Alia Bhatt, the Bollywood actress and “It Girl” known for her ingénue face and dashing style is known for portraying the current struggles of middle class South Asian women. She does not shy away from potentially controversial social issues such as inter-caste dating in 2 States (2014) and seeking treatment for one’s mental illness in Dear Zindagi (2016). She has recently taken upon more historical roles in two well-known films, Raazi (2018) and Kalank (2019); the former became the highest grossing Bollywood film to feature a female protagonist. Both films highlighted the importance of an Indian woman’s contribution towards a collective sense of Indian nationhood. The plots of the films demarcated the gender as well as social boundaries between “Indians” and “others.” While her characters do not explicitly refer to present Indian politics, the structure of the female lead’s love interest in these two Bollywood films successfully addressed anxieties surrounding the nation-state from the 1930s to 1970s.
The two films’ plot revolved around different junctures in South Asian history, one from 1930s to the 1950s, the other covering the period from the mid-1960s to 1971, yet allude to the same anxieties surrounding the “foreign Muslim” of the present. I will discuss the two films chronologically and then move on to comparing both films. Both films have female-centric narratives, which invites audiences to participate in complicated performances of heterosexuality. While moments of the film expose the inner workings of heterosexuality, the endings inevitably affirm the heterosexual female as well as her life choices. In both instances, Alia Bhatt’s characters explorations of her gender roles coincide with the image of the liberal Indian nation-state.
In Kalank (2019), Alia Bhatt plays the newly-wed wife as both a favor for her father’s family friend as well as her family interests in a pre-Partition city. The first wife of a family heir asked Alia Bhatt’s character to be the new wife, due to the first wife’s terminal disease. The film titled which means “blemish,” focused on Alia Bhatt’s character’s purity despite being denied conjugal love (both in as well as outside the bedroom) by her husband, who focused on his first wife.
Alia Bhatt’s character narrates this story decades later for a historian who wants to recover Partition stories, which has become a recent genre within historical research. The function of print is integral to reconstructing her romantic and “innocent” self, since she also explores the city’s public space as an educated daughter-in-law working for her family’s newspaper. Her gendered innocence is crucial to vindicate “India” from responsibility for partition as well as the newspaper’s uncommitted stance to the politics of their content. An all-male and religiously diverse boardroom discussed heatedly the ads, including those that advertised alcohol, which at times aroused religious sentiments. Alia Bhatt’s character argued from the boardroom’s doorstep that female products could potentially save the day, adding her voice to the newspaper’s future, without showing any explicit “communal” agenda.
In contrast, the film showed that the angry Muslim laborers are first and foremost key to locating “communal” attitudes, a popular trope in history and reports on Partition from post-Partition India. The Muslim illegitimate son, who has little interest in organized politics, attempts to establish a liaison with her to revenge the father who did not give him his due respect. The mother, courtesan, provides a queer space for Alia Bhatt’s character to experience pleasure beyond the domestic realm and train her singing voice. There is a moment of homosocial intimacy between her two love interests at a similarly queer space: the river bank. Under the moonlight, they open up to the perceived stranger about family and love matters, both of immense consequence. Beyond the “serious” boardroom, another kind of inter-religious bonhomie can be established over affections suppressed during the day.
In the climatic ending, while attempting to board the train to “India” under the heat of the moment, her illicit love interest unfortunately died under the hands of the “communal” Muslims. Alia Bhatt’s character’s innocence in regards to the political aspect of the affair continued over the recorded oral testimonies which will live beyond her own lifetime. While she focused on her personal romantic sentiments, the liberal destination of the India free of “communal Muslims” as a political state is ensured, especially given that her loyalty to her Hindu husband is also preserved. Both endings were crucial to her success as a wife in post-Partition India: she could not be redeemed as an innocent citizen of the new Republic if she either succumbed to the consummation of extramarital love or to communal enmity. The pity of partition was resolved by her ability to articulate through the new state’s language and account for her fallen love’s death, metaphorically and literally. She focused mainly on interpreting her own acts of wifehood-transgressions rather than the broader political anxieties of the 1940s town (qasbah). Yet notably, the patriarch of her family, her husband, is absent during her recounts with the journalist, ensuring a sense of “objectivity” from the female subject. Yet even though the setting is intimate and understanding, Alia Bhatt’s character is aware of the public judgment in the ending’s conclusion, an off-screen voice asked that the people (audience included) can judge whether her story involved a blemish (kalank) or not. But clearly, the question and stake of her purity became connected to the idea of India’s liberalism of the 21st century through the film’s narrative arc.
In the film Raazi, Alia Bhatt’s character is more complex, given her multiple loyalties to the Indian state, to Kashmir’s future, and to her own religious piety. She succeeds her father’s role as a spy for India’s mission, which is poorly defined, but still sustained through spy-centric plot twists. Like her character in Kalank, Alia Bhatt’s character in Raazi similarly outlined the weight of respectability for any daughter-in-law in any middle class South Asian household. The gendered innocence helped her evade most suspicions of espionage, yet it could be argued that this requirement for authenticity and piety on screen is a uniquely post-9/11 phenomena for Indian Muslims. The muhajir servant of the Pakistani military family is the only one suspicious of her “innocence,” since she often usurped his responsibilities while demonstrating loyalty and usefulness within the domestic sphere. It is significant that she ends his life when he discovered her spy identity outside the domestic sphere.
Soon after Alia Bhatt’s character’s exceptional and murderous act, she frantically searched for her own cover; the thrill of the audience overlaps with the gendered anxiety that the wife of a respectable should not ventures outside her domestic realm. Interestingly, nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi once argued that ‘Western Civilization’ and capital displace women from their homes into the productive sphere. Alia Bhatt’s character in Raazi similarly has been displaced through her commitment to India’s intelligence gathering. Yet this revolting act by Alia Bhatt’s character of murdering of fellow Muslim could be read as nationalist and thus exorable to prevent imminent war between India and Pakistan. It is interesting to think about how the American TV series Homeland, which also starred a female lead might have influenced the plotline and character development of Raazi.
Alia Bhatt’s character’s acceptance (which is also the meaning of the title, Raazi) as a daughter-in-law is connected to Pakistan elite’s efforts to project their image of themselves as upper-caste sharif persons with respectable families. The Pakistani’s state project consists of promoting their pious self-image at times, which often occurred at the expense of religious minorities and non-sharif citizens. Yet the cinematic subversion of such a publicity project occurred when Alia Bhatt’s character used her Islamic duties, such as prayer, as her cover during her espionage-related activities. She often prayed and completed household tasks during her outings for communicating with her Indian intelligence superiors at the bazaar. Such acts also remind the audience of the potentially unfaithful wife of Kalank who used female-specific tasks as a “cover” to seek out her lover towards the middle of the film. Both films seem to leave the question to their audience: does Alia Bhatt’s loyalty as a wife matter more or does the commitment to the national cause trump “domestic” obligations? Such questions posed by the films are very poignant given the contemporary context: in India, certain Hindutva groups have initiated movements such as ghar wapsi in which women married to non-Hindus are encouraged to “return home” to the fold of Hinduism. The agency demonstrated by Alia Bhatt’s character Sehmat in Raazi contrasts to the thousands of repressed voices of sexual violence survivors against crimes that occurred during the War of 1971, incidentally where the film ends. The editing and promotional process of the film in its Youtube trailer that highlighted the agony of Alia Bhatt lying on the bed, seemed to acknowledge the tensions of sexuality and consent South Asian women face from the beginnings of nationhood to this day.
