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 differently mobilized in the construction of the nation in fiction. I will base my argument on Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani (2005) with the view to offering 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 filmmakers fracture orthodox gender roles articulated in dominant nationalist and other conservative stories. The film is unique in that its narrative, offered 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 films 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 offers powerful expressions of rebellion (through speech, gaze, silence, dismissal, and exile) by means of which women subvert institutionalized structures of control and literally or figuratively refuse their bodies to be used as a battlefield for sectarian and communal conflict. The film 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
