FIRE: A SUBALTERN EXISTENCE?

SUBALTERNITY AND REPRESENTATION

Gayatri Spivak forced us to evaluate our subjectivity by asking the question "Can the subaltern speak?" In this essay she argues that the subaltern Hindu woman does not have the agency to speak for (her) self and is always 'spoken for' by different groups. Spivak critiques the discourse on sati (widow-burning) in the early nineteenth-century India vis-à-vis the colonial discourse of "saving" Hindu women from Hindu men. She contends that neither the colonial discourse nor the Hindu patriarchal arguments against sati represented the "true voice" of the Hindu woman. Hence, Spivak asserts that "between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the "thirdworld woman" caught between tradition and modernization."1

In postcolonial India, the complicated juxtaposition of the Hindu woman as the bearer of purity and traditional values with the effects of 'modernization' or 'westernization' has created a web of identities for the often sidetracked Hindu woman. Rahul Gairola addresses Spivak's question of the subaltern voice by analyzing the "economies of identity" Hindu women seem to carry.2 Gairola compares the Hindu woman's identities and agencies with the act of "gift-giving."3 Just as gift-exchange establishes social, spiritual and psychological bonding, Gairola contends, "identity itself can be viewed as a reflexive "gift" stuck in a churning network of identities within the ideological constraints of society."4 The subaltern Hindu woman's identity is shaped and molded within (and by) the patriarchal discourse. Therefore, patriarchal codes in power work to justify her subject-position as a "subaltern" Hindu woman and thereby validate her subordination, identity and subjectivity within Hindu society.

In doing so, the Hindu woman's identity is always seen through the lenses of the male psyche and, as a result, Hindu women begin to view themselves and their agency through the patriarchal laws and confinements. In her introduction to Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex, "Judith Butler argues that the formation of a"sexed"body (a body that is divided into male or female) is based upon a set of actions mobilized by the law to produce effects that are necessary to patriarchal and heterosexual hegemony.5 This mobilization forces women to give their consent to patriarchal structures. Hindu women's articulation of their agency and subjectivity is kindled via the epistemological positioning of gender difference.

In this essay I examine how the film Fire problematizes the issue of gender ideology, identity and difference within a middle class Hindu family. I believe the film challenges the patriarchal hegemonic expectations of gender role-playing and identity. In breaking down the myth of an "ideal" heterosexual joint family, the film initiates different ways of social inquiry and tropes of understanding alternative sexuality. Consequently, I believe the film also creates space for a depiction of homosexual life within Indian culture in general and Indian cinema in particular. Through a meticulous analysis of the film, I argue that by creating a space for lesbianism, Fire establishes a sociopolitical platform for Hindu lesbians to negotiate the boundaries of identity politics and attempts to shift the hegemonic paradigm of nationalistic heteronormativity by proposing new models of the self.

SUBALTERNITY, MEDIA AND REPRESENTATION

Many media studies scholars have probed into the relationship between media, culture and representation and have focused on the effects of media on audience. Stuart Hall provided a model for film theory that analyzed the "encoded" cultural and social context of the narrative of the film and its effects on the consumer. Hall argued that a film is understood or "decoded" by the audience based on their socio-cultural milieu. He based his work on Louis Althusser's concept of "interpellation." Althusser argues that every person's concept of self or identity is determined and produced by the dominant ideologies. When a person easily identifies with the film and enjoys it, Althusser argues that the process of "interpellation" takes place because the consumer does not critically analyze the text and hence the consumer is seduced into accepting the dominant ideology.6

Althusser and Hall do not directly link their concepts of "interpellation" and "encoding/decoding" to gender relations. However, these concepts can be appropriated into feminist film criticism to understand the "interpellating" effects of media on women. Feminist film theory provides such a critique of gender and representation in the media. The dominant ideology within and outside the media is the patriarchal ideology. Traditionally men have made films for the male gaze wherein women have had a "subaltern" existence. Laura Mulvey examines the relationship between cinema and cinematic spectatorship and establishes that cinema caters exclusively to the male gaze or pleasure. She argues that pleasure has been split into the "active/male and passive/female"7 binary wherein the "male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly."8 She contends that women are (re) presented to provide a passive heterosexual division of labor in the narrative of films.