Modernity, Globality, Sexuality, and the City: A Reading of Indian Cinema

This essay examines the impact of modernities and globalities on cities and sexualities in postcolonial India, arguing that it has taken another monumental movement since colonization—globalization— for us to come to terms with our own modernities. The essay argues that the cinematic representation of our cities—as well as of our ambiguous, multiplicitous sexualities—mark these tumultuous changes in our sociopolitical fabric. The city has occupied an ambivalent position in the Indian nationalist imaginary throughout the process of nation-building. It often occupies a confrontational as well as contemplative space signifying modernity and its concurrent promise, as well as ills relative to the ‘traditional’ ethics of a very old culture, even while representing ‘progress’ and ‘development’. Such progress, seen as necessary but demeaning, is perceived as a moral degeneracy of the nation easily analogous with female sexual transgression/ promiscuity with the nation personified as woman. Yet the same signifier simultaneously reveals a metamorphosed autonomy of the female Indian self. Non-normative female behaviour—particularly sexual— has always constituted a liminal space, a site both of empowerment through transgression and containment through regulation. The newly freed urban space thus assumes the metonymic equivalent of available sexual freedom for women, its powers, and its dangers. This essay locates Satyajit Ray’s cinematic oeuvre as central to illustrating this ongoing tension among modernity, globality, sexuality, and the city in India, and reads his films Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963) and Charulata (The Lonely Housewife, 1964) as signifiers of the liminal spaces they propose to explore.