Document Type

Book Chapter

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Interdisciplinary, Studies on Film

Publication Details

1990s Women’s Cinema’, Film Studies (special issue on ‘Visualising the City’ ed. Marcus, A.), Winter (11): 1-13.

Abstract

This article examines the representation of Bombay in Aruna Raje’s Rihaee (1988) and Sai Paranjpye’s Disha (1990). It has been argued here that in both films, Bombay functions as a narrative anchor to the fictive village, which is depicted as the locus of Indian modernity. Symbolism of the village-city trope is used to reorganise the syntagm of modernity-location-gender in new relations of power and also to present alternative visions of national development within the socio-economic context of 1990s liberalisation in India. The dialectic between city and village in these films emphasises the role of memory and migration in women’s cinema, and also serves as a means to probing the relationship between gender and films in the postcolonial context.

Download


Share

COinS