her room, shuts the door behind her and closes her eyes. A quick montage of erotic play with her husband flashes past as the opening notes of the song are heard. We assume that the song is related to Krishna’s memory. The scene cuts to a sunrise and the camera pans to several snapshots of the morning – boys bathing, a flock of birds flying from a tree – and finally settles on the sleeping figures of Khalujaan and Babban. As the musical notes become more intense, Khalujaan awakens and the camera follows him as he walks towards the sound of Krishna’s voice. He discovers Krishna dressed in a white sari, strumming a sitar and singing behind closed doors. Through a crack in the door, Khalujaan watches Krishna as she sings the following thumri:

Badi dheerey jail raina Dhua dhua naina (2) Raaton se haule haule, kholi hai kinari Akhiyon ne taga taga, Bhor utaari Khari akhiyon se, Dhuan jaaye na Badi deheere jali … raina Dhuan dhuan naina … /The night smolders slowly My eyes are clouded with smoke The fringe of the night unravels slowly My eyes wander restlessly, the morning arrives Smoke refuse to leave my forlorn eyes

Poetically speaking, the song is a prolonged metaphor for shab-e-hijr/the night of meeting, which ironically is also the night of waiting, and is a common trope in Urdu love poetry. Here the lover tells her beloved that the night burns slowly, as she waits for her lover. The smoke from the burning night stings her eyes and makes her cry. The night becomes a metaphor for the lover’s own pining heart and her body, which burns with longing and brings tears to her eyes. These tropes are common to the genre of thumri poetry (and I shall return to this point later when discussing a similar thumri in Dedh Ishqiya). At another level, the song makes subtle reference to the night that Krishna’s husband staged his own death by igniting a gas cylinder that set the house on fire, endangering Krishna’s life. In the context of the revenge drama that unfolds later in the film, the song signifies Krishna’s love–hate relationship with her husband. The lyrics of the song imply that Krishna is bereft without a beloved who will wipe away the tears that sting her eyes. The combination of the song and the setting has its effect on Khalujaan, an old-world romantic with a penchant for Hindi film songs of the 1960s and 1970s. Like the valiant suitor of the Hindi film of that era, Khalujaan imagines himself rescuing Krishna from her loneliness and providing her with much needed companionship and love. We watch Khalujaan watching Krishna through a crack in the door. The scopophilic gaze, both his and ours, transforms Krishna from subject into object of desire. In the rape and revenge narrative of the 1980s and 1990s, the rape is depicted through a similar voyeuristic aesthetic. As Gopalan argues,

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the rape scene is produced through the cinematic technique of coitus inter- 11. Jack Boozer argues ‘that the prevailing ruptus, which not only ‘sexualizes the female body through fragmentation, male gaze upon the but also chooses to fragment and sexualize those parts of the female body that seductress provides are intimately linked to reproductive functions’ (2002: 39). the most obvious confirmation of In Ishqiya however, the camera focuses not on Krishna’s reproductive the woman’s visual anatomy but rather on her eyes. A close-up of Krishna’s eyes is followed by a objectification. close-up of Khalujaan’s eyes. The fragmentation of the body in this instance On the other hand, that male gaze is is distributed equally between the male viewer and the female object. Further, also problematized the quick succession of these shots implies that Krishna is aware of being and punished in the noir narrative’ watched by Khalujaan; it is not only that he watches her, but also that she (1999/2000: 22, watches him watching her. Her knowledge of his gaze disrupts the scopophilia original emphasis). for she is produced now as knowing subject rather than as hapless object.11 When she returns the gaze, we understand that she is aware of Khalujaan’s presence and his gaze, and has explicitly staged herself as object of desire. We see that her performance is in fact a masquerade. As regards the performativity of gender, feminist film scholar Mary Doane argues that ‘Womanliness is a mask which can be worn and removed. The masquerade’s resistance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as closeness, as presence-to-itself, as, precisely imagistic’ (1991: 138). In this instance, Krishna’s hyperbolic femininity, signified by the white sari, her long open hair, her melodious voice, is a performative excess that invokes femininity as ‘presence-to-itself’. Gopalan, reading masquerade through Joan Riviere and Doane, argues that anxieties invoked by the appearance of the woman as a ‘powerful phal- lic figure’ (Gopalan 2002: 56) are allayed through the mask of femininity. In the context of Ishqiya, Krishna’s masquerade of femininity is not used to mask her violence, her possession of the phallus so to speak, but rather to mask her powerful sexuality. In this, her masquerade differs from that of the conventional femme fatale who uses sex to manipulate the noir hero ‘even as her own interest is only superficially erotic’ (Bronfen 2004: 106). Krishna’s interest in sex is evident when she seduces the sex-crazed Babban. Babban watches Krishna chop wood with a sickle and asks her why she cooks on wood when there is a gas cylinder in every room of the house. Krishna ignores him and continues chopping wood. Babban draws close to her and tells her, ‘Please forgive me for suspecting you of stealing our money. I don’t know the language of poetry and song, but I am sincerely sorry’. He puts his hand on Krishna’s hand in an attempt to get her attention. Krishna flicks the sickle and inflicts a cut on Babban’s thumb and says, ‘Which language should I explain things to you?’. She then takes Babban’s bleeding thumb in her mouth and sensually sucks on it, a barely disguised simulation of fellatio. In this sexually charged scene of seduction we see several significant aspects of our femme fatale, Krishna, which clearly differentiate her from the conventional femme fatale. Babban’s question about the gas cylinders is significant given the later events of the plot when Krishna uses them to blow up the house and her unfaithful husband. The question posed at this moment of the narrative foreshadows Krishna’s ruthless manipulation of the men, but unlike the conventional femme fatale she is not punished for her actions. Further, in ignoring this question she draws Babban closer to her, thereby enabling their close physical and sexual contact. Unlike the conventional femme fatale who is never shown enjoying sex and whose sexuality is depicted as abnormal and deviant, we see Krishna initiating and enjoying this sexual encounter. Krishna’s interest and pleasure in sex becomes increasingly

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evident as she and Babban become sexual partners. This positive depiction of the femme fatale’s sexual desires allows for the unfolding of a feminist narrative trajectory of romance. Dedh Ishqiya’s femme fatales are similarly depicted as enjoying seduction and sex. While Begum Para deploys music and masquerade to seduce Khalujaan, Muniya uses a potent cocktail of violence and sex to seduce Babban. Begum Para awakens to the strains of a gramophone playing Begum Akhtar’s famous thumri ‘Woh jo hum main tum main qaraar tha, tumhein yaad ho ke na yaad ho’/‘You may or may not remember the intimacy that was between us, my beloved’. She follows the music and catches Khalujaan playing music on her gramophone. She confronts him about his invasion of her privacy, upon which he reminds her that he had seen her dancing 25 years ago and begs her to reawaken her inner dancer, the song in the background reinforcing their previous connection. Begum Para refuses, pushes Khalujaan out of the room, locks the door and looks around the room. Her gaze falls on the necklace Khalujaan had offered her a few days ago and she seizes the opportunity to seduce him. The scene cuts to a flashback. We see a younger Begum Para whirling around in circles. The camera cuts to the present, and we see Khalujaan watching Begum Para draped on a chair, through the smoky glass panes of a door. Begum Para awakens from a reverie. We imagine that perhaps she too recalls her past intimacy with Khalujaan. As the music begins, she dances to a thumri:

Jagaave sari raina (3) Nigode do naina Nigode naina churaaye chaina (2) Kaanon mein juhi ke jhumke lagai ke (2) Baahon mein motiyaan pehne sajai ke Motiyaan sajai ke Sajnaa kaa ke liye Sajnaa kaa ke liye re sajnaa Jagaave saari raina/They keep me awake all night Your naughty gaze Your naughty gaze takes away my peace of mind I adorn my ears with jasmine earrings I deck my arms with jasmine For my beloved Whose eyes keep me awake all night

On the surface, the song merely elaborates on the lover’s adornment for her beloved, whose gaze she aims to please. At a deeper level, the lyrics imply the lover’s sexual desires. It is not only the beloved’s eyes that keep her awake through the night, but also the love-making with the beloved, hence the reference to the naughty eyes of the beloved. Since there is no possessive article here, we do not know whether the naughty gaze belongs to the lover or the beloved. (I have translated the gaze as belonging to the beloved, but one could just as easily translate it as belonging to the lover.) This deliberate obfuscation produces another meaning entirely: the song could be read as the lover, spending sleepless nights waiting for her beloved to appear. The thumri is accompanied by Begum Para’s kathak performance, a dance form widely practiced by courtesans in conjunction with the thumri, to

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entertain and beguile men.12 This combination connotes decadence and moral 12. Veena Oldenburg 13 writes in Lifestyle as depravity, yet the space of performance is not the brothel, but Begum Para’s Resistance: home instead. This produces her as respectable subject rather than seductive While implying courtesan. A close-up of the emotive expression of Begum Para’s eyes illus- that the coming trate the lyrics of the song, which explicitly discuss the male gaze as it covets of the British had the lover’s body. A rapid cut follows, as we see Khalujaan watching Begum left these women as a beleaguered Para through the smoky windowpanes of the door – thus the abstraction of community, Sharar the male gaze is made concrete. was strongly of the This is followed by a close-up of Begum Para looking at her extended arm opinion that the morals, manners, in a dance pose and Khalujaan watching her from the window. Unlike the and distinctiveness cuts, which move from one character to the other, in this shot, both characters of Lucknow culture and society were are in the same frame. This framing implies that Begum Para is aware of being sustained by watched, and her performance, like Krishna’s, is performative and designed to the courtesans. pique Khalujaan’s desire for her. Ensconced as they were in lavish The song ends with Muniya questioning Begum Para, who gestures with apartments in the her eyes that they have an audience. Muniya glances around, sees Khalujaan city’s main Chowk and Babban watching them, and quickly joins hands with Begum Para as they Bazaar, and in the Kaisar Bagh palace, whirl around in circles. This performance, reminiscent of childhood games they were not between girls, hyperbolizes not only their femininity, but also their innocence only recognized as preservers and to the two men watching, who consequently fall in love with them. At another performers of the level, this performance is riddled with irony, as it suggests that Begum Para high culture of and Muniya’s desire for each other masquerades as girlish innocence. We are the court, but they actively shaped the reminded of this scene later in the film when the two women play hop scotch developments in with each other, once again imitating a childhood game with its connotations Hindustani music of innocence, but this time they fall into each other’s arms and commence and Kathak dance styles. Their style of love-making. entertainment was As we see, in both films, Krishna and Begum Para manipulate the poetic widely imitated in other Indian court and affective registers of thumri to perform femininity as masquerade, in cities, and their keeping with the role of femme fatale. Music scholar Vidya Rao argues that enduring influence thumri is the feminine voice in Hindustani classical music not only ‘because on the Hindi film is all too of its evident identification with women singers, nor with the fact that the patent. poetic text articulates female desire (albeit constructed in the male gaze) but (Oldenburg 1990, 263) because of its interrogative/subversive quality’ (1990: 31). In this instance, we Kathak was see that subversion in both songs is generated by the lyrics, which on the resuscitated as surface suggest that songs are about a pining lover waiting for her beloved’s a respectable dance form in the embrace, but at a deeper level, articulate the singer’s sexual desires, a subver- mid-twentieth century, sion of patriarchal norms that deny women’s sexuality. largely through male practitioners of the In addition, the editing of the two songs underscores women’s subversion dance such as Birju of the male gaze. In an interview, film director Abhishek Chaubey states that Maharaj, who lent the film Dedh Ishqiya explicitly aims to overturn the male gaze: ‘Generally, we it an air of respectability. It tend to show how men look at women. I reversed that in Dedh Ishqiya and was used widely showed how women … look at men!’ (Sahgal 2014). This reversal of the male in Bollywood films gaze is wrought through the very techniques that mark the women’s trans- as a signifier of Muslim culture. formation into objects. The women overturn the scopophilic male gaze by becoming the male object of desire, in keeping with the genre of the thumri. 13. As Sarah Waheed argues in an article on However, by returning the gaze, they also simultaneously draw attention to Dedh Ishqiya: the performativity of their performance, the performance as masquerade. As As professional, feminist film theorist Janet Staiger argues, the ‘masquerade confounds this public women, the masculine structure of the look, in which man should be a voyeur with the status of the early female singers of woman unaware of the participation’ (1995: 32). Here, the women’s aware- Bombay cinema ness of their ‘looked-at-ness’, to quote Laura Mulvey, enables them to deflect was nebulous: on the male gaze (1975). Rather than becoming the object of desire, they become the one hand, they

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were glamorised instead the subjects of desire, as they manipulate the men to forward their for their talent, but on the other, own agenda. they were viewed A similar overturning of gender norms takes place in Muniya’s seduction with moral of Babban. Muniya catches Babban prowling in the library in the middle of the disdain. Singing, as a profession night. Babban attempts a weak apology and draws closer to Muniya. When for women, had Muniya remains unconvinced, he wields a knife at her throat and threatens become tainted to cut her open. Muniya draws her face closer to Babban and defies him to in increasingly conservative cut her. She then locks lips with Babban and passionately kisses him. Babban middle-class social responds with fervour and the camera cuts to dawn the next day. circles, given its association with As Gopalan argues, Indian censorship regulations prevent the depiction of courtesan culture. sex on-screen and hence the camera deploys the cinematic technique of coitus (2014) interruptus ‘most visible when the camera withdraws just before we see a 14. ‘If romantic love sexually explicit scene’ (2002: 37). In this instance, the cut to the dawn the next and the arranged morning is a classic instance of coitus interruptus; when the camera zooms in marriage had been the two opposing on the couple we see a reversal of gender roles. Babban lies on Muniya’s lap norms of conjugality while she smokes a cigarette, a thinly veiled metaphor for her control over the in Indian cinema, phallus, which emerges in the subsequent conversation where she manipu- serial monogamy emerges here as a lates Babban to do her bidding. third option’ (Gopal As we see, in both films the femme fatales control men through sex, but and Moorti 2008: 78). they are not punished for their transgression of patriarchal norms of feminin- 15. As Bronfen argues, ity; rather, the femme fatale’s positive relationship to her sexuality allows the [The femme fatale] unfolding of a feminist trajectory of romance. gains power over the noir hero by nourishing his sexual Conjugality and the desi feminist noir: Rethinking genre fantasies, her own The post-liberalization or New Bollywood film portrays a gamut of non- interest is only superficially erotic. normative relationship formations such as live-in relationships, serial monog- She entertains amy and same-sex desire, as well as more explicit sex scenes, as it is freed from a narcissistic the constraints of the Indian social.14 Gopal argues that the ‘new properties of pleasure at the deployment of her the couple-form allow New Bollywood to be conjugated with a set of exter- own ability to dupe nalities that constitutes emergent Indian modernity’ (Gopal and Moorti 2008: the men who fall for her, even as she 2008: 19), and for the ‘reinvention of the family as a liberatory (and liberal) is merciless space’ (Gopal and Moorti 2008: 2008: 79). However, despite their focus on in manipulating hitherto taboo subjects, the films of the New Bollywood ultimately affirm and them for her own ends. reinforce patriarchal norms of marriage and kinship as is evident in films such (2004: 106, original as Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge/The Brave Hearted shall Take the Bride (Chopra, emphasis) 1994) and the more recent Dostana/Friendship (Mansukhani, 2008). Similarly, 16. However, this both Hollywood and Bollywood films featuring femme fatales reinforce unfettered power conventional notions of marriage and kinship. In the Hollywood noir film, is undercut by finally reeling in the femme fatale might seek marriage as a means of redeeming herself, but the authority of the she is often denied this because of her excessive sexuality.15 In the Indian rape state and revealing the avenging and revenge film, on the other hand, women are reintegrated in the social woman’s own through marriage, thus undercutting the radical possibilities of the revenge overwhelming narrative.16 investment in the restoration of the The Bombay noir (a term coined by Lalitha Gopalan) sidesteps the figure social imaginary. of the femme fatale almost entirely. In Ram Gopal Verma’s Satya (1998), Casting women as for instance, the protagonist Satya’s love interest is a simple, middle-class embodying and sustaining tradition woman whose sexual purity serves as a contrast to the moral degradation of recycles an old the underworld. Similarly, in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s gangster film Parinda/ stereotype from Indian films; however, The Bird (1989), women play a subservient role in the noir narrative, provid- the forced closure ing a convenient escape from the dangers of the mob through marriage. in this genre only Unlike these films, which do away with the figure of the femme fatale, in

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Vishal Bhardwaj’s Saat Khoon Maaf/Seven Murders Forgiven (2007), the femme provisionally irons out the anxieties fatale Susanna is the protagonist of the noir narrative. However, while she between patriarchy commits seven murders to find love, the film ends with her marrying Jesus and the state. Christ and becoming a nun. Thus the film contains the threat of female sexu- (Gopalan, 2002, 49) ality by denying it entirely. The desi feminist noir straddles all three genres. Like the New Bollywood film, the desi feminist noir experiments with new formations of romantic coupledom that are the cornerstone of post-liberalization cinema. Like the rape and revenge films, the plot centres on a strong female protagonist, and like the Bombay noir it is invested in exploring the dark underbelly of desire. Yet it differs from these films in its substantial rethinking of the tradition/ modernity dichotomy that undergirds heterosexual couple formation in all three genres. If the New Bollywood film purports to represent a newly emerg- ing Indian modernity through its portrayal of taboo subjects, the rape and revenge film and the Bombay noir regulate their taboo subjects by re-inscrib- ing women within traditional patriarchal formations. The tension created by the taboo subject of female sexuality in the desi feminist noir is however not so easily resolved. As Lalitha Gopalan argues, the rape and revenge films of the 1980s ‘cannot completely regulate the series of unstable desires and identities set in motion through the continuing dynam- ics between rape and revenge’ (2002: 49). The desi feminist noir unleashes the radical potential of the rape and revenge narrative by portraying feminist femme fatales whose sexuality is celebrated rather than condemned, and their desires give rise to couple formations that destabilize the norms of heteronormative romantic coupledom. In both Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya, the promise of marriage becomes the means by which the women manipulate the men – in Ishqiya, both Khalujaan and Babban dream of marrying Krishna. Similarly, in Dedh Ishqiya, Khalujaan believes that he will marry Begum Para, after winning the poetry contest initi- ated to find the best suitor, while Babban believes that Muniya will marry him after a torrid night of love-making. The women, however, overtly reject marriage in favour of non-normative relationships – a threesome in Ishqiya and a lesbian relationship in the case of Dedh Ishqiya. Despite the radical choices made by the femme fatales of these films, the films eschew an unequivocal equation between the expression of female sexual desires and a western modernity. Rather, the films insist on narrating their femme fatale’s sexuality as coextensive with her sociocultural milieu, that is small-town India. Unlike the urban Bombay noir, Ishqiya and Dedh are set in Gorakhpur and Mahmudabad, provincial towns in Uttar Pradesh, rather than the cosmopolitan city. Further, they make self-conscious use of the small- town milieu – its dialects, its caste-ridden gang wars, its seedy brothels, its small-time gangsters turned politicians – to forward their plots. As discussed above, in accordance with the cultural milieu of small town India, the desi feminist femme fatale uses the thumri, rather than a more overt display of her sexuality, as an instrument of her manipulation. In keeping with this, the film portrays its protagonist’s sexual desires through a scopic (in)visibility, such that the task of the critic is to read the cinematic frame as a narrative of desire and pleasure in its own right. Ishqiya concludes with a rather unusual sequence of events. Krishna has just escaped the house where her murderous husband lies wounded. An elderly widow who leads Khalujaan and Babban to Krishna at the beginning of the film, precipitating the events that follow, reappears at this climactic moment.

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17. See Gayatri She walks up to Krishna and hands her a burning torch. Krishna hesitates for a Gopinath’s ‘Local sites/global contexts: moment and then lights the house on fire even as her husband struggles for life The transnational inside. In classic femme fatale fashion, Krishna does away with the men in her trajectories of fire way. However, rather than punishing Krishna for her transgression, the film and the quilt’ in her book Impossible ends with Krishna walking away with Khalujaan and Babban on either side of Desires (2005) for her. The film’s implied threesome however did not elicit any comment from its more on this. audience or reviewers. I suggest that this is largely because of the film’s politics 18. In her essay ‘Homo on of (in)visibility, which structures its portrayal of sexual relationships. the range’, Jigna Desai A similar politics of (in)visibility animates Dedh Ishqiya. As film critics have quotes the reactions of Indian politicians noted, the lesbian relationship in Dedh Ishqiya draws on prominent Urdu who dismissed Fire as novelist Ismat Chugtai’s short story ‘Lihaaf’/‘The Quilt’ (1941), which also an import of the west: 17 The deputy minister, serves as an intertext for Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996). While Ismat Chugtai Naqvi, concurred: was tried for obscenity, the Hindu Right labelled the lesbian relationship in ‘Lesbianism is a Fire as an import of the ‘West’ and shut down cinema halls where the film pseudo-feminist trend 18 and is not part of was being screened. Conversely, American film critics critiqued Fire as too Indian womanhood … tame in its portrayal of same-sex relationships and suggested that India was Some people create stuck in the past and had yet to emerge into a sexually liberated modernity. a controversy for marketing films As Shohini Ghosh argues, ‘Unable to see the opposition to Fire as part of a in foreign countries, continuing cultural war, critics and commentators in North America rushed to while foreigners give more prominence present the conflict as one between tradition and modernity’ (2010: 112). and prizes to such Unlike these other artistic portrayals of same-sex desire, the lesbian rela- kind of distorted tionship in Dedh Ishqiya has not fomented any controversy, even as the film versions of Indian culture’ (2002: 71). comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate Section 377, re-criminalizing homosexuality.19 I suggest that this is largely because the 19. On 10 December 2013, the Supreme Court portrayal of same-sex desire within the film rests on a politics of (in)visibility. reversed the Delhi High As Gayatri Gopinath argues in the context of ‘Lihaaf’, ‘Female homoerotic Court’s judgement pleasure within Chughtai’s text quite simply exceeds the enclosed space decriminalizing gay sex. For more details, see beneath the quilt, just as it does the structures of visibility and visuality that ‘Supreme Court makes the text references’ (2005: 151). gay sex punishable offence, activists Similarly, Dedh Ishqiya rejects the politics of ‘visibility and visuality’, rely- dejected’ (Anon. 2013). ing instead on subtle gestures and shadow play to make homoerotic desire legible. We learn of Begum Para and Muniya’s desire for each other through larger than life shadows on a wall. The scopic register of this scene is in keeping with the expressionist lighting of the noir film, ‘which reduces the blind- ing effect of the fill light so as to produce shadows and enhance the range of black to white’. Gopalan suggests that ‘to glimpse noir in Bombay cinema is to search for this style’ (2013: 498). The expressionist lighting of this scene pays homage to Bombay noir while at the same time asserting its radical difference from this genre. If in the Bombay noir expressionist lighting is used metonymically to reflect the dark machinations of the underworld, here the play of shadows suggest lesbian love-making that is metaphorically buried in the shadows of the Indian social imaginary. The politics of (in)visibility is further emphasized when Khalujaan tells Babban ‘Lihaaf manga le’/‘Bring me the quilt’, subtly gesturing to the sex scene in Chugtai’s short story. However, for viewers unfamiliar with Chugtai, the shadow play and the love-making scene are all but invisible, especially since the film normalizes same-sex desire by enfolding it within the larger narrative of women outwit- ting men. As film critic Deepanjana Pal notes:

Usually, if there’s a potentially controversial or provocative element in a Bollywood film, we’re inundated with sound bytes that depict the actors

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and filmmakers as people who have boldly gone where no one has gone 20. A film blogger condemns film before. But there was none of that hoopla for Dedh Ishqiya. The film reviewers for missing treats a love affair between two women the way it treats the camarade- the homoerotic subplot rie between two men: normally and delightedly. of Dedh Ishqiya and goes on to enlighten (2014) the reader: this is a strange Overall, the film’s politics of (in)visibility have made the homoerotic desire of scenario. I read its protagonists illegible to its viewers, so much so that film reviews have taken review after review on the role of educating viewers about the film’s homoerotic sub-plot.20 after review, every damn possible The politics of (in)visibility are in keeping with the films’ subversion of review of Dedh the tradition/modernity dichotomy, which undergirds the discussion of Ishqiya. Just to figure out one female sexuality in Hindi cinema. As discussed above, the cinema of the thing – to see New Bollywood dwells on topics such as adultery, homosexuality and divorce if anyone has because it is filmed in the urban metropolis – New York, Sydney, London – written about the homage scene in and is removed from the Indian social. Further, it focuses on the romantic and the film, and the sexual tribulations of the English-speaking Indian elite who are always already inspiration behind westernized. In other words, it suggests that women can express themselves the film’s spoiler, or scratched it beyond as sexual beings only when they are removed from the Indian social and are the surface. And situated in the more sexually liberated West.21 On the other hand, the Bombay I was extremely disappointed to noir and the rape and revenge films reinforce women’s traditional roles by see that not a reintegrating them within heterosexual patriarchal formations. single reviewer has In contrast to both new Bollywood and Bombay noir, the ‘desi feminist mentioned it. (Anon. 2014) noir’ articulates female sexual desire through a politics of (in)visibility, such that the seductions of its protagonists and the unconventional endings of the 21. Gopal suggests that the frank depiction of films are illegible to those who recognize women’s desire only when they are sexual relations and structured by the ‘dominant configurations [of] pleasure, identity, and visi- more liberal ideas of bility’ (Gopinath 2005: 152). In doing so, the desi feminist noir destabilizes family, marriage and conjugality indicate the correlation between westernization and sexual expression that the films a newly emergent of the New Bollywood insist on. The scopic register of the film and the femme Indian modernity. She writes: ‘the new fatale’s use of the thumri to seduce her lover, suggests that we see women’s properties of the sexuality as not contingent on modernity, but rather as continuous with their couple-form allow social and cultural milieu. The desi feminist noir thus inaugurates a new genre New Bollywood to be conjugated with a of films in which demure yet dangerous feminist femme fatales subvert heter- set of externalities osexual patriarchal conventions of love, sex and romance. that constitutes emergent Indian modernity’ (Gopal and Moorti 2008: 18). References Anon. (2013), ‘Supreme Court makes gay sex punishable offence, activists dejected’, DNA, 11 December, http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report- supreme-court-makes-gay-sex-punishable-offence-activists-dejected- 1933110. Accessed 27 February 2014. —— (2014), ‘Dedh Ishqiya – what they didn’t see and what you must read’, F.I.G.H.T C.L.U.B., http://moifightclub.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/dedh- ishqiya-what-they-didnt-see-in-the-film-what-you-must-read/. Bhardwaj, Vishal (2011), Saat Khoon Maaf, Mumbai: VB Pictures. Boozer, Jack (1999/2000), ‘The lethal Femme Fatale in the noir tradition’, Journal of Film and Video, 51: 3/4, pp. 20–35. Bronfen, Elizabeth (2004), ‘Femme fatale: Negotiations of tragic desire’, New Literary History, 35: 1, pp. 103–16. Chatterjee, Basu (1978), Tumhare Liye. Chaubey, Abhishek (2010), Ishqiya, Mumbai : Shemaroo Entertainment and Vishal Bhardwaj Pictures.

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Chaubey, Abhishek (2010), Dedh Ishqiya, Mumbai: Shemaroo Entertainment and VB Pictures. Chopra, Anupama (2010), ‘Ishqiya’, 29 January, http://movies.ndtv.com/ movie-reviews/Ishqiya-473. Accessed 14 February 2014. Chopra, Vidhu Vinod (1989), Parinda, Mumbai: Vinod Chopra Films. Chopra, Yash (1981), Silsila, Delhi: Yash Raj Studios. Desai, Jigna (2002), ‘Homo on the range: Mobile and global sexualities’, Social Text, 20: 4, pp. 65–89. Doane, Mary Ann (1991), Femmes Fatales, New York: Routledge. Ghosh, Shohini (2010), Fire, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Gopal, Sangita, and Moorti, Sujata (eds) (2008), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gopalan, Lalitha (2002), Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema, London: British Film Institute. —— (2013), ‘Bombay noir’, in A. Spicer and H. Hanson (eds), A Companion to Film Noir, 1st ed., Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp. 496–511. Gopinath, Gayatri (2005), Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Durham: Duke University Press. Kashyap, Anurag, (2007), No Smoking, Andheri West: Vishal Bhardwaj Pictures. Manwani, Akshay (2013), The People’s Poet, Delhi: Harper Collins. Mazumdar, Ranjani (2010), ‘The dystopic fragments of Bombay cinema’, in. Prakash, Gyan (ed), Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, Princeton, Princeton University Press, pp. 150–84. Mehta, Deepa (1997), Fire, Toronto: Hamilton Mehta Productions. Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Screen 16.3, pp. 6–18. Oldenburg, Venna Talwar (1990), ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow, India’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 16, No.2, Speaking for Others/Speaking for Self: Women of Color, Feminist Studies Inc., pp. 259–287. Pal, Deepanjana (2014), ‘Why masala film Dedh Ishqiya is one of the year’s most important releases’, 14 January, http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/ why-masala-film-dedh-Ishqiya-is-one-of-the-years-most-important- releases-1336909.html. Accessed 26 February 2014. Prasad, M. Madhava (1998), Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rao, Vidya (1990), ‘“Thumri” as feminine voice’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 April, pp. WS31–39. Sahgal, Geety (2014), ‘Dedh Ishqiya director on why film didn’t do great business’, The Indian Express, 14 February, http://indianexpress.com/article/ entertainment/play/dedh-Ishqiya-director-on-why-the-film-didnt-do- great-business/99. Accessed 26 February 2014. Sivan, Sangeeth (2006), Apna Sapna Money Money, Mumbai: Mukta Arts. Staiger, Janet (1995), Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Varma, Ram Gopal (2002), Company, Mumbai: Varma Corporation. Varma, Ram Gopal (1988), Satya, Mumbai: Varma Corporation. Waheed, Sarah (2014), ‘An archive of Urdu feminist fiction and Bombay’s gaanewalis’, Economic and Political Weekly, March 8, http://www.epw.in/ commentary/archive-urdu-feminist-fiction-and-bombays-gaanewalis. html. Accessed 3 February 2014.

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Suggested citation Shandilya, K. (2014), ‘The long smouldering night: Sex, songs and the desi feminist noir’, New Cinemas 12: 1+2, pp. 97–111, doi: 10.1386/ncin.12.1-2.97_1

Contributor details Krupa Shandilya completed her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University in 2009. She is currently Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College. Her research interests include postcolonial literature and theory, transnational feminism, and South Asian cinema. E-mail: [email protected]

Krupa Shandilya has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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