The provincial Flâneuse: Reimagining provincial space and narratives of womanhood in Bollywood

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay uses the interpretive lens of the flâneuse to read Rumi, the protagonist of Anurag Kashyap’s 2018 film Manmarziyaan, as an emergent figure who exemplifies provincial confidence and aspirations through specific notions of autonomy in the public space. At the core of this and similar portrayals, I argue, is a changing relationship between gender formations and provincial space, accessed not only in movement or ambulation but in a narrative of space and modernity not written by hegemonic or dominant forces. I read Rumi as a provincial flâneuse because she rewrites the provincial space that marginalizes her, and she does this not with income and ambition, or with brute power and violence, but with pleasure, movement, and affect. Her remaking of space is influenced by capital and the rhetoric of prostitution (the two contexts in which the flâneuse was historically imagined) but it is determined by neither. Rumi’s flânerie is, then, her struggle to weave a modern self from the disparate strands of provinciality, urbanity, and the uneven imbrications of the two. Her incomplete cooptation by both the provincial and the urban ensures ongoing dialogue between the two spaces, evident in the film’s use of hip hop, and tropes like the failure to elope to the city, and the terrace.