Representing Women’s Singleness in Contemporary Indian Cinema

In the last two decades single people, particularly single women have been emerging globally and in South Asia as a significant demographic category. In India there are 39.8 million single women comprising 7.4% of the total population of Indian women (2001 census). However women’s status and identity in society, state, law, policies and social discourse are still defined by marriage and the heteropatriarchal family making it impossible for single women to claim their basic rights. Against this dominant construction, a trend is emerging in contemporary popular Hindi (Bollywood) films [Queen (2014); Highway (2014); Piku (2015); Pink (2016); Masan (2015); Anarkali of Arrah (2017)] of representing the single woman as an autonomous entity who chooses to live outside marriage and asserts herself against the family, community and state power. However this is not articulated as an overtly “feminist” stance unlike the progressive cinema of the 1980’s exemplified by Parama (1985), Umbartha (1982) or Arth (1982) which focus on women’s failed marriages. These recent films construct strong female protagonists often from villages and small towns who aspire for a life undefined by conjugal, kinship or community identities lived as autonomous citizens of a new globalised India.

The proposed paper will examine these cinematic representations of women’s singleness to understand how they challenge the hegemony of marriage, validate singleness as a life option and question the discursive constructions of women’s identities overdetermined by marriage in law, policy and social discourse.