ABSTRACT
In this chapter I propose to critically evaluate cinematic representations of the gendered basis of colonial and postcolonial nation formation. I will critique colonial and postcolonial nationalisms that are founded on the idea of woman as a ‘metonymy of nation’. As an extension of this argument, I will also highlight what I consider are omissions within some of the feminist critiques of postcolonial narratives where the focus of analysis on women distracts from other non-bourgeois, subaltern, or compassionate masculine subjectivities framed by caste, sectarian, and class belongings. My analysis will also touch upon the persistence of the nation-state that has, for all intents and purposes, denied women and other subaltern groups their democratic right to equal citizenship. Further, if, following Elleke Boehmer’s (2005) contention, the bourgeois masculinist conceptions of gender have always been brought into play in the construction of postcolonial nations, then I will endeavor to look into feminist conceptions of gender that have been diff erently mobilized in the construction of the nation in fi ction. I will base my argument on Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani (2005) with the view to off ering a feminist critique of this lopsided gender weighting. I will explore the ways in which, by centering their (private and public) stories of love, sexualities, nurturing, and political participation, postcolonial feminist fi lmmakers fracture orthodox gender roles articulated in dominant nationalist and other conservative stories. The fi lm is unique in that its narrative, off ered from a collectivity of women’s perspectives (both diegetic and extra-diegetic) within a discourse of colonial/neo-colonial phallocentric heteronormativity, performs a simultaneous disruption and construction of feminine agency. Other fi lms belonging to this genre of ‘partition cinema’ represent women in essentialist and monolithic binaries (M. S. Sathyu’s 1973 Garam Hawa, Govind Nihalani’s 1987 Tamas, Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s 2003 Pinjar). Khamosh Pani, however, eschews such representations and complicates the tenacious hold of patriarchal power on women’s subject position that undermines it through sexual oppression, abduction, manipulation, and attempts at their recovery. It off ers powerful expressions of rebellion (through speech, gaze, silence, dismissal, and exile) by means of which women subvert institutionalized structures of control and literally or fi guratively refuse their bodies to be
used as a battlefi eld for sectarian and communal confl ict. The fi lm focuses on the socio-political dilemmas confronted by women whose membership of the nation as self-determining, equal citizens is undermined precisely because of ‘women’ being equated with ‘nation’. Set against the period of decolonization and neo-colonial hegemonic state oppression, its narrative weaves into its fabric the concepts of alienation, dislocation, exile, silence, and agency. It underscores the extent to which the reality of ethnicity, religion, politics, class, and sexuality informs the larger question of the gendered subjectivities of women, and men, belonging to colonial and postcolonial nation-state
BRIEF SYNOPSIS OF THE FILM
Sabiha Sumar is Pakistan’s foremost and internationally acclaimed independent fi lmmaker. As a primarily documentary fi lmmaker, her fi lms such as Who Will Cast the First Stone (1988, dealing with the horror of Hudood ordinances), Suicide Warriors (1996, on women in the Tamil Liberation Army), and For a Place Under the Heavens (2003, on the relationship between Islam and women in Pakistan) focus on the ways in which questions of politics, history, religion, globalization, and phallocentrism intersect with the reality of gender. Khamosh Pani is her fi rst feature fi lm: it examines the relationship between religion, nation, citizenship, and gender, and unravels at two time frames set a little over thirty years apart: 1947 and 1979.
