Women and Emergent Agency in The Cinema of Aparna Sen PDF

South Asian Popular Culture
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Women and emergent agency in the cinema of

Aparna Sen
Mantra Roy & Aparajita Sengupta
To cite this article: Mantra Roy & Aparajita Sengupta (2014) Women and emergent
agency in the cinema of Aparna Sen, South Asian Popular Culture, 12:2, 53-71, DOI:
10.1080/14746689.2014.937056
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2014.937056
Published online: 17 Jul 2014.
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Download by: [Central University of Orissa] Date: 01 May 2016, At: 23:36
South Asian Popular Culture, 2014
Vol. 12, No. 2, 53–71, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2014.937056
Women and emergent agency in the cinema of Aparna Sen

Mantra Roya* and Aparajita Senguptab
a
University of Washington; bIndependent Scholar
Our article examines four of Aparna Sen’s films, 36 Chowringhee Lane, Mr and Mrs
Iyer, Paromitar Ek Din (House of Memories), and 15 Park Avenue, and locates a
gradual progression in the emergent agencies of the leading women characters in the
context of feminist movements in India. The first section of the article situates Aparna
Sen as actor and director in the context of Bengali and New Wave/Parallel Cinema in
Downloaded by [Central University of Orissa] at 23:36 01 May 2016
order to provide readers with a background to her career. Then we demonstrate that Sen
emphasizes self-reliance and self-fulfilment, the keys of strategic feminism in Kolkata,
as each of her characters enacts self-motivated agencies. While Ms Stoneham is forced
to embrace her loneliness, Mrs Iyer protects a Muslim co-passenger’s life on her own;
while Sanaka and Paromita resist their lives’ boundaries on their own, Meethi boldly
steps into her ‘reality’ all by herself. We also argue that Sen’s polyvocal feminist lens
includes the pluralistic identities of women in India, including different affiliations of
class, ethnicity, religion, and educational background, for example, thereby making her
a feminist filmmaker whose inclusive perspective extends her regional identity.
Introduction
Aparna Sen is equally well known as director and actor in the Bengali film circuit. Her
early career as an actor in Bengali cinema, and the exposure she had working closely with
prominent Bengali auteurs, associates her filmmaking to the sensibilities of mid to end of
the century Bengali auteurship. However, her engagement with gender also centralizes her
auteurship in the context of Indian cinema as a whole, especially in New Wave or Parallel
Cinema.
When Aparna Sen’s Paroma was released in 1985, it opened a floodgate of
controversy within social and critical circles in India, and resultant academic discussions
on the film have continued for over a couple of decades. Even though Yugant (1995) and
Mr and Mrs Iyer (2002) have been discussed in some detail in the recent past, Paroma has
all but usurped the academic attention on Sen’s films. This particular trend has also
established Sen as a filmmaker with a special interest in women’s issues, often also as a
feminist. Most critics including Shoma A. Chatterji in Parama and Other Outsiders: The
Cinema of Aparna Sen, acknowledge that Aparna Sen, like many women film directors in
India, represents a ‘feminine sensibility’ in the way she portrays women’s negotiations
with Indian patriarchal society (14). But a comprehensive discussion of her central women
characters, particularly one that examines and compares her female protagonists, still
seems to be missing. Such a discussion is necessary not only because it would allow one to
trace any development in her characters over the years, but also because it could help
clarify some of the critical assumptions about Sen’s agenda in making films about women.
However, before engaging in a discussion about Aparna Sen’s women characters and
her directorial sensibility, an introduction to Aparna Sen as actor and director is critical in
order to understand the contexts that inform her filmmaking. Her training as an actor under
*Corresponding author. Email: docmantra@gmail.com
q 2014 Taylor & Francis

54 M. Roy and A. Sengupta
the tutelage of Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, the character roles she played in commercial
Bengali cinema, the historical status of Bengali cinema and New Wave cinema in India
when she started her career as director, and the socio-cultural scene of Kolkata during her
debut as director – all these aspects inform Sen’s directorial oeuvre and help the authors of
this article approach her cinema critically.
Aparna Sen as actor

Aparna Dasgupta, later Sen, daughter of noted film critic and historian, Chidananda
Dasgupta, began her acting career with Satyajit Ray in Samapti (1961). Chidananda
Dasgupta founded the Calcutta Film Society in 1947 and established the Federation of
Film Societies in India. He organized screenings of world cinema and, as a close associate
of Ray, was instrumental in shaping a taste for international cinema in Bengal.
Exposed to and trained in the art of realistic cinema and performance, Aparna
Sen delivered her brand of Bengali leading lady for many years. She portrayed the
sexually-liberated, educated, middle to upper middle class, candid, ‘street smart’ working
woman who mingled with men freely during the 1960s and 1970s, a time in Calcutta when
economic disparities, unemployment, and food insecurity were close companions of a
rising ‘cabaret culture’ that sucked middle-class women into its depraved world of
corruption, greed, prostitution, and crime (Gooptu 176– 7). Either as the girl in a college
group who is impregnated and abandoned by a lover in Ekhoni (dir. Tapan Sinha, 1971) or
as the smart working woman who wins arguments against and finally falls in love with the
young man in the opposite house in Basanta Bilap (dir. Dinen Gupta, 1973), Sen reigned
as the top star of Bengali commercial cinema for many years.
However, since Aparna Sen began her career as an actress for Satyajit Ray, who is
often considered a pioneer of the New Cinema in India, she is deeply oriented in this
cinematic tradition, and has had close associations with the works of contemporary
parallel directors like Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen.
Aparna Sen as director

It can be argued that like Ray who did not operate in a vacuum when he established his
credo of filmmaking, Aparna Sen’s cinema can be better understood within the context of
Bengali cinema.
By the 1930s, especially under the leadership of B.N. Sircar’s New Theatres, the
Bengali ethos of filmmaking included a balance between art and commerce, a good
storyline (following Bengal’s penchant for the literary), psychologically-developed
characters, non-erotic romance, and social realism. Although Bengali cinema had
achieved a pan-Indian audience, by the late 1940s it had lost 40% of its audience and was
socially devastated due to India’s Partition. Effectively, Bengali cinema began to turn
inwards during the late 1940s and 1950s and gradually became ‘regionalized’ instead of
remaining ‘national’. Subsequently, through the mid-1950s the rise of Uttam Kumar and
Suchitra Sen, both as independent stars and as the star-couple, ushered in the Golden Era
of commercial Bengali cinema (see Gooptu 11– 127).
Satyajit Ray’s emergence in the early 1950s, especially with the release of Pather
Panchali in 1955, marked a transformation in Bengali film culture that would continue for
the next several decades. New filming strategies like on-location shooting ushered in a
level of realism that was absent from earlier films (see Gooptu 139– 69). On the other
hand, through the late 1960s into the 1980s, directors like Mrinal Sen, another important
South Asian Popular Culture 55
pillar of New Cinema, made politically-conscious films that depicted the Naxalite
movement and other socio-political crises afflicting the middle class in Kolkata and India
at large. The 1950s to 1970s also saw Ritwik Ghatak’s films, engaging with the cultural
dismemberment engendered by the 1953 Bengal Famine and India’s Partition, as yet
another corpus of work establishing social realism as a mark of Bengali and Indian parallel
or New Wave cinema.
Although parallel cinema owes its origins to central government funding initiatives in
the 1960s, the terms ‘parallel’ or ‘alternative’ came to signify a wide range of realistic
cinema based on social issues. Along with the works of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and
Ritwik Ghatak, the genre of parallel cinema includes a host of films in Hindi and other
regional languages. A large section of these directors were associated with the Film and
Television Institute in Pune, and although encouraged largely by the availability of
government funds, also often found private funding. Critically acclaimed in this group are
the works of Shyam Benegal, Girish Kanrad, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Ketan Mehta, Mani
Kaul and Kumar Shahani, among others. The 1980s witness the parallel directors seeking
to enhance their audience base by gradually moving away from the intense intellectualism
of earlier parallel cinema, leading to the more accessible works by Shyam Benegal, M.S.
Sathyu, Govind Nihalini, as well as Mrinal Sen (see Armes 122).
Aparna Sen released her first feature film, 36 Chowringhee Lane in 1981 which not only
won National Awards for Best Director and Best Feature Film but also announced the arrival
of a director of a latter phase of Parallel and New Cinema, often called ‘Middle Cinema’
which is distinct in form, style, and intellectual complexity. Her films are usually realistic
portrayals of social and familial issues that characterize parallel cinema but her work differs in
their pace and the multiplicity in the choice of characters. It is arguable that Sen’s experience
with Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ghatak informed her directorial work in which she creates realistic
women characters enacting agency within a patriarchal Bengali/Indian society.
Through the choice of characters and contexts that are informed by but supersede the
immediate socio-political scene in West Bengal, Aparna Sen’s films can be viewed as
reaching a wider audience outside Bengal, thereby extending her regional identity.
However, the essence of Bengali cinema, as identified by Gooptu, centring on good story,
good acting, psychological interiority of characters, realism, simplicity, and absence of
flamboyance, inform Sen’s oeuvre.
Aparna Sen’s women

Aparna Sen is one of the few directors in India who bears witness to women’s experiences
in Indian society. Therefore it is not surprising that critics like Brinda Bose suggest that
Sen’s portrayal of women enacting their choices often represents agendas that are clearly
political (321 –2). But Bose also points out that in interviews, Sen resists the idea that she
speaks specifically for feminist ideologies in her films (319).1 In the following excerpt
from an interview, Sen declines to be labelled as a feminist:
Interviewer: As a woman film-maker do you find this pressure to make sure your films
are ’feminist’?
Aparna Sen: I was hailed as a kind of feminist messiah after Paroma. I kept objecting
and kept saying that feminism to me is a part of humanism. (Sen “If I’d Made More
Compromises”)
Sen’s reluctance to draw direct connections between her characters and the feminist
politics surrounding them can be explained if we are sensitive to the amount of personal
agency the director grants them. If Sen chooses to describe herself as an apolitical director,
or as one having no ties with actual women’s movements in India, it is not because her
characters are somehow detached from the movements in India, but because she shows
them as having complex reactions to the society around them. They are, of course, shaped
both directly and indirectly by the social movements, but Sen takes into account
specificities in their circumstances such as class positions, family backgrounds and
interpersonal relationships, thereby granting them individual agency over and above their
derived influence from the actual social movements.
We argue here that Sen responds to the women’s movements in India through the
1970s and 1980s by nuancing the identity of the Indian woman2 through a pluralistic and
polyvocal feminist lens, in the sense that her women are not merely products of the
feminist movements in India – their sense of agency might have been influenced by the
social climate, but their negotiation of that agency is unique to their specific
circumstances. If we see a consensus in these characters, for example, regarding

economic independence or the need to question an abusive or unfulfilling relationship, the
paths to those goals are undeniably informed by factors specific to the characters.
Moreover, Sen’s films demonstrate that women’s identities are informed by circumstances
and choices that are not always necessarily tied to patriarchy. We contend that her films
establish the need for realization of women’s potential in multiple aspects of their lives,
such as relationships between women and not always with men and negotiations with
ethnic and regional identities and with physical or pathological conditions. The women’s
movements in India in the latter decades of the twentieth century illustrate a similar
emphasis on and engagement with women’s identities (see Samita Sen).
Samita Sen’s review of the two distinct waves of feminism in India, the
pre-Independence movement and that of the 1970s–1980s, reveals the challenges of
addressing women’s issues in Indian society where gender identity is necessarily refracted by
differences in caste, class, religion, urban-rural divides, sexuality, and physical ability (21).
The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed several incidents that underline the
increasing impact of social feminism in India. The birth of various local and regional
associations addressing the specific needs of women in their immediate surroundings, the
passage of various legislative Bills in favour of women’s empowerment, legal instances like
the Shah Bano case and the critical attention it elicited from feminists all across the country,
and demands by women to gain more legislative power are all significant signs. However,
feminist scholars still continue to debate the effectiveness of a women’s movement whose
spokespersons have primarily been elite urban upper class and upper caste women. Raka Ray
in Fields of Protest cites Gayl Omvedt’s conclusion that autonomous middle class women’s
organizations in India tend not to include poor and working women’s issues in their
agendas (15). The socio-cultural issues affecting ‘Indian women’ are as varied as their
identities and have thus not been able to be addressed by any monolithic formulation of
Indian feminism. This fact, we contend, has significant influence on the polyvocal feminist
lens of Sen’s cinema.
An educated consciousness regarding the situation in India enables Aparna Sen to
articulate the multiplicity of the Indian woman’s identity through a range of characters and
their agencies in enacting certain choices. We will explore, with reference to four of Sen’s
films, a pattern that traces Sen’s maturing directorial lens as it addresses a pluralistic
feminism, by capturing women from different backgrounds in terms of class, education,
and ethnicities, and represents a gradually evolving Indian society in which women’s plural
roles, expectations, and sensibilities must be articulated in an attempt to comprehend them.
Through a close examination of central women characters in 36 Chowringhee Lane,
Mr and Mrs Iyer, Paromitar Ek Din, and 15 Park Avenue, we endeavour to establish that in
testing social boundaries, these women follow a certain trajectory; from being emotionally
vulnerable and impressionable they gradually claim agency for themselves. The director
does not show them to be participating in, or even being conscious of women’s movements
around them, but her own awareness regarding the same gradually leads to the emergence
of stronger women on screen. Through a nod to the activism of feminists in the 1970s and
later, Sen focuses her attention on the distinct socio-cultural-economic contexts that
inform, restrict, and delimit women’s subjectivities in various walks of Indian life.
We argue that Aparna Sen does not restrict herself to a regional, or specifically
Bengali, feminist-director’s status; instead she complicates the notion of being ‘Indian’
and examines an ageing Anglo-Indian teacher, Ms Violet Stoneham, in postcolonial India
in 36 Chowringhee Lane, a young Tamil Brahmin woman on a bus raided by Hindu
fundamentalists in Mr and Mrs Iyer, two middle-class Bengali women in a Kolkata
household in Paromitar Ek Din, and a schizophrenic upper-class urban English-speaking

North Indian Kayasth woman and her highly educated and accomplished elder sister
in Kolkata in 15 Park Avenue. The films demonstrate a specific progression in the way
protagonists move towards more mature choices – Stoneham’s vulnerability and
Paroma’s3 initial disorientation disappear completely in later characters because they
often intervene on their own behalf. Sanaka’s (Paromitar Ek Din), Dr Verma’s, and
Meethi’s choices (15 Park Avenue), for example, would have happened naturally, without
outside interventions. What Renuka Viswanathan sees as a form of ‘growing up’ in
Meenakshi (Mr and Mrs Iyer), might also be applied to the repertoire of Sen’s women
characters as a whole (4512).4 Because the changes the later women characters undergo
are more internal, they neither suffer Stoneham’s dismissal nor Paroma’s violent removal
from cultural groundings.
In Paroma’s case, as Rahul ‘teaches’ her to pay attention to her individuality, he
completely ignores that she has a strong cultural identity within her household and her
society. By ignoring her cultural identity, Rahul is insensitive to her personality as a
whole, and therefore confuses and disorients her (Arora and Irving 116 – 17). Likewise,
Stoneham allows the young Bengali couple to exploit her emotions because of her
own desperate need for joy and company. For her later characters, Sen could be said to
have followed a trajectory towards a more mature cinema in a couple of senses; her
characterization of female protagonists matures as she grants them more agency, and her
representation of the cultural position of Indian women also evolves as she accommodates
complex and culturally grounded forms of feminisms.
Samita Sen (24 –7) observes that most feminists of the 1980s in India described their
agenda as making women self-reliant and capable of recognizing their rights, across the
board, irrespective of caste, class, community, and religious affiliations, factors which
have been historically defined by patriarchy. In Aparna Sen’s films we see the women
characters embrace agencies under circumstances that are seldom politically motivated but
which reflect Sen’s engagement with the contemporary feminist call for recognition and
realization of rights. In this perceived dialogue between Sen’s films and the women’s
movement, it is possible to establish that Sen’s feminist perspective pronounces itself in
the emancipation of the central characters built on the recognition of their rights as
individuals.5 So Sen’s choice to portray both a range of characters from the Indian
milieu and to focus on ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances emphasizes her
pluralistic view of women and women’s issues in India. While films like Paroma
(in Geetha Ramanathan’s reading, for example) and Paromitar Ek Din may be read as
explicitly engaging with some Anglo-American feminist concerns of sexual liberation and
dismantling of patriarchal institutions like meaningless marriages, we argue Aparna

Sen’s feminist concerns are rooted in socio-cultural contexts of Indian society in which
women negotiate empowerment through self-realization and self-fulfilment from within
the patriarchal structure.
Ania Loomba in her article, “Tangled Histories: Indian Feminism and Anglo-
American Feminist Criticism” discusses how many feminist scholars in India resisted
Western feminist scholarship and literary practices because they misunderstood Western
feminism as strictly Anglo-American and they did not consider feminisms of colour which
address multiples axes of women’s identities – race, class, ethnicity, nationality – and
which could operate as important and parallel frameworks/scholarship for addressing
feminism in a pluralistic India (275 – 8). In the interview quoted above, Sen says, ‘While
I feel that women’s issues need to be addressed I don’t feel that this war of the sexes is a
good thing’ (“If I’d Made More Compromises”). It is also possible that Aparna Sen’s
resistance, in her interviews in the 1990s, to the label ‘feminist’ responds to the term’s
limited understanding in India at the time.
The agencies Sen’s characters assume progressively illustrate the relationship between
the women’s movements and Sen’s articulation of women’s roles through art not only in
the emphasis on self-reliance but also in the possibility for women to define themselves in
relation to each other and other aspects of their psycho-social realities that, although
often informed by patriarchy, do not always involve the presence and dominance of
male figures. In 36 Chowringhee Lane,6 Stoneham’s agency is ambiguous but is not
circumscribed by patriarchy (unless of course if we consider her position in the context of
colonial and postcolonial patriarchal decisions regarding nation-building). In Mr And Mrs
Iyer, Sen deliberately mixes the political and the personal, stopping short of letting
Meenakshi articulate a clear message of national integration for the audience. But
Meenakshi’s agency in protecting Raja’s life in the face of Hindu fundamentalism does not
engage with conscious resistance to patriarchy; rather it bespeaks a woman’s ability to
circumvent her received heritage of caste consciousness and notions of purity in order to
save another human being from sure death. Sanaka and Paromita from Paromitar Ek Din
draw upon each other’s strengths to negotiate their relationships with a traditional
patriarchal household and the focus of the film becomes the friendship between the two
women. Dr Verma and Meethi from 15 Park Avenue similarly articulate agency in terms of
their relationship with each other and Meethi’s parallel reality that she inhabits as a
schizophrenic and not against patriarchy. These women test social boundaries by
attempting to claim their rightful positions and rights and not because the characters are
feminists in the Anglo-American tradition, but because Aparna Sen arguably lends her
characters the knowledge and agency to rebel against their constricted circumstances.
What Sen’s characters often achieve as individuals can be understood by Raka Ray’s
observation that women in India as ‘collective subjects(s)’ have shifting interests which
sometimes share and sometimes collide with men’s interests, and what alliances women
undertake or which aspects of their identity they prioritize in a given context define how
specific aspects of their identities become ‘salient’ (19). While women may share alliances
of class, ethnicity, and religion with men in the roles of wives, sisters, lovers, and
daughters, they may emphasize the limitations they encounter in one or more categories of
their social identities in particular contexts while in others they may blend in seamlessly
(Ray 19). Ms Stoneham in 36 fits perfectly with the Bengali couple in terms of their tastes
in music and literature but is not welcome in mainstream Bengali society because she is an
ageing Anglo-Indian in a postcolonial society that is uncomfortable in accommodating
remnants of British rule. At once a friend for elitist cultural interests and a forgotten
outsider, Ms Stoneham’s journey signals Sen’s pointer to the complex (and contradictory)
alliances women in India subscribe to. Sen is therefore more successful in capturing the
complexities of women’s issues in the cultural context of India, and in representing the
evolving nature of agency in her central women characters.7
Additionally, Ray identifies the issues around which the women’s movement in
Kolkata developed, such as ‘literacy, employment, wage discrimination . . . and the
participation of women in general democratic struggles’ which are considered
‘economistic’ or ‘pragmatic’ and not explicitly ‘feminist’ or ‘strategic’ (5). Sen’s films
are not centred on issues of violence against women, sexual harassment, or amniocentesis,
which are internationally recognized as ‘feminist’ issues, but instead focus on rights to
education, employment, and self-growth of women (see Ray for distinctions between
women’s movements in Kolkata and Mumbai). In the four films we examine here, it is
possible to see Sen’s particular feminist interests in self-fulfilment and self-realization in
the progress her characters make.
Ms Stoneham must remain lonely in 36 Chowringhee Lane

36 Chowringhee Lane drew critical and popular attention as Aparna Sen’s very first film
that depicted with delicate sympathy the lonely lives led by Anglo-Indian teachers in
Kolkata who recede to the blind spots of the popular mind after Convent school-life comes
to an end. In this film Sen shows how the lonely ageing Ms Violet Stoneham resists the
pressure to live with distant family and instead teaches Twelfth Night during the day and
eats meagre meals in the company of her cat in the evening. Through flashbacks and letters
we realize that her niece Rosemary has repeatedly invited Ms Stoneham to relocate to
Australia and live with her family. In one of the flashbacks we hear a younger Rosemary
articulate her determination not to remain a solitary spinster – a conscious choice derived
from observing Ms Stoneham’s pathetic life in an old flat in central Kolkata punctuated
by weekly visits to an old-age home to meet her irritable and ailing brother Eddie.
Ms Stoneham is hurt because the insensitive remark does sum up the abject loneliness of
her life; but as the film’s narrative unfolds we realize that after her fiancé’s death in the war
while they were very young, Stoneham chose to fill her life with teaching, reading letters
from relatives, and visiting ailing family members.
A sudden breath of fresh air interrupts the monotony of Ms Stoneham’s life when
Nandita, a former student, and her fiancé, Samaresh, enter her life and begin spending time
with her. While the couple needs a place for their pre-marital rendezvous away from
parental restrictions, Ms Stoneham is led to believe that Samaresh needs a quiet place to
write and gladly offers her flat during the day while she is away teaching. Sen illustrates
how the postcolonial Indian society sometimes exploits the vulnerability of the less
favoured cousins of the erstwhile colonizers in a country that is disassociating rapidly from
its colonial past while retaining the colonizer’s language and manners as marks of elitism.
While Stoneham has a good time with the young couple in the evenings, one day she
catches the lovers in an intimate moment and realizes the reason why Nandita suddenly
revived her connections. But she chooses not to confront them, maybe because she does
not want to lose their company. Post marriage, the young couple’s need for Ms Stoneham’s
flat is exhausted and Ms Stoneham begins to return to her empty flat once again.
When one of her colleagues decides to relocate to Canada to live with her son,
Ms Stoneham once again faces the choice of accepting Rosemary’s invitation. Here Sen
depicts the predicament of the Anglo-Indian community as it recognized its ‘forgotten’
status in independent India and began to relocate to Canada or Australia. But Stoneham
resists relocating to Australia and continues with her routine life. She arguably enacts
agency in not submitting to external pressure to become entangled in the complications of
family life in what she understood as a foreign land; however, it is another form of agency,
one which exposes her need for company in a desperately lonely life, with which Ms
Stoneham embraces the momentary company of the young couple and hopes to become
part of their vibrant life. But when she recognizes that she is unwanted in the youthful
Christmas party hosted by Nandita and Samaresh, Ms Stoneham comes face to face with
the true extent of her loneliness. She clears away a small patch from a fogged up glass door
to look into the scene of the party in a symbolic shot that underlines both a clearer
understanding of the betrayal she has undergone, and the fact that she will ever remain an
outsider to Nandita and Samaresh’s social circle. She walks away into the dark cold night
by herself while the carol ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’ plays on the gramophone she had
gifted them.
Interestingly, Stoneham demonstrates more decisiveness in refusing Rosemary’s

invitations than in recognizing her identity as ‘outsider’ in a postcolonial Indian society.
This discrepancy is striking because in one of the flashbacks we observe Stoneham
warning Rosemary against indulging in dreams of marrying a Bengali boy because she
knew the communities were very different from each other and worried that Rosemary
would not be well-accepted. The minimal hesitation in deciding against leaving ‘home’ for
Australia becomes pronounced in Stoneham’s delay or refusal in accepting her position
in Nandita-Samaresh’s life until their unintended dismissal reminds her of her ‘lack of
belonging’ in mainstream independent India. In bearing witness to Indian society’s act of
forgetting the Anglo-Indian Aparna Sen justifiably reminds Indian society of the margins
to which it tends to relegate Anglo-Indians; in making Stoneham experience the rejection
Sen underscores both the lack of responsibility fellow Indians feel toward Anglo-Indians
and the absence of direct patriarchal dominance in Stoneham’s life.
Ms Stoneham’s resignation to her loneliness and decision to never leave India may
be difficult to explain from a ‘strategic’ interest perspective; but her realization of her
marginality in mainstream society indicates Aparna Sen’s engagement with the
‘pragmatist’ perspective of the women’s movement (Ray). So, without denouncing
patriarchy, when Ms Stoneham loses some of her assigned classes to a younger newer
teacher in school, Aparna Sen demonstrates the need to address wage discrimination
experienced by an ethnic minority. It is arguable that in tune with the women’s movement
in Kolkata, Sen emphasizes Stoneham’s self-realization as a minority woman without
highlighting her oppression within patriarchal machinery.
Mr Iyer and Mrs Iyer: Why Meenakshi saves Raja

In Mr and Mrs Iyer, Meenakshi Iyer chooses to save co-passenger Raja Chowdhury’s life
with a simple lie despite her hatred and fear of the Muslim other. When Hindu extremists
raid the bus they are traveling in, looking to drag off and kill Muslim passengers,
Meenakshi says that they are Mr and Mrs Iyer, a Hindu couple. Her statement represents
one of many instances where Sen’s women characters momentarily step away from
mainstream sentiments and social conditioning, and eventually make extraordinary
choices. Meenakshi seems an unlikely crusader for the cause of secularism, because she
deeply believes that the differences in caste and religion are inherent, and should be
maintained at all costs. Meenakshi’s later exchanges with Raja clarify that she represents
the viewpoint of an extremely conservative Tamil family, where demarcations of caste and
religion are vital elements of identity. Practices that ostensibly maintain the ‘purity’ of that
identity have been integral to Meenakshi’s life so far, so her rebellion against them is
purely accidental. The fact that she is chosen by the director to be the ambassador for
secularism makes the director’s argument on the resolution of communal violence appear
much convincing – if someone like Meenakshi can be changed with a close encounter
with a Muslim man, then there could be hope for the resolution of the problem of
communal tension at the national level. At the same time, Meenakshi’s choice
demonstrates Sen’s pattern of choosing protagonists who overstep their boundaries
because of a specific turn of events, and not to vindicate a conscious political belief. This
particular act of saving the life of a person she possibly believes is different, and even
inferior to her, has no direct connection with challenging patriarchal norms; yet it is a
representation of a woman’s moment of maturity and self-realization.
However, in tracing the trajectory of women making choices in Sen’s cinema, it
appears that even though Meenakshi takes the first step in questioning religious difference,
her development remains questionable because her opinion is shaped to a great extent by
Raja. Additionally, her later choices to accept Raja completely (she overcomes her fear of
contamination and drinks from the same bottle) might have been because of a personal
affection for Raja. From this perspective, her position in the repertoire of Sen’s women
characters can be best described as one where the woman is capable of making
independent choices, but is still dependent on the male character for analysing her beliefs.
Like with Rahul’s character in Paroma, Sen facilitates the woman’s encounter with
theoretical feminism through the character of an educated, enlightened man from outside
the woman’s socio-cultural circle. Meenakshi’s choices after such an encounter, therefore,
are all the more worthy of analysis in this case.
Like many other women in Sen’s cinema, the magnitude of Meenakshi’s act (of saving
Raja) seems insignificant, especially at the moment that it is carried out. It seems an
expected, quiet act of a sympathetic human being, and does not carry with it any association
of a premeditated act of revolt against her own position as a Hindu woman. When Renuka
Viswanathan says that ‘Meenakshi’s dilemma belongs to all Indians’, it could be suggested
that she is actually indicating that the moment that Meenakshi makes the choice is
completely stripped of the religious politics that constitute the basis of this film – her
character makes no attempt later on to theorize on the choice, or to explain tenets of
tolerance and love, or to analyse why, in spite of her evident hatred of Muslims, she decides
to utter this lie (4512). Viswanathan says that in Meenakshi’s lie, Sen pinpoints the exact
moment when nation triumphs over divisive religious identities, because even the most
religious of the viewers would not possibly condemn Meenakshi’s action:
I suspect that even very traditional and conservative persons would find it difficult to condemn
her action. Despite the virulent divisive propaganda that is so current today, few of us will
betray our duty as true Indians to protect our fellow citizens of different religions.
(Viswanathan 4512)
In the actual scene, shot from the slightly high point-of-view of the assailants, Raja looks
down as he holds Meenakshi’s son Santhanam, while Meenakshi herself looks directly into
the camera and almost unwaveringly delivers her lie. We might also remember that
immediately before this, she has stopped Raja from going into a confrontation with the
terrorists by thrusting her son into his hands – there is a complete reversal in power
structures established at the beginning of the film where the lone woman seeks protection
from the man to one where the man emasculated by violence is protected by the woman,
now empowered to look directly into the camera. We are not sure if this act is a deliberate
choice on her part then, or a sudden, unthinking reaction.
It can be argued here that even if it is an unthinking reaction, it is the reaction of a

humane and intelligent woman, and that whatever learned behaviour Meenakshi
demonstrates, her unconscious appears to be in good health. However, accepting that this
moment was the first in a series of choices that Meenakshi consciously makes in the film
could also be logical from a number of perspectives. Meenakshi demonstrates, as we have
noted, a form of learned behaviour. Her initial attitude towards Raja is marked by the fear
of contamination – the fear typical to racial/caste discrimination, where contamination
through the exchange of bodily fluids (blood/saliva/semen) must be evaded at all costs. In
their case, the water-bottle becomes the vehicle that Meenakshi fears would contaminate
her body with Raja’s saliva. From this moment of extreme religious hatred onwards to the
time when she lies about Raja’s identity, nothing changes from the perspective of the
characters but the intensity of fear and the immediate possibility of extreme violence and
death. When Meenakshi lies, she does so because for the first time, she comes face to face
with the extremes to which her learned behaviour will take her, and she makes the choice
to undergo a quiet but irreversible transformation.
However, Meenakshi’s development is slightly problematic, as already noted, because
of the role Raja plays in reshaping her opinion about communal intolerance. Raja
questions Meenakshi’s prejudice in a number of ways, even though it must be
acknowledged that he is not as overtly condescending as Rahul (also a cosmopolitan
photographer figure) in Paroma. When they are alone in the forest bungalow, Raja
questions her about her background and comes to know that Meenakshi and members of
her family hold college and university degrees but are nevertheless extremely restricted by
notions of caste and religion. Even though Raja does not preach the value of tolerance to
her directly, he does exhibit surprise and indignation at the amount of prejudice
Meenakshi’s circle demonstrates. The romantic nature that their relationship gradually
takes on also affects critical analysis of Meenakshi’s development; does she really
question her boundaries on her own, or does she change because she falls in love with Raja
and thus switches over to his belief systems? Whatever the case, it should be noted that she
exercises free choice when she saves Raja’s life. Even if we suspect that her liberation, like
Paroma’s, is prescribed by a condescending male figure, we must grant her the maturity of
making that first and most significant choice in the film, the one that is completely her own.
By pronouncing that her fellow Muslim passenger is her husband without being prompted
to do so at the beginning of the film, Meenakshi claims agency much strongly than Paroma
could. At the end of the film, she confidently and pointedly emphasizes Raja’s Muslim
identity in introducing him to her husband. As Raja walks away, the audience recognizes
that this brief encounter, even if it does not lead Meenakshi to question her role as a Hindu
mother and wife, leaves her with deep self-realization.
Paromitar Ek Din: moving towards mature choices

Paromitar Ek Din is one of Sen’s later films on women, and represents a mature stage in
Sen’s handling of women’s issues and relationships – the director has matured here in
emphasizing that self-realization and self-fulfilment for women lie not only in negotiating
a marriage, but in dealing with social structures and forging many other kinds of
relationships. The film deals with two characters, but the issues represented in their lives
are similar, and appear to be continued from the older woman’s life into the younger’s. Set
in the unlikely background of an extremely traditional North Kolkata household, the plot
of a woman’s search for love and self-worth transcends into a story of liberation spanning
two generations in this film. The film focuses on the issue of mental health and the position
of special needs children in middle-class Bengali society, but it is also a specific step in
Sen’s exploration of women’s roles within the Indian society. It should be noted that Sen
(who writes the script for the film herself) arrives at the story of a Bengali housewife
testing boundaries again a long time after Paroma, but this time, the outcome to the
rebellion is quite different. Sen says, ‘in Paroma, I realised that with the new liberalism
that has spread to the Bengali middle-class, we are prepared to accept a woman’s choices
in many areas, but not the sexual’ (““If I’d Made More Compromises”). When she portrays
Paromita, however, sexual liberation becomes one of the many issues that the woman is
shown to be negotiating. Paromita is capable, in the 1990s, to be liberated sexually, but she
simultaneously handles issues such as having a spastic child, being a daughter-in-law in a
conservative family, and dealing with an abusive husband. If in exploring a pluralistic
feminism, Sen seems to be moving towards women who are able to enact their choices
more consciously, Paromita represents not only the generation after Sanaka (her mother-
in-law in this film), but the one after Paroma as well.

If Paroma’s rebellion can be critiqued as an ethnographic intervention by the brown
sahib, as suggested by Arora and Irving (116 – 17), Paromita seems to act of her own
accord, with a little bit of help from her mother-in-law. In other words, her need to
overstep the boundaries of a middle-class woman’s life in Kolkata is not propelled by an
outsider eager to perpetrate colonial ideas of freeing the native woman (see Chatterjee).
In fact, the trajectory of her development is quite different from Paroma’s because not only
does she forge the path to individual and conjugal happiness by herself, her cultural
influences are also closer to her own social position. Her greatest influence, of course, is
Sanaka, whom she watches (and helps) enact minute acts of revolt. Unlike Paroma, who is
swept off her feet on finding an avenue for self-expression and freedom from mundanity,
and whose influence has been heavily criticized as being patronizing, overtly western8 and
male, Paromita’s choices are shaped to a great extent by a fellow rebel. Her second
husband Rajiv does ask her about her choice to become a homemaker early in the film, but
he does not appear to condescend. He feels that Paromita needs economic independence,
but even before he intervenes, Paromita is already trying to make herself useful outside of
the home. As a result, Paromita’s choices seem more culturally grounded – she is not
suddenly and deliberately removed from her environment because someone else points out
her need for liberation. Paroma does not appear to be deeply unhappy at the beginning of
the film; it is Rahul who points out that she needs to explore avenues for self-expression,
but he also fails to show up at the moment of her crisis. Paromita, on the other hand, has an
insensitive and abusive man for a husband, and chooses to divorce him for a more
companionate and loving relationship. While Paroma is completely disorientated by the
effect of the change in her life, Paromita copes much better. She even takes bold decisions
such as going back to take care of an ex in-law, and attending her funeral. In both cases,
elderly relatives (mostly women) criticize the actions of the central women characters, but
while Paroma is gradually pushed to hysteria and makes an attempt to take her own life,
Paromita is quietly confident of her new role.
However, even as the women in this film make more daring choices, it should be noted
that they do not consciously locate their rebellions within a discourse of urban feminism.
Paromita hardly begins her life as a rebel; she is educated, but willingly settles into the life
of a housewife, and puts up with an unhappy and partially abusive relationship with her
husband for a while. She feels the need to rebel only when she takes her son Bablu to a
school for special needs children. She meets Rajiv there, but finally makes the choice to
divorce her husband after Bablu dies. Her experiences make her aware of her selfhood, and
she naturally takes the steps towards fulfilling her emotional needs.
It is no accident that the lives of the women in Paromita’s in-laws’ residence are
somewhat similar; most women marry and settle into a life of domesticity, and finding a
compassionate partner, sexual satisfaction or personal fulfilment is not impossible but rare.
However, Sen is sensitive to the complexities of such a situation, and her depiction of the
two generations of women takes into account the varied forms of rebellion within the
social setting of a non-nuclear family. Sanaka plays the traditional roles, but manages to
find avenues for expressing herself.9 Unlike Meenakshi or Paroma, Sanaka’s choices do
not significantly alter her own life. She is a woman of many minute rebellions which
possibly culminate in a significant and life-changing enactment of choice by her daughter-
in-law. As Sanaka carries out her rebellion against various established systems in her life,
she is blatant at certain times, and surreptitious at others. Overall though, Sanaka’s
personality in this film is shaped by her choices; she emerges as a distinctive woman even
in her role as an ordinary housewife because she makes some extraordinary choices. Her
choices are all the more vital in this context because she represents a strategy of survival
by merely testing the boundaries, but never quite breaking them.
Sanaka is married into a traditional Bengali middle-class family in North Kolkata, and
outwardly at least, she fits the role perfectly. When we are introduced to her through the
point of view of Paromita, her youngest daughter-in-law, she is probably in her 50s, and
appears to be the average housewife in every way. Her manner of dressing and accent
clearly denote that her form of feminism is not that of the western-educated class of
Bengali women. Sanaka fulfils the role of the homebound wife and mother and is not
formally versed in contemporary discourses of women’s rights, but she is able to question
and destabilize a number of patriarchal norms in her own way. Her rebellions seem to be
more an outcome of her own common sense than anything else.
Sanaka finds happiness in a few simple things, but her status as a wife and mother often
denies her access to these. The section where she tries to watch television while the men
eat establishes how she is often denied the right to act her will; Sanaka watches television
while her husband and two sons eat at the table and her daughters-in-law serve them food,
but her husband insists that she turn off the television and serve them. Sanaka resists as
much as she can, but seems to avoid confronting her husband in front of the others.
However, she rebels more blatantly in another case. She maintains a friendship with Mani,
the man she had hoped to marry, in spite of the restrictive nature of her circumstances.
Mani (Sanaka describes him as a coward to Paromita) was in love with Sanaka before she
married her lifelong husband, and continues to visit her throughout her life. Even though
he never has the courage to ask her to be with him, they share an enduring bond over the
years. Sanaka is quite candid about this relationship; not only does she ignore the sarcasm
that her family directs at her for maintaining this friendship, she even shares details of her
own expectations with her daughter-in-law.
Sanaka appears to be most liberated after her husband’s death, and aided by Paromita,
she enjoys things that she was denied earlier. She can now watch television, fly kites with
her grandchildren, eat out and go shopping with Paromita. Even though she has had to give
up fish and meat as a widow, she even steps beyond those boundaries in her new-found
freedom. The most surprising element in the enactment of her choices, however, is the
freedom she grants her daughter-in-law. Even though she had always supported Paromita,
even siding with her against her own son after their son is diagnosed with cerebral palsy, it
is quite surprising to see her support her daughter-in-law’s affair with another man. Sanaka
watches quietly as Paromita, always unhappy in her marriage, gradually gets involved in a
relationship with Rajiv after her child’s death. She does react when Paromita lets her know
of her decision to move out with Rajiv, but it is clear that Sanaka found nothing wrong in
Paromita’s affair, even though she is married to Sanaka’s own son. In a scene towards the
end, Sanaka goes through a range of emotions when Paromita announces her decision to
divorce her husband. A series of medium shots show her moving from anger to frustration
to grief as she tries to convince Paromita that she can stay and continue her affair with
Rajiv without necessarily filing for divorce and leaving the house. It is clear that Sanaka
wants her to follow the pattern of her own life, to test the boundaries, and never quite break
them. In a shallow-focus shot with the focus on Sanaka crouching on the bed in a posture
of acute grief as she asks why Paromita values this new relationship over her connection
with Sanaka, the complexity of the situation emerges – in spite of the deep bonding that
they share, Paromita is now ready to step out of this family. She is capable at this point to
move out of a failed marriage, and make a stronger choice because of the very example
Sanaka sets before her.
Meethi’s Choice: 15 Park Avenue over the ‘real’ world

Following Paromitar Ek Din Sen deepens her critical examination of the differently-abled
in 15 Park Avenue and brings the audience’s attention to the complicated experience of
living with and caring for a schizophrenic family member. Here Sen depicts several upper
middle class women whose lives and relationships revolve around Meethi’s ‘real’ world
that collides with the world inhabited by Mrs Gupta, her mother, Anu, her older step-sister,
her doctors, Sanjeev, Anu’s colleague and possible partner, and Jojo, Meethi’s estranged
fiancé. In her alternate world, Meethi juggles a busy family life (her husband, Jojo, and five
children) and a full-time job. Her imagined residential address, 15 Park Avenue, where her
married life thrives, is the sole focus of her ‘reality’. This address does not exist in present-
day Kolkata, the setting of the film.
Dr Anjali Verma (Anu) has literally put her own personal life on hold in order to take
care of her schizophrenic step-sister, Meethi. Enacting agency and independence are not
new to a respected professional academic like Dr Verma, but as a very responsible eldest
child of the family, her life becomes limited when she chooses to protect, support, and
defend her family rather aggressively. While her successful colleague Sanjeev coaxes her
at several points to pay attention to her own life, a life where they can be together, Anu
determinedly wards off the opportunity to have a life that will demand sharing her
responsibility of Meethi with that of her own husband and children. Had Anu decided not
to take all of Meethi’s responsibility in her own hands, Meethi would probably have been
confined to an asylum and thus would have deteriorated faster. Besides lecturing in college
and researching, Anu chooses to live every moment of her life for Meethi and their ageing
mother. Anu believes her wrong decision to allow Meethi to go on a reporting assignment
to rural Bengal where she was gang raped aggravated Meethi’s schizophrenic condition.
Her financial independence and established career guarantee her the social bandwidth
(she is divorced, yet feels no social pressure) to exercise her choices and she does not need
to rebel against social restrictions. In several ways she is a far cry from Stoneham,
Meenakshi, Sanaka, and Paromita. In not allowing anyone or any factor interfere with her
choice to take care of Meethi, Anu is a great leap from both Stoneham and Meenakshi; in
not responding to Sanjeev’s pursuit Anu extends Sanaka’s and Paromita’s agencies
(of course the difference in backgrounds and contexts plays an important role in informing
each woman’s choices).
In a Rediff.com interview with Raja Sen, Aparna Sen says Anu is fiercely independent,
but restricted and defined to a certain extent by her relationship to her younger sister
(Sen “This Isn’t a Konkona-Rahul Film”). Sen demonstrates how Anu and Meethi
negotiate circumstances that are not defined by patriarchy at all. Rather, Sen creates
women characters who are circumscribed by neurological conditions like schizophrenia.
In exploring forces beyond patriarchy that delimit these women’s lives, Sen offers a
feminism that is pluralistic not only in the socio-cultural axes of women’s identities but in
the nature of issues that inform women’s identities. In the film Sen shows more women
who do not resist patriarchy when they enact choices that advance the narrative in crucial
ways. Mrs Gupta, the ageing mother of Anu and Meethi, remains grounded in social
conditioning to the extent of inviting a Tantric priest to exorcise her schizophrenic
daughter. But when Meethi slashes her wrist later that day and is rushed to the hospital,
Mrs Gupta, despite her fear of Anu’s disparagement, chooses to confess the episode of the
Tantric priest. Instead of getting angry with her mother’s irrational attempt to help Meethi,
Anu realizes that moments of lucidity punctuate Meethi’s thought process and all her
thoughts are not hallucinatory. Mrs Gupta’s confession, far from being a resistance to
socio-cultural constrictions, instead throws light on the schizophrenic condition and helps
Anu provide a better informed report on Meethi to the doctor.
If there is one character who finds self-fulfilment, it is Meethi. Meethi’s relentless
search for her home where her husband and five children must be waiting for her operates
as the primary driving force in the narrative. Although it is not clearly stated in the film, it
seems her search begins after Jojo breaks off their engagement. It is perhaps problematic to
suggest that the schizophrenic’s ‘reality’ is circumscribed by the non-schizophrenic world
from within which Meethi enacts her conscious agency; but Meethi’s alternate reality is as
real to her as the reality of her family is to them and as the reality outside and inside the
theatre is for the audience. Like many schizophrenics, Meethi hears voices and responds to
them. Her total commitment to finding the house numbered 15 Park Avenue, including
making Anu drive to different locations to find the non-existent address, defines her
psychological being.
But can we identify Meethi’s disappearance at the end of the film as an act of agency?
Sen gives her directorial spin to Meethi’s reality, at the very end when Anu, Jojo, and the
doctor while searching for 15 Park Avenue lose track of Meethi. As shots of Meethi’s
reality and the reality of Anu-Jojo-audience alternate, we see Meethi entering her 15 Park
Avenue house – in a few brief shots, she is shown entering the house where she finds her
imagined children playing with a younger Jojo. She is greeted by the children, and she and
Jojo kiss briefly before stepping into the house as a happy group with laughter and a
subdued piano score playing in the soundtrack. Right after this, she disappears from the
frame of everyone else, including the audience’s. Meethi chooses to step into her own
reality that everyone through the narrative told her does not exist. By making Meethi take
the step, Aparna Sen demonstrates that the other side of schizophrenic reality is indeed a
possibility that lies beyond the non-schizophrenic mind. In the interview with Raja Sen,
she states she intended to explore Meethi’s consciousness and depict her ‘reality’ as a
comment on the ‘subjective nature of reality’ (Sen “This Isn’t a Konkona-Rahul Film”).
Clearly, Meethi does not need any external aid in choosing to do what she does at the
end; in fact her challenge to the ‘reality’ of her family, well-wishers, audience, and the
director is the boldest step taken by any character in Sen’s films. Meethi becomes invisible
to us as she merges with her ‘real’ world, thereby destabilizing the meanings of ‘visibility’
and ‘reality’. It is perhaps most difficult at this point in Sen’s oeuvre to argue that she has a
feminist (read ‘resistance to patriarchy’) motive informing her work – because Meethi’s
agency can hardly be understood in terms of socio-cultural contexts. But that she realizes
her potential – in finding her 15 Park Avenue home and uniting with her husband and
children – indicates Aparna Sen’s commitment to a broader understanding of feminism
through which women fulfil their dreams and assume identities on their own rights and
independent of dictates of socio-cultural-political institutions. Meethi ‘becomes’ the wife,
mother, and professional in her ‘reality’ and proves everyone wrong who deem her
dis-abled. By taking that giant leap, Meethi speaks to the schizophrenics who fail to be
comprehended. It is perhaps an assertion of the co-existence of different types of reality,
even if it is psychological. Ultimately, if viewed from the perspective of Disablity Studies,
posits Pushpa Naidu Parekh, Sen’s conclusion urges the audience to question the
‘borderlines’ between the ‘normal and the abnormal’ (149).
Aparna Sen addresses a pluralistic Indian society

The trajectory of Sen’s films traces a growth in women characters as they increasingly
make choices out of their own volition and without the aid of external influence.
Moreover, our selected films help us illustrate the generational differences in Indian
society. Sanaka, Ms Stoneham, and Meethi and Dr Verma’s mother, like Paroma, belong
to an older generation in India in which women were conditioned to view their roles in
specific ways that differ greatly from the generation of Dr Verma, Paromita, Meethi, and
Meenakshi. Although the older women have different class and ethnic affiliations, each of
them seems to be circumscribed by their times. Thus, Sanaka did not seek divorce but
quietly maintained her friendship with Mani; Ms Stoneham never married nor did she
leave her ‘home’ for a foreign location, unlike Rosemary. While Dr Verma is older than
Meethi, Paromita and Meenakshi, these women, belonging to the succeeding generation,
respond to their situations in contradistinction to the older women: Paromita ends a
meaningless marriage; Meenakshi fearlessly emphasizes Raja’s Muslim identity to her
husband; and Dr Verma refuses to marry Sanjeev although she is divorced, unlike her
mother who married a second time when she was widowed early.
Secondly, Sen’s camera captures a pluralistic society – an Anglo-Indian teacher’s
poignant relationship with young Indians, a Tamil woman’s interaction with a
cosmopolitan Muslim man, two married women in a traditional North Kolkatan
household, and an upper class successful academic’s relationship with her schizophrenic
sister. We must also consider that Sen focuses on the differently abled in Paromitar
Ek Din and 15 Park Avenue; Khuku, Paromita’s sister-in-law and Meethi can be read
specifically from a ‘gendered disability perspective’ as Sen explores their relationships as
schizophrenic women with dreams of conjugal lives (Parekh 143). Considering these
multiple nodes of identity Sen treats in her films, this essay’s authors prefer (not designate)
the term ‘pluralistic feminist’ for Sen’s directorial oeuvre. In terms of social background,
manners, way of dressing and general appearance, these women are as unlike each other as
possible, but their aspirations for personal freedom and agency often overlap.
In 36 Chowringhee Lane Sen’s treatment of Anglo-Indians illustrates her inclusive
view of Indian society. Glen D’Cruz observes that Sen’s portrayal of Ms Stoneham is a far
cry from the stereotypes of Anglo Indians usually seen in popular Indian cinema because
for Sen, Stoneham signifies an ‘unhomed’ postcolonial subject who has experienced
rejection from the British Raj historically and must necessarily endure dislocation from a
postcolonial modern Indian society. Additionally, as D’Cruz aptly notes, Sen portrays
Violet Stoneham with characteristics that resonate well with many Anglo Indians – her
‘“chi-chi” accent’, her long printed-cotton frocks, her table manners despite the meagre
shrimps she can afford. The general squalor and decay that surrounds her, her connections
with an ailing brother in an old-age home and with near relatives in Australia are
also markers typical to this community (66). Stoneham, representing the distant and
underprivileged relative of the erstwhile colonizer, finds herself an outsider in the

independent ex-colony that she knows as her only ‘home’. While Sen resists
Vaidyanathan’s insensitive comment that Anglo-Indians belong to the ‘“dustbin” of
history’ in an interview with Rediff.com and instead bears witness to their experience of
alienation, she nevertheless depicts Stoneham’s permanent state of social liminality, a
cruel reminder that forces Stoneham to decide on her own what to do: she moves quite
rapidly from becoming dependent on the young couple for moments of joy to finding her
own way to her dark lonely flat by herself (Sen “If I’d Made More Compromises”).
From the ethnic margins of society, Sen goes on to interrogate education and humane
responses in Indian society through the story of a young Tamil woman. Arguably,
Meenakshi’s accidental rebellion against years of ingrained conditioning against the
Muslim other and her gradual awakening to the gap between her (and her family’s)
education and the socio-cultural reality of a pluralistic Indian identity becomes more
glaring when we observe the journey she makes from the first few scenes to the last scene
on the railway platform. Sen captures the cultural essence of Meenakshi even before
introducing her – the gold bangles, the flowers braided through her hair, the bindi and the
sacred white-ash dash on the forehead, the steaming idlis being packed in a stainless steel
lunch-box, instructions in Tamil – in order to anticipate and intensify the disjuncture
Meenakshi will experience shortly. Moreover, her personal actions stemming from her
conditioning, such as not responding in Hindi when spoken to on the bus and her disgust at
Raja’s drinking water from her bottle by touching the rim with his mouth for fear of
contamination of caste purity, encounter a crisis in the face of violence and possible death.
In Paromitar Ek Din Sen’s directorial lens draws attention to a middle-class, fairly
traditional Bengali household – a setting that is familiar to the majority of her audience.
Sen meticulously depicts the characters in tune with their backgrounds: Sanaka’s North
Kolkatan accent, her pan-chewing, her way of tying the saree, her manner of sitting and
general posture, to name a few, ring true of the home-bound traditional housewife
burdened with running a huge household with no exposure to mingling with outsiders in
public spaces; Paromita, on the other hand, belongs to the succeeding generation, she
wears her saree differently, her Bengali accent is South Kolkatan, she is more polished in
her speech owing to her education, she carries herself very differently to Sanaka, and,
when the time comes, she easily assumes a professional role with no sense of inhibition.
Effectively, Paromita succeeds Sanaka in more ways than one; where Sanaka tests her
margins from within the restrictions she encounters as a matriarch of a traditional North
Kolkatan family, she supports Paromita, her daughter-in-law, in resisting the abusive
behavior of her own son. Sanaka and Paromita become two points in the spectrum of a
traditional family which gain strength from each other. Neither of the women is influenced
by external forces such as Rahul (Paroma) or Raja (Mr and Mrs Iyer). Sen celebrates the
friendship between two unlikely members of a family – mother-in-law and daughter-in-
law – as they encounter similar challenges but owing to the difference in their generations,
one encourages certain steps that the other is bold enough and equipped to embrace.
In 15 Park Avenue Sen introduces a very different world of women – upper-middle-
class Hindi-speaking women settled in Kolkata who negotiate their relationships with a
schizophrenic family member. Far from Ms Stoneham’s worn-out dresses, Meenakshi’s
bindi and flowers, Sanaka and Paromita’s sarees, Dr Verma wears expensive silk and
cotton sarees and churidaars, and sports gorgeous shawls on her trip to Bhutan; Meethi,
although seen mostly in ‘nighties’ owing to her medical condition, is shown in very urban
clothing in her younger days as a college girl-turned reporter. They live in an upper-class
spacious house that speaks of their material comforts, and is starkly different from Ms
Stoneham’s dimly-lit, dilapidated flat and Sanaka’s congested household. Moreover, the
sisters hardly visit the kitchen – Dr Verma is much more likely to spend time on her laptop
than to cook meals for the family. The absence of a prominent male figure who determines
the course of events is also a striking feature of this film.
In this nexus of class and gender, Sen locates the axis of disability by exploring the
trauma of gang rape that interrupted the relationship between Meethi and Jojo which, in
turn, may have accelerated Meethi’s deterioration. Following Pushpa Naidu Parekh’s
observation that Indian cinema is increasingly engaging with the disabled or differently
abled in sensitive but not sentimental ways, it is evident that Sen challenges ‘biomedical
models of psychiatric patients’ as the narrative along with the leading characters gradually
begin to create a space for Meethi’s ‘real’ world that is full of love and desire for her
conjugal family (150 –51). Anu begins to question if Meethi’s world is delusional just
because it is not tangible to the rest of her family or doctors. Meethi accesses a space that
no one can influence and she enacts her agency by stepping out of the cinematic frame and
entering her own ‘reality’. Although the formidable Dr Verma does not need to rebel
against social mores (we must remember, though, she chooses to dedicate her life to
Meethi’s schizophrenia at the cost of her personal life with Sanjeev) she is left out in the
cold when Meethi transitions into her own space.
Conclusion
As Aparna Sen’s directorial lens pans over a pluralistic society and tells the stories of
ordinary women negotiating their lives through extraordinary choices, we observe a pattern
that links them in Sen’s oeuvre. Unlike Paroma, who could hardly enact agency in either
resisting Rahul or in accepting her limitations as a traditional housewife, each protagonist
we examine in our article gradually embraces agency, although often unconsciously.
The progression in the mode of enacting agency is clearly evident in the following
trajectory: the vulnerable Ms Stoneham enacts little agency in not leaving her ‘home’ and,
on being cast away by her younger friends, is compelled to embrace her loneliness and
outsider status; Meenakshi takes a short step forward and enacts unpremeditated agency in
choosing to save Raja’s life. This gradually emergent self-motivated agency gains strength
almost surreptitiously in Sanaka and becomes more pronounced in Paromita’s active
resistances to their circumstances, while Dr Verma’s unquestioned agency in committing to
Meethi’s caretaking and not to Sanjeev perhaps pales in comparison to Meethi’s resilient
insistence upon and ultimate immersion in her ‘real’ world.
Progressively, the women characters from different walks of life demonstrate Aparna
Sen’s pluralistic feminist concerns of self-realization, utilization of potential, and
self-fulfilment. As each character builds upon the strength of the former in the spectrum of
Sen’s women, their nuanced portrayals signal the tenacious and slow progress in the
agencies claimed by women in Indian society. While these women do not get consumed by
their circumstances, unlike Mumtaz and her daughter in Mahesh Bhandarkar’s Chandni
Bar (2001), they do not rupture the social fabric to claim their identities either, as
discussed in the example of Astitva above. The subtlety with which Aparna Sen depicts the
balancing acts of women in Indian society, concludes the present authors, makes her an
astute witness of women’s experiences in Indian society.
Notes
1. Also see Shoma Chatterji for reasons why some scholars think Aparna Sen resists the ‘feminist’
label.
2. The connotations surrounding the term Indian woman are various. Starting from the image of
Bharatmata to the ideal woman of mainstream cinema, the woman-nation connection has been
perceived as an intentional and politically motivated norm of coercing the figure of the woman
for the purposes of a nationalist patriarchy. (See Virdi for discussions of portrayals of women in
mainstream cinema.) In contradistinction, Aparna Sen qualifies and expands the ‘Indian
woman’s’ roles and representations beyond what mainstream cinema projects.
3. The character of Paroma, from Sen’s 1984 film of the same name, was a key factor in
establishing Sen as a filmmaker with feminist concerns. This film, which explores Paroma’s
search for self-worth and sexual liberation as a homemaker from a middle-class Bengali family,
gave Sen iconic status. But Paroma, who suffers a complete emotional meltdown after her affair
with a photographer friend (Rahul), appears to be much weaker compared to later characters in
Sen’s films.
4. ‘I do not see “Mr and Mrs Iyer” as a love story of the “Brief Encounter” type. It is instead a
growing up tale, the story of a woman walking into adulthood’ ().
5. See Datta about ‘Bollywood’ films that continue to represent women, their bodies, and
sexualities in ways that appeal to the male gaze. Datta highlights the contradiction between
the influence of satellite television that inspires Westernized clothes and lifestyles and the
preservation of conservative approaches to women and their roles in society as created in these
films that today access global markets effortlessly.
6. See individual sections on the four films for brief plot summaries.
7. Compare Sen’s focus on the complex alliances Indian women negotiate with Mahesh
Manjrekar’s film Astitva. The female protagonist, Aditi Pandit (played by Tabu), is forced to
conceal her extra-marital liaison with her music teacher, and, when challenged by her husband
years later, tells him the truth, criticizes him for his lack of empathy, and leaves the house.
Unlike Manjrekar, who offers Aditi’s departure from her marital home as the only resolution of a
situation where the discovery of a woman’s active engagement with her sexual desire disrupts
the hegemonic patriarchy, Aparna Sen complicates the role of divorce in the context of
companionate marriage in Paromitar Ek Din.
8. See Loomba on western feminism in India, where she discusses the implications of the term
western for feminist theorists from India. Loomba focuses on the difficulties of naming an
effective and inclusive genre of feminism for India when Anglo-American feminisms are
deemed (and sometimes actually are) hegemonic in the social context of India, but naming
feminism itself as western also effectively brands it, in patriarchal terms at least, as an outside
influence, completely useless in India.
9. In this regard, she is somewhat like women in post-globalization popular Hindi film, who keep
up appearances, but often have their way. She is reminiscent, for example, of Simran’s mother
Lajjo from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), who carries out her own will without ever
essentially confronting her husband
Notes on contributors
Mantra Roy received her PhD in English in 2010 from the University of South Florida with a
specialization in gender, caste, and race in Indian and African American Literature and Cinema. She
is currently pursuing her MLIS (Masters in Library and Information Science) at the University of
Washington. She continues to watch, read, and critically write about cinema.
Aparajita Sengupta explores the relationship between nation, women and the idea of realism in
Indian Cinema in her doctoral dissertation titled “Nation, Fantasy, and Mimicry: Elements of
Political Resistance in Postcolonial Indian Cinema” (University of Kentucky, 2011) She continues to
write about these issues with reference to mainstream and parallel Indian cinema.
References
Armes, Roy. Third World Film Making and the West. Berkeley & London: U of California P, 1987.
Print.
Arora, Poonam and Katrina Irving. “Culturally Specific Texts, Culturally Bound Audiences:
Ethnography in the Place of its Reception.” Journal of Film and Video 43.1/2 (1991): 111–112.
Web. 27 Dec. 2010.
Bose, Brinda. “Sex, Lies and the Genderscape: The Cinema of Aparna Sen.” Women: A Cultural
Review 8.3 (1997): 319– 326. Web. 20 Nov. 2010.
Chatterjee, Partha. “Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonized Women: The Contest in India.”
American Ethnologist 16.2 (1989): 622– 633. Print.
Chatterji, Shoma A. Parama and Other Outsiders: The Cinema of Aparna Sen. Calcutta: Parumita,
2002. Print.
Datta, Sangeeta. “Globalisation and Representations of Women in Indian Cinema.” Social Scientist
28.3/4 (2000): 71 – 82. Web. 16 April 2008.
D’Cruz, Glenn. “Anglo-Indians in Hollywood, Bollywood, and Arthouse Cinema.” Journal of
Intercultural Studies 28.1 (Feb. 2007): 55 – 68. Web. 15 July 2011.
Gooptu, Sharmistha. Bengali Cinema: ‘An Other Nation.’ London & New York: Routledge, 2011.
Print.
Loomba, Ania. “Tangled Histories: Indian Feminism and Anglo-American Feminist Criticism.”
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 12.2 (Autumn 1993): 271– 278. Web. 28 Mar. 2012.
Parekh, PushpaNaidu. “Gender, Disability and the Postcolonial Nexus.” Wagadu. Special Issue:
Intersecting Gender and Disability Perspectives in Rethinking Postcolonial Identities 4 (2007):
142– 161. Web. 14 July 2011.

Ramanathan, Geetha. “Aesthetics As Woman: Aparna Sen’s Paroma.” Quarterly Review of Film and
Video 17.1 (2000): 63 – 73. Web. 20 Nov. 2010.
Ray, Raka. Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India. Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota
P, 1999. Print.
Sen, Aparna. “If I’d Made More Compromises I May Have Been More Successful.” Rediff.com
(1998): n.p. Web. 28 Nov. 2010.
Sen, Aparna. “‘This isn’t a Konkona-Rahul film.’ Interview with Raja Sen.” Rediff.com (Jan. 2006):
n.p. Web. 20 Nov. 2010.
Sen, Samita. “Toward a Feminist Politics? The Indian Women’s Movement in Historical
Perspective.” Policy Research Report on Gender and Development. Working Paper Series No. 9.
Apr. 2000. Web. 10 Mar. 2012.
Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003. Web. 25 May 2010.
Viswanathan, Renuka. “Mr and Mrs Iyer: Such a Long Journey.” Economic and Political Weekly
8.43 (25 – 31 Oct. 2003): 4511– 4512. Web. 30 Dec. 2010.
Filmography
15 Park Avenue. Dir. Aparna Sen. SPS Telefilms, 2005. Film.
36 Chowringhee Lane. Dir. Aparna Sen. Film-Valas, 1981. Film.
Astitva. Dir. Mahesh Manjrekar. Jhamu Sughand Productions, 2000. Film.
Basanta Bilap. Dir. Dinen Gupta. Sonali Productions, 1973. Film.
Chandni Bar. Dir. Madhur Bhandarkar. R. and Lata Mohan, 2001. Film.
Ekhoni. Dir. Tapan Sinha. K.L. Kapoor Productions, 1971. Film.
Mr and Mrs Iyer. Dir. Aparna Sen. Triplecom Media Productions, 2002. Film.
Paroma. Dir. Aparna Sen. Usha Enterprises, 1984. Film.
Paromitar Ek Din [House of Memories]. Dir. Aparna Sen. India. Suravi, 2000. Film.
Pather Panchali. Dir. Satyajit Ray. Govt. of West Bengal, 1955. Film.
Samapti. Dir. Satyajit Ray. Sony Pictures, 1961. Film.
Yugant. Dir. Aparna Sen. National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC), 1995. Film.

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South Asian Popular Culture

ISSN: 1474-6689 (Print) 1474-6697 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsap20

Women and emergent agency in the cinema of

Mantra Roy & Aparajita Sengupta

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2014.937056

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Women and emergent agency in the cinema of Aparna Sen

*Corresponding author. Email: docmantra@gmail.com

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

Aparna Sen as actor

Aparna Sen as director

Aparna Sen’s women

circumstances. If we see a consensus in these characters, for example, regarding

household in Paromitar Ek Din, and a schizophrenic upper-class urban English-speaking

dismantling of patriarchal institutions like meaningless marriages, we argue Aparna

the progress her characters make.

Ms Stoneham must remain lonely in 36 Chowringhee Lane

Interestingly, Stoneham demonstrates more decisiveness in refusing Rosemary’s

Mr Iyer and Mrs Iyer: Why Meenakshi saves Raja

It can be argued here that even if it is an unthinking reaction, it is the reaction of a

Paromitar Ek Din: moving towards mature choices

in-law in this film), but the one after Paroma as well.

Meethi’s Choice: 15 Park Avenue over the ‘real’ world

Aparna Sen addresses a pluralistic Indian society

underprivileged relative of the erstwhile colonizer, finds herself an outsider in the

142– 161. Web. 14 July 2011.

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