Re-cast(e)ing the New Woman

Abstract

This essay reinserts caste as a predominant theoretical and practical consideration in scholarship about contemporary Indian cinema’s representations of women through focusing on the narratological, political, and emotive function that women serve in two recent Indian films that deal explicitly with caste: Sairat (Wild in Love, dir. Nagraj Manjule, 2016) and Kaala (Dark-skinned One, dir. Pa. Ranjith, 2018). We examine how the conspicuous caste-ing of women reconfigures or expands the category of the new woman, the predominant model of empowered womanhood that Indian (especially Hindi) cinema has resorted to since liberalisation. We investigate how the new woman is reconstituted or destabilised within patriarchal relations that are cross-hatched by caste. Locating their female protagonists in a caste-ist world, both Kaala and Sairat firmly contest the caste-neutral constructions of empowered femininity in mainstream Indian cinema and emphasise instead the intersectional workings of gender, caste, religion, and patriarchy in the articulation of the new woman. By bringing caste to the foreground, even as they barely mention it explicitly, these films make explicit its omnipresent reality and brutality in the everyday functioning of our gendered existence.