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

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.