SOURCE: Natarajan, Nalini. “Woman, Nation and Narration in Midnight's Children.” In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, pp. 399-409. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 1999.

In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the midnight of Indian independence is represented through refraction of the colors of the Indian flag onto national celebrations (extravagant ‘saffron rockets’ and ‘green sparkling rain’) and the bodies of women giving birth: ‘green-skinned’, ‘whites of eyes … shot with saffron’ (MC [Midnight's Children], 132).¹ We may note significant juxtapositions and identities: woman's pain with communal joy, human with national birth, woman's body as the national tricolor flag.

GENDER AND NATION

The scene illustrates the centrality of gender in the space of the social imaginary that constitutes ‘nation’ while indicating the dissimilar elements that comprise the collectivity of nationalism. The two women whose ordeal in labor is represented in national colors are from the more marginalized sections (by the dominant middle-class Hindu ethos) of Indian society: a Muslim woman and a humble street singer. The text provides an occasion for introducing my concerns in this essay: the spectacle or visual effect of woman as it shapes the national imaginary, the way woman functions as sign in the imagining of community, the relation of these aspects of woman as sign and spectacle (as figurations of the beloved, mother, and daughter) to the failure of the secularization project that ‘Indian’ culture generally, and the Bombay cinema industry in particular, envisaged for itself in the early decades of Indian independence.

[…]

WOMAN AS SIGNIFIER FOR NATION

Woman functioned as a signifier in many ways in the contrary dialectic of stasis and change in the imagining of India. It was required not only to imagine one out of many, an operation requiring a relinquishing of the caste-based hierarchies to a pan-Indian modernity, but also to render this one ontologically stable, an effort that inevitably privileged the dominant cultural group—broadly speaking, the Hindu middle classes.² In reading narrative against this paradoxical cultural effort, I look at woman in three moments in nationalism: (1) the movement from regional to national in the ‘modernizing’ process; (2) the threat of communal or civil rupture within the body politic; and (3) the rise of fundamentalism. Woman's body is a site for testing out modernity, in the first moment; in the second, as ‘Bharat Mata’ or ‘Mother India’, a site for mythic unity in the face of fragmentation; and in the third, as ‘daughter of the nation’, a site for countering the challenge posed by ‘Westernization’, popularly read as ‘women's liberation’.

WOMAN AND NATION IN MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN: THE SCOPIC AND THE CIVIC

A nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which … was … quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream—it was a mass fantasy.

(MC, 129-30)

The text I am reading traces the fortunes of a Muslim family in complex allegorical relation to the fate of the nation. Woman occupies a minor role in the narrative, but my argument foregrounds her marginality as a strategy of reading. I have already indicated the symbiotic connection between Midnight's Children and Bombay cinema. The representation of women is a startling instance of the connection, and it is possible to read the text as parodying Bombay cinema's use of women. At the same time, the text's own use of woman's body as signifier for nation implicates it within a critique of male-dominated culture.

My first argument links the scopic (that which is seen) with the civic. Synecdoche, the imagination of a whole from its parts, essential to nation construction, also becomes the way woman is perceived in Midnight's Children. The first national subject textualized in Rushdie is the German-educated doctor Aadam Aziz. He returns home with a void in his head—European scepticism has destroyed his faith in ‘Islam’ and in ‘India’. The void becomes the space of desire. His reintegration occurs over the body of a woman patient, who later becomes his wife. Because she is in purdah (veiled) she is shown to him through holes in a sheet. As he treats her in parts he begins to imagine her as whole. This coincides with his imagining a ‘whole’ Indian identity for himself, instead of his regional Kashmiri one.

The synecdochic process of discovery or construction of Naseem Aziz is a camera technique familiar in Bombay cinema. The camera focuses on the heroine's body part by part. On one level, this defers to the censors; on another, it leaves the job of construction to the male hero and the audience. The popular film Mere Mehboob (1963), for instance, depicts the hero's discovery (which is also imaginative construction) of the woman he loves.³ He, like Aadam Aziz, has only seen her in parts—walking fully veiled on a university campus. The woman's covering is a sign of orthodox values (here the national culture exploits the titillations of Islamic restrictions on women as presented by many producers who work in Bombay cinema) while the university campus is a signifier for modernity. In another film, Pakeezah (1971), a viewing of the heroine's feet takes place on a train.⁴ The university and the train are both symbols and spaces of modernization and integration. The audience participates at once in the potential for female viewing offered by a modernizing India, as well as the retreat into traditional taboos that monitor the revealing of the female body. Such representations demarcate the space of desire as male. This imaginary uncovering/covering of woman becomes the site for national self-definition, a site where the contradictory facets of the national ideology are played out. Woman should fulfil the individual male psychic need for scopic/sexual gratification and yet be the figurehead for national culture, guarded by the censors. The contradictions in woman's position as spectacle may be seen in the social dramas of contemporary India—bride viewings by eligible males, the spectacles of lavish marriages financed by the fathers of brides, bride burnings caused by ‘inadequate’ dowry, the resurgent spectacle of widow-sacrifice, or sati. In each case, the body of woman becomes a focus for the symbolisms of cultural and religious reaction.

While male discursive dismembering (such as Saleem's mutilated finger or bruised scalp) symbolizes national rupture, the representation of woman as parts in both fictional and filmic discourse provides an occasion for imagining wholeness. Although she is a symbol for wholeness, her own integrity remains secondary. The text announces within brackets ‘(he has told her to come out of purdah)’, the punctuation indicating that woman's freedom is an aside in the narrative of nationalism. When the couple move to Amritsar, Naseem Aziz finds herself cruelly exposed to the multiplicity of the Subcontinent as Aziz sets fire to her purdah veils:

Buckets are brought; the fire goes out; and Naseem cowers on the bed as about thirty-five Sikhs, Hindus and untouchables throng in the smoke-filled room.

(MC, 33)

Imaginative construction of woman's body is a metaphor for constructing national identity from regional, and the exposure of woman's body is a signal for the melting pot of secular modernity. The text represents this modernity as a sexual threat for women—note the connotations of ‘bed’, ‘through’. For in the political context of decolonization, modernity is required of Indian women. An Oedipal trace could be observed here—we recall that Aadam Aziz's mother also came out of purdah in order to finance her son's education. Aadam Aziz demands of his wife after the purdah-burning: ‘Forget about being a good Kashmiri girl. Start thinking about being a modern Indian woman’ (MC, 33). Women are required to shed their traditional inhibitions; their reluctance to do this could indicate disjunctive articulations in the discourse of nationalism, which claims to construct one out of many. ‘You, or what?’ says Naseem at Aziz's request that she come out of purdah. ‘You want me to walk naked in front of strange men’ (MC, 33).

Incidentally, we may note the difference to woman in Western representations. In Alice Doesn't, de Lauretis quotes Mulvey's account of the paradigmatic film narrative where woman is first object of the collective male gaze and then reserved for the hero's eyes alone.⁵ The movement of woman as scopic object between public and private spheres is mediated by the wider sociohistorical processes that affect gendering and by the specific anxieties of nationalism. Rushdie's text reveals how women are tied into the process of middle-class homogenization as India modernizes. As part and parcel of the new ‘nationhood’ and its economic, social, and cultural coordinates, woman becomes an index of the erosion of discrete regional and caste cultures in the movement from regionalism to modernity. The class anxieties that imposed a ‘new kind of segregation’ on women in the nineteenth century are modified so that women may emerge in public.⁶ Thus in Rushdie's text, woman moves from man's individual gaze to the collective gaze of many. But this emergence into the public gaze is as problematic as women's seclusion.

Frantz Fanon has discussed the politics behind the veil in the colonizer's attempt to decimate the colonized culture. The battle to end purdah in the colonial context is inflected by the colonizer's wish to ‘rescue’ the colonized woman from the ‘backward’ colonized male.⁷ Here in decolonization, the newly independent male demands what he resisted during colonialism, or conceded grudgingly in response to British accusations of ‘backwardness’. In both cases, the uncovering of women's bodies is related more to the politics of men's power relations than any interest in female subjectivity.

Rushdie's text ironizes the formation of the national bourgeois imaginary through the relations of Aadam Aziz and Naseem. Although Bombay cinema retains for the male the scopic advantage, and consistently portrays woman as an entity to be discovered and protected in the formation of a new India of patriarchally monitored ‘progress’ for woman, Rushdie's text unseats these confidences in the spectator/subject. For Aadam Aziz's attempt at mental construction fails—he misapprehends Naseem Aziz. Synecdoche allows a space for the imagined object to assert its autonomy. When the whole is assembled it turns out to be very different from the sum of its parts. Naseem Aziz emerges as the stronger partner in the relationship, defying her husband's desires by becoming fat and refusing to do his sexual bidding. Communication between the couple is forever curtailed through Naseem's silence; her body promises not cognitive wholeness, but rupture.

‘MOTHER INDIA’

Naseem Aziz's daughter Amina, though conventionally unattractive, is sexually precocious: she steals her older sister's fiancée. For the early chapters of her appearance, she lives underground with her fugitive lover—a textual absence. Like Naseem, unmarried women exist only partially in discourse. When she surfaces again, as wife and mother-to-be, national imagining goes side by side with Partition riots. In the Delhi sections of Midnight's Children the imagined India reappears in the visual space of the bioscope—the Dilli Dekho machine that shows children the collage of a unified India:

Inside the peepshow of Lifafa Dass were pictures of the Taj Mahal, and Meenakshi temple, and the holy Ganges … untouchables being touched; educated persons sleeping in large numbers on railway lines.

(MC, 84)

We may note here the voyeuristic terminology: peepshow, the sight of untouchables being touched, of the educated homeless … the exclusions that help the bourgeois Indian child still dream of Indian unity. Meanwhile, in the geographical space of Delhi, attempts at unity are shown to be futile. A Hindu revivalist group (the Ravana gang) terrorizes Muslims, and the Muslim crowd turns on the lone Hindu Lifafa Dass. Once again, the spectacle of woman's body, Amina Sinai provides a national image and averts a riot:

‘Listen’, my mother shouted, ‘Listen well, I am with child. I am a mother who will have a child and I am giving this man my shelter. Come on now, if you want to kill, kill a mother also and show the world what men you are!’

(MC, 86)

Woman as spectacle of motherhood once again evokes dreams of unity and wholeness. Woman here is the dream of unified India, and her unborn child its hypothetical citizen. In pregnancy she is the symbol of the wholeness of the men themselves. Motherhood, which could be a privileged site for women and also a potential challenge to patriarchal systems through its admitting of, in Kristeva's terms, an ‘otherness within the self’, is appropriated for nationalistic purposes. As Klaus Theweleit has said, ‘woman is an infinite untrodden territory of desire which at every stage of historical deterritorialization, men in search of material for utopias have inundated with their desires.’ He further adds that it is the lure of a freer existence that marks this territory of desire and is most often indulged in by men in search of power rather than those already dominant.⁸

How does the figure of Mother cement nation? She suggests common mythic origins. Like the land (which gives shelter and ‘bears’), she is eternal, patient, essential. National claims have always been buttressed by claims to the soil. The linking of ‘Mother’ with land gains strength from Sita, who was the daughter of Mother Earth. During moments of ‘national’ resurgence, the land is figured as a woman and a mother. In the era of militant Hindu resurgence in the late nineteenth century, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Anand Math captured the figuration through its famous slogan ‘Vande Mataram,’ Victory to the Mother. The film version of this work expressed the role of woman in the euphoria of a newly independent India. Thus, ‘Mother India’ is an enormously powerful cultural signifier, gaining strength not only from atavistic memories from the Hindu epics, Sita, Sati Savitri, Draupadi, but also its use in moments of national (typically conflated with Hindu) cultural resurgence.

Figuring woman/mother as nation also suggests another of the sustaining analogies of the myth of nation. In an analysis of the foundational fictions of Latin America, Doris Sommer speaks of how the analogy of family helped to represent marriage between the different racial groups that comprised Latin American nations.⁹ In India, however, exogamous marriage (across regions, religions, castes, and subcastes) was not a historical reality. Hence the analogy of nation as family could only lead to the appropriation and invisibility of minority groups in the hegemonic Hindu national narrative.

Let us now see how this appropriation of the maternal body as the ‘imaginary site where meaning (or life) is generated,’¹⁰ which excludes women from being meaning makers in their own right, is cemented by film. We have said that Hindi film took upon itself the task of covering the fissures in Indian society through an ‘India’ it represented for its viewers. This ‘India’ was best captured by its ‘values’ figured in woman. Mother as presiding over the link between nation and land/family found its classic expression in a film of the late fifties. I refer to Mother India, a film released in 1957, still said to be screened in India every day of the year. Here the nation gains its strength and validity from its metonymic identification of woman with land and family. In Mother India, the mother Radha works the land as a serf and is exploited by the forces of capital in Sukhilala the moneylender. She works the land and provides for her family after the death of her husband. And she stands for woman celebrated in the mythic Hindu narratives—of Sita in the Ramayana and Draupadi in the Mahabbarata, who encounter privations (and in Sita's case rejection and expulsion) in the service of their hero-husbands. Her younger son Birju joins the dacoits in order to avenge his family's ruin. This has been read as an allegory of radical action.¹¹ But the mother kills her own son, using her moral authority within the family and the nation to uphold the law, making the figure a force for conservatism.

In conflating the maternal with the national, the film extinguishes the heterogeneity of Indian women in favor of the Hindu model. The potential of different cultural formations to interrupt one another and reduce the tendency to privilege man's version of woman over historical women is thereby lost. This stereotyping of Hindu Woman as Mother India gives great impetus to the Hindu fundamentalist project, and makes woman's body the very site of fundamentalism.

Feminist criticism has stressed this need to distinguish between woman as sign and women as historical subjects in their own right.¹² Here feminist perception intersects that of critics of Hollywood cinema who argue that by relying on the primacy of the visual, cinema manages to efface real women in its representation of the image of woman. The image privileges what is present over that which is absent. As Christian Metz has said, the mastery of technique in cinema ‘underlines and denounces the lack on which the whole arrangement is based (the absence of the object, replaced by its reflection), an exploit which consists at the same time of making this absence forgotten.’¹³

This disguised lack in cinema has a communal as well as sexual dimension in the case of the film Mother India. In this archetypal film of nationalism, the Muslim identity of the actress who played the recognizably Hindu character symbolizing the nation is at once appropriated and emptied of significance. The main actress who played Mother India was the Muslim actress Nargis, and she has always been associated in the minds of the public with Mother India. Her marriage to the Hindu Sunil Dutt, who played her son in the film, cemented her image as Mother India. The cultural message of the film has always been seen as Hindu, with its echoes of Radha, Parvati, Sita, with all of the traditional self-sacrificing virtues ascribed to these women.¹⁴ We have, then, a nationalist articulation of Hindu religion and culture focusing on the figure of a Muslim actress.

Woman, symbol of Hindu nationalism, covers real women in India, heterogeneous, various, of many castes, religions, and geographical regions. As spectacle on screen, the regional identity of the actress is usually subsumed under the hegemonizing cultural sway of the Hindi heartland, the Indo-Gangetic plain. The metonymic representation of all women—whatever their cultural identity—as Hindu women is a recurring feature in Hindi film. Indeed, a large majority of popular film actresses have in fact come from the ‘minority’ sections, but rarely are these sections the subject of the national film industry. Because in Indian popular culture, attention is focused on the person of the actor or actress (gossip magazines about these characters constitute a major popular discourse), such metonymic representations obscure, at the level of individual actor, the fissures in Indian society, and may work to appropriate minority groups.

Read against the cultural politics of the Bombay film industry, the spectacle of Amina as Mother India in Midnight's Children yields interesting ironies. The conflations of mother with origin, land, family, and Rule of Law, upheld in the Bombay cinema, are exposed in Rushdie's text. Amina is mother but not to her own son, sharing the raising of Vanitha, the street singer's son, with Mary Pereira. The text is much more interested in maternal betrayal. When Saleem's telepathic gifts give him an inside view of women, he uncovers maternal adultery. But this adultery can be read in terms of national anxiety, suggesting the text's complicity with the imaginary of Bombay cinema. His mother, auntie Pia, and Leela Sabarmati become the collective scapegoat for the emergence of militancy and national heroism, especially significant in the context of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965. Once again it is the expulsion of Sita enacted. The graphic scene linking women's purity with national events is conveyed textually through the letter Salim sends to a Commander Sabarmati. He cuts out words from national newspapers relating current events to phrase a letter of warning. Once again, over the body and morality of woman, national events take shape. There is a public unanimity in the reaction to Commander Sabarmati's murder of this wife (‘We knew a Navy man wouldn't stand for it’ [MC, 314]). The ironies are obvious—woman's shame, dispensable in the urge to modernize, becomes a mystified area once the crisis has passed, and India, from being victim, is now the aggressor and victor in subcontinental politics (the two wars with Pakistan, the second over the creation of Bangladesh, established this position for India).

WOMAN IN POSTINDEPENDENCE ANXIETIES

In Midnight's Children, the dream image of woman as embodying the desire for nation becomes subjected to greater ironies even as male desire (represented first in Saleem's erotic attraction to his Auntie Pia and then to his sister, Jamila Singer) continues to provide the narrative's impetus. Each time this desire is deflated. Women recur as different kinds of bodies: the body in adultery, the body aging.

But the myth of nation is in fast decay, especially in the context of partition and war, and with it the dream image of woman. Male dismembering—as Saleem loses first hearing, then hair, then finger—is symptomatic of deep national anxiety. But this, too, happens in relation to the anxiety aroused by women. The description of the other children of midnight allows the narrator to imagine many versions of women who are no longer idealized or a dream, but victims of the brutal realities of poverty. There is Sundari, the beggar, whose face is slashed because her beauty blinds people, but now ‘was earning a healthy living’ and because of her story ‘received more alms than any other member of her family’ (MC, 236), and Parvati the witch, who ‘stood mildly amid gasping crowds while her father drove spikes through her neck’ (MC, 239). In contemporary India, poverty drives women to present a different kind of spectacle. Wee Willie Winkie's wife Vanitha, the street singer, is a common sight in India's big cities, her rags barely covering the body that in other circumstances is so mystified a site. In poverty, woman's shame is dispensable.

And woman's shame is the cornerstone of Islamic fundamentalism. The status of woman as a sign constantly subordinated to male-dictated contexts is demonstrated in the transformation of Saleem's once uninhibited sister the Brass Monkey into Jamila Singer when the family moves to Pakistan. The Brass Monkey, like the Monkey God Hanuman in the Ramayana, has entered the world of corruption (read as Western influence on women). Thus she is friendly with the ‘hefty’ Europeans of Walsingham School and plots with them to discredit the young boys. Later she (temporarily) embraces Christianity. But she can hold her own against these girls—she defeats Evie Burns in a street fight. Saleem's narrative adopts the male-oriented rhetoric of the nation—women are the electorate to be wooed by those in power (MC, 221).

(Woman becomes the site of the East—West cultural battle so often depicted in Bombay cinema. The classic example in this genre is the film Purab aur Paschim (East—West) (1970), where Indian values for women are reiterated over European. The ‘Westernized’ heroine (played by the actress Saira Bano) smokes, wears miniskirts, and is reformed into Indian womanhood by her love for the hero (played by Manoj Kumar, a recognized ‘nationalist’ filmmaker),¹⁵Purab aur Paschim uses woman to vent cultural anxiety in the wake of war and migration. The film targets Indian immigrants in Britain (metonymically represented by women who wear short dresses, smoke, and drink) and the nationalist message of the film is the containment of the threat to national culture (once again represented by Hindu ideals for women) from diasporic Indian populations. In other films of the seventies heroines are similarly reformed or punished for daring convention (Thodisi Bewafai and Do Anjane, for example).

So too, in Midnight's Children, the taming of Jamila Singer, which now involves not the exhibition but the extinguishing of woman as spectacle. As a child, the Brass Monkey was at the center of spectacle—she set fire to shoes. In the cosmopolitan world of Bombay her exuberance was irrepressible, but now, in fundamentalist Pakistan, she is captive to the Pakistani nationalist rhetoric and its view of women. She becomes martyr to the idea of nation. The wheel has come full circle when Jamila's voice, dream/imaginary of the Pakistani nation, is dissociated from her body. Heard by all on the Voice of Pakistan, she is placed during public appearances behind a perforated sheet; ‘this was how the history of our family once again became the fate of a nation … being the new daughter-of-the-nation, her character began to owe more to the most strident aspects of the national persona than to the child-world of her monkey years’ (MC, 375). As inspirer of men's souls, she must hide her body: ‘Jamila, daughter, your voice will be a sword for purity; it will be the weapon with which we shall cleanse men's souls’ (MC, 376). Because ‘no city which locks its women away is ever short of whores’, Saleem Sinai acts on his country's dual view of woman, as saint and whore. While the sister he desires sings of holiness and hides her body, Saleem's lusts drive him to ‘women of the street’—latrine cleaners, Tai Bibi, whore of strange odors, and eventually Padma, the muscular pickle maker, whose hairy and strong forearms fascinate him.

Midnight's Children represents and ironizes not only the dream image of woman really servicing the psychic needs of the male subject constructed at the time of decolonization, but also her flip side, fat, gross, dirty but strong, as, from the male narrator's point of view, the dream of nation turns to nightmare in the wake of Indo-Pakistani postcolonial history. The text thus demonstrates woman's body's continued exploitation as a sign (albeit not a fixed one—the role of shame, and of spectacle, for instance, keeps changing), and the shifting space it occupies in the tentative process of decolonization and nation forming imaginatively represented in Midnight's Children. Reading Rushdie against Bombay cinema reveals gender as a trope in the narrative imagining of nation. This analysis hopes to reveal how all narratives imagining nation—sophisticated postmodern as well as mass cultural—collude in the engendering of nation as male through their representation of the female body. Thus, though Rushdie's representation parodies this engendering, moments in the text are complicit with Bombay cinema's signifying practices on women.

Notes

1. Quotations from Midnight's Children are cited in the text with page numbers in parentheses using the abbreviation MC Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (New York: Avon, 1980).

2. Throughout this essay I refer to ‘Hindu middle classes’ not as an essentialized religious or cultural group, but as a construct of a cultural production relying on recognizable Hindu symbolisms. For the recent political use of Hinduism, see Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen, Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993). By ‘modernization’ I mean the postindependence changes caused by increased intranational mobility of the professional and clerical sectors, and the legal changes in women's status with the widespread education and visibility of women. These are distinct from the role of women in modernization during reform and nationalism. See Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nation and Its Women’, in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 116-58. See Immanuel Wallerstein's discussion of ‘modernity’ and Westernization, ‘Culture as the ideological Battleground of the Modern World System’, Global Culture, ed. Mike Featherstone (London, Newbury Park, and New Delhi: Sage, 1990), 45.

3. Made by H. S. Rawail, this film was very popular in the sixties, chiefly because of its music. The sixties was a decade of euphoric nationalism, centering in the early half around the figure of Nehru and fuelled by the war with China and the two wars with Pakistan.

4. Although released in 1971, this is essentially a film of the late fifties as it took twenty years to complete. In mood and representation of women, it echoes the earlier period of filmmaking. The fifties and sixties were notable for the preponderance of Muslim themes. See Hameeduddin Mahmood, The Kaleidoscope of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: East West Press, 1974), 84.

5. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 139.

6. See Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, ‘Recasting Women: An Introduction’, in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Sangari and Vaid (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 10-11.

7. Frantz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959), 35-67.

8. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 294.

9. Doris Sommer, ‘The Foundational Fictions of Latin America’, Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 71-98.

10. Mary Jacobus, Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 7.

11. Vijay Mishra, ‘The Texts of “Mother India”’, Kunapipi 11, 1 (1989): 119-37, 134.

12. Mary Poovey, ‘Speaking of the Body: Mid-Victorian Constructions of Female Desire’, in Body/Politics, 29.

13. Mary Ann Doane, ‘Technology, Representation, and the Feminine,’ in Body/Politics, 170-76.

14. Mishra, ‘Texts’, 125-26.

15. The director is noted for his interest in nationalist themes. The film in question deals with the protection of Indian values for women in an era of change. To assess the nationalist mood at the time, it is useful to note that this era was framed by the two wars with Pakistan—1965 and 1971 (Sarcar, Indian Cinema, 147).