ABSTRACT
The theme of urban angst has been for some time the favourite theme of Indian cinema. Movies such as “Dombvli Fast” (2005, Nishikant Kamat) have charted a territory, where the politics of urban angst suspends normative ethics. The movie “Totta, Patakha, Item, Maal” (2020, Aditya Kripalani) creates a new terrain for itself on this basis. The titular “parrot, cracker, sex-object and commodity” are four women who share a tense solidarity in the increasingly claustrophobic margins of Delhi. When a male named Mahendra Chauhan, the very image of ebullient masculinity, insistently seeks to penetrate their realm, the four women abduct the molester and take pedagogic roles as vigilante goddesses. The OTT platforms such as Netflix have liberated the feminine phallic assertion in a context where the dehumanization of the subaltern seeks to reach its culmination. The digital energies are mobilized in the service of building a counter-narrative that tackily addresses violence, by subverting the very martial tone and character of male vigilante flicks. The disruptive element ingrained in the movie vis-à-vis gender, lies in the feminization of the phallic male and his being made to do household chores; this in turn recreates and rearticulates ideological preoccupations of patriarchy from within the normative system of an OTT platform like Netflix.
