Rape Culture, Misogyny, and Urban Anxiety in NH10 and Pink

Feminist Media Studies ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20 Rape culture, misogyny, and urban anxiety in NH10 and Pink Tupur Chatterjee To cite this article: Tupur Chatterjee (2017): Rape culture, misogyny, and urban anxiety in NH10 and Pink, Feminist Media Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2017.1369446 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1369446 Published online: 04 Sep 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 30 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfms20 Download by: [University of Washington Libraries] Date: 29 September 2017, At: 01:21 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1369446 Rape culture, misogyny, and urban anxiety in NH10 and Pink Tupur Chatterjee Radio-Television-Film, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY One of the most pervasive aspects of Delhi’s post-liberalization Received 20 March 2017 psychopathology has been everyday violence against women. The Revised 13 August 2017 city’s rape culture was given an exceptionally sharp global focus after Accepted 13 August 2017 the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012. Recent KEYWORDS Hindi cinema has begun to engage with some aspects of the capital’s Delhi; rape culture; misogynist urban ethos. In this paper, I look at how the Delhi subgenre multiplex film; multiplex of the “multiplex film” has engaged with rape culture, misogyny, and viewer; anxiety; Bollywood; urban anxiety through a close textual and discursive analysis of two misogyny; Pink; NH10 recent films—NH10 (Navdeep Singh, 2015) and Pink (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, 2016). Specifically, I identify how the December 16 “trigger event” and Delhi’s notorious misogyny are finding newer modes of representation through the interplay of genre and exhibition space. In what ways do these films position and imagine the “multiplex viewer”? New engagements with the figure of the consuming middle-class woman and the public discourses that surround her sexual safety and navigation of space have taken a central position in understanding the present urban psychosis of the capital. I suggest that these films and the forms of spectatorial identification that they privilege are intricately linked to the gendered spatial politics of the multiplex. Introduction A significant trend visible in recent Hindi cinema is the rise of the Delhi film—which can be seen as a subgenre of what has been popularly defined as the “multiplex film” since the mid-2000s. The term “multiplex film” at the first instance, emerges out of an understanding that when an upper middle-class Indian audience (economically sound, English-speaking, globalized) watches a film in a luxuriously designed expensive space (such as a mall or a multiplex), they are also more receptive to a more challenging and hatke (different) type of Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 film that is not the melodramatic and unrealistic commercial fare that they have been offered for so many decades. Several of these new “multiplex films” have much smaller budgets than the usual Bollywood film, as well as shorter durations and songless and stylized narratives. These films often privilege deeper explorations of the individual and social psyche of characters in ways that present significant diversions from the generic and popular conventions of Hindi cinema. CONTACT Tupur Chatterjee [email protected] © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group T. CHATTERJEE 2 Among the 80 or so “multiplex films” in the last decade (2006–2016), around 30 can be classified as Delhi films. Examples of these include Khosla Ka Ghosla (Mr. Khosla’s House, Dibakar Banerjee, 2006), Delhi-6 (Rakesh Omprakash Mehra, 2009), Oye, Lucky, Lucky Oye! (Hey Lucky!, Dibakar Banerjee, 2009), Dev D (Anurag Kashyap, 2009), Love Sex aur Dhoka (Love, Sex and Betrayal, Dibakar Banerjee, 2010), Band Bajaa Baraat (Bands, Horns and Revelry, Maneesh Sharma, 2010), Do Dooni Char (Two Times Four, Habib Faisal, 2010), Delhi Belly (Abhinay Deo, 2011), No One Killed Jessica (Raj Kumar Gupta, 2011), Vicky Donor (Shoojit Sircar, 2012), B.A Pass (Ajay Bahl, 2012), Fukrey (Wastrels, 2013), NH10 (Navdeep Singh, 2015), Titli (Butterfly, Kanu Behl, 2015), Pink (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, 2016), etc. This is entirely new—Delhi’s distinct urban identity had barely existed in popular Hindi cinema before the mid-2000s “multiplex moment,” barring one or two films (such as Chashme Badoor [Sai Paranjape, 1981]). Traditionally, Bombay has dominated representations of the city and its psyches in popular Hindi cinema (see Ranjani Mazumdar 2007). The recent Delhi films are contemporary narratives of the post-globalized landscape of Delhi, sharply commenting on new aspirations for homes, commodities, money, and romance. Often, these desires clash against restless worlds of urban congestion, fear, rumor, violence, panic, and crime. This paper looks at how the Delhi subgenre of the multiplex film has engaged with gender, anxiety, and rape culture through a close textual and discursive analysis of two recent films— NH10 (2015) and Pink (2016). Both these films are about everyday violence against middle-class, urban women in the capital, and have been critical and commercial successes. However, any reading of the cinematic address of these films must be contextualized within both the spatial environment of their exhibition and the contemporary discourses surround- ing the consuming middle-class woman. Ravi Sundaram (2007, 31) has argued that Delhi’s psychosis, which is marked by two major events of large-scale, visceral communal violence (Partition, 1947 and the Congress-organized Sikh massacres following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, 1984), presents a unique case of a post-colonial media-satu- rated city where “fear has become implicated in the larger social theater of urbanity.” I extend this argument and delineate an additional layer of the city’s present pathology: rape culture, and the aftershocks of the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012. Initially, the Delhi subgenre of the “multiplex film” did not tackle this fundamental underlying anxiety of urban life in the city. Most of the narratives sought to revise older representations of women on screen, sketching new female characters—economically independent, ambitious, sexually active, etc. Examples of these include films such as Band Bajaa Baraat (Maneesh Sharma, 2012), which draws upon the linguistic flavor of the city to tell the story of an ambitious middle-class girl who wants to become the city’s best wedding planner. Post-2012, however, the Delhi “multiplex film” has started to veer into the anxious realms of everyday Downloaded by [University of Washington Libraries] at 01:21 29 September 2017 gendered violence. This moment has arrived after an initial celebration of the globalized “New Indian Woman” as an empowered, modern-yet-traditional consuming subject. Leela Fernandes has called gender the “central ideological site for the production of a new script which can manage the contradictions of liberalization and mark the boundaries of the future of the globalizing nation” (2001, 157). As several scholars (Leela Fernandes 2001; Purnima Mankekar 2015; Patricia Uberoi 1998) have pointed out, the dominant post-liberalization middle-class anxiety centered on the loss of “Indian cultural values.” Specifically, these concerns were regarding the loosening of sexual and moral codes of behavior that middle-class Indian women were expected to follow. The constant reiteration of “contradiction” and “modern-yet-traditional” FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 3 as the two defining characteristics of the “New Indian Woman” (see also Radhika Parmeswaran 2004 and Rupal Oza 2001) reflects the need to make a sexualized and desiring subject-position a nonthreatening one in the contemporary narratives of heightened consumption-in- duced utopia. While the big-budget Bollywood films from the mid 1990s (also targeting the diaspora) tried to mitigate these anxieties through the trope of the Hindu woman who remains steadfastly moral/sexually chaste in the face of unsettling changes (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge [The Braveheart will take the Bride], Aditya Chopra, 1995), the “multiplex film,” meant for a niche audience at home, began to slowly muddle these conservative representations. These changes in the nature of the popular Hindi film are a part of the beginning of a larger change in the industry with regard to both the representation of women on screen and the place occupied by the female star. In the recent past, several female actors have spoken up against sexism in the industry and the significant gap in wages, and have refused roles in male-dominated narratives where they would have been merely interchangeable props. Several of them now continue to work post-marriage. A-list actresses have begun to produce their films and many directors and production houses have made films with only female leads and no major male actor (unthinkable for the pre-multiplex era in India). These films have succeeded at the box office. Female actors have also begun to take on roles that deviate significantly from earlier multiple variations on the stereotypical sexually chaste “good Indian girl/wife” (see Sumita Chakravarty 2011 and Jyotika Virdi 2003). In The Dirty Picture (2011), for instance, Vidya Balan plays an overweight sex siren from 80s B-grade South Indian films, Silk Smitha. This choice met with enormous positive press for her courage to accept such a role and for displaying a body type that defied norms of conventional beauty. In Margarita with a Straw (Shonali Bose, 2015) Kalki Koechlin is a bisexual young girl with cerebral palsy, coming to terms with her sexuality and revealing it to her mother. A second crucial facet of the multiplex film is the return of the city to the cinematic screen.

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