posted on 2016-10-28, 13:03authored byRohit Dasgupta, Tanmayee Banerjee
This article analyzes Rituparno Ghosh's celebrated film Bariwali (The Lady of the House, 2000). The film marks the beginnings of Ghosh's treatment of gender and sexual politics. Ghosh's earlier films Unishe April (1994) and Dahan (1997) engaged with strong female characters, but Bariwali is the first of his films to narrate the various ways in which female agency is routed through male exploitation and patriarchy. Through close readings of the characters and the visual tropes perspicaciously crafted by Ghosh, this article positions hegemonic masculinity and heteropatriarchal privilege as the exploiter within India's gendered politics. By placing the protagonist Banalata both within the feudal space as well as within the bhadralok discourse, one can trace the transition from tradition to modernity that the story represents, and in turn trace Ghosh's unique understanding of and reaction against India's prevailing social and cultural norms.
History
School
Loughborough University London
Published in
Film Quarterly
Volume
69
Issue
4
Pages
35 - 46
Citation
DASGUPTA, R.K. and BANERJEE, T., 2016. Exploitation, victimhood, and gendered performance in Rituparno Ghosh's Bariwali. Film Quarterly, 69 (4), pp. 35-46.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/