By Leela Kiyawat
Mira Nair’s 2001 film Monsoon Wedding is set in New Delhi and centers around the preparations that the Verma family; their servant, Alice; and their wedding planner, Dubey, are making for their daughter Aditi’s arranged marriage to Hemant Rai, an engineer living abroad in Houston. According to Jenny Sharpe in “Gender, Nation, and Globalization in Monsoon Wedding and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,” the film presents its audience with a stark and compelling break from the traditional cinema of Bollywood, a term that refers to the hugely popular Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, India. In its exploration of social class and romantic love, Monsoon Wedding reimagines the traditional Bollywood heroine in both Aditi and Alice, who emerge as complex and modern Indian female characters. In the Bollywood tradition, women are typically encased in conservative values, exhibiting little agency when it comes to their romantic partners, and rarely discussing or expressing feelings of attraction onscreen. Functionally, they exist only as objects of male conquest and desire, which is why Monsoon Wedding and its portrayal of dynamic women with sexual agency is a step towards authentic representation in South Asian cinema.
In examining the film’s break from tradition, Sharpe argues that both Aditi and Alice, in their respective relationships, represent a departure from conventional Bollywood womanhood. Sharpe contextualizes Bollywood’s celebration of pure and non-sexual Hindu women, and explains how, in the 90s, the industry began to focus primarily on chaste upper-middle class heroines. Before the 90s, these chaste heroines typically belonged to lower classes. In Sharpe’s view, the incorporation of Aditi, an upper-class, sexually liberated, and modern heroine who is having an affair with a married man, is Monsoon Wedding’s first departure from the traditionally chaste heroine. Alice, then, represents the film’s second departure from this convention: Sharpe argues that she “[occupies] the position of the pure Indian woman,” undermining the stereotypical Bollywood representation of Christians as “mini-skirted” and “sexually loose” (74). Due to what Sharpe sees as her chaste nature, Alice’s “purity” is contrasted with Aditi’s promiscuity, and she would be reconstituted as the traditional Bollywood heroine were it not for her Christian faith and lower class status. In this essay, I aim to challenge Sharpe’s claim that Alice is a pure, chaste and simple heroine. Although Alice displays her desire in a more subtle way, a closer examination of her social class, as well as her romantic pursuit of Dubey, show that she, like Aditi, is also a subject who harbors and acts upon her sexual desires, which makes her departure from Bollywood conventionality even more significant.
We can see Aditi’s sensual power in effect during her first meeting with Dubey, when she bumps into him and drops a tray of glasses, shattering them all (00:12:33 – 00:12:50). Prior to their meeting, Alice has functioned as an inconsequential character, quietly cooking and cleaning for the Verma family while donning traditional Indian clothing. However, as she prepares to move the tray of glasses past Dubey, she places an orange marigold in her hair while smiling, indicating that she takes pleasure in the way she looks and is appreciating her own attractiveness (00:12:14). Dubey, distracted by the broken glass, fails to notice her and the flower, so Alice later approaches him herself at the engagement party and speaks directly to him. Dubey is entirely apathetic at first, and the camera angle is such that Alice is always staring at Dubey with hope in her eyes while he has his back turned to her. Alice then makes the decision to ask Dubey if he wants water, further pursuing the conversation in the hopes that he will take proper notice of her. Dubey finally turns around and looks directly at Alice while handing her a water bottle, and Alice again decides to engage with him by asking if he wants “fridge water or tap water.” Dubey then turns around a second time and holds solid eye contact with Alice for a moment before answering. As Alice turns and walks away, Dubey fixes his gaze on her, watching her leave for ten seconds (00:23:04 – 00:23:55). Because of her persistence—the careful placement of the marigold, and her refusal to go unnoticed in their exchange—Alice is successful in getting what she wants: a flirtatious encounter with Dubey. If, as Sharpe asserts in her article, traditional Bollywood women are “pure and virginal objects of desire” who are sought after by their male counterparts, then Alice’s choice to initiate a relationship with Dubey immediately distinguishes her as an untraditional heroine, not a traditional one, as Sharpe would have it (73). In the context of Bollywood cinema, her desire is nontraditional, because it is she who desires Dubey first, reversing the conventional courtship and making him the object of her affection.
Alice also feels her affection for Dubey while simultaneously working as a servant for the Verma family; her flirtations towards Dubey show how her sexual agency transcends both her gender and her social class. Sharpe neglects to examine this intersection of status and desire, and instead focuses on the conservative nature of Alice’s clothing, calling her the “virginal woman of Bombay cinema” (73). It is true that Alice initially comes across as the chaste counterpart to Aditi, an upper-class “modern Indian woman with cropped, hennaed hair” who has grown up in the bustling city of Delhi (Sharpe 71). Alice, on the other hand, is of a lower class upbringing, and she hails from a village located in the rural state of Bihar. Because of Alice’s socioeconomic background, there is an expectation that she must adhere to tradition in order to stay employed. She functions in the Verma family as a background presence who is seen but not heard, and her long braided hair, primary use of Hindi instead of English, and sari also set the foundation for traditionality. By allowing herself to act upon her attraction to Dubey, Alice’s actions are that of a sexually liberated woman because she feels her desire is worth pursuing despite the fact that it is not socially acceptable– in being with her, Dubey is “marrying beneath his class and outside his caste” (Sharpe 74). Alice’s clothing, upbringing, line of work, quietness, and religion do not make her any less immune to the cadence of sexual pursuit, and her awareness of her desire only makes it more subversive.
Sharpe, however, ignores Alice’s soft disruption of conformity, and instead zeroes in on Aditi’s disruption of the status quo with her married lover, Vikram. Sharpe notes how Aditi, like Alice, approaches her lover, Vikram, first when she visits him at his workplace, a TV studio. While Alice and Dubey merely hold eye contact during their first romantic connection, Aditi and Vikram have a passionate, close-up on-screen kiss (00:08:43 – 00:08:48). Sharpe juxtaposes Alice and Dubey’s shy flirtation with Aditi and Vikram’s direct intimacy, arguing that “there is no indication that Alice is looking for the sexual passion that Aditi desires in a man” (74). Again, Sharpe’s conclusion that Aditi’s sexual expression eclipses Alice’s does not take social status and upbringing into account. When Aditi meets Hemant for the first time, she wears an open button-up shirt and does not speak in Hindi (00:30:59 – 00:32:22). We can infer from Aditi’s contemporary clothing and refined English speaking abilities that she is familiar with the West, which tends to portray physical affection between men and women as normal and acceptable. Such normalization is the very subject of the debate that takes place in the TV studio immediately before Aditi joins Vikram in his dressing room for their kiss (00:05:35 – 00:07:30. When taken in the context of their backgrounds, it is a much bigger breach in tradition for Alice, being working class, to make a romantic move towards Dubey than it is for Aditi to kiss Vikram. Alice’s choice to act on love despite the limiting standards for Indian women of her social class makes her sexual agency just as disruptive as Aditi’s. Once again, her pursuit of Dubey shows how her sexual agency trumps the obstacles presented by both her gender and socioeconomic background.
Despite the narrative nuance of Alice’s sexuality, her relationship is still compared by Sharpe to that of Aditi’s, the shining example of a “modern Indian woman” (71). Sharpe claims that while “the marriage between a woman from Delhi’s wealthy cosmopolitan class and the son of a Houston NRI is complicated by prior relationships and family obligations, the relationship between Alice and Dubey is entirely uncomplicated…[It is a] story of pure and innocent love” (74). Again, Sharpe uses the words “pure” and “innocent” to insinuate that Alice’s relationship is not sexual like Aditi’s; therefore, she implies that Aditi must be the more sexually liberated of the two. I disagree with this conclusion and argue that the simplistic nature of Alice and Dubey’s relationship does not translate to a “pure” and non-sexual one. Though the intimacy between Alice and Dubey is less physical than Aditi and Vikram’s, I argue that Alice and Dubey’s wedding scene is full of sexual tension and desire. Their marriage takes place towards the end of the film, when the monsoon rains have begun mercilessly pouring down. Because of the rain, Alice’s sari sticks to her chest, and Dubey gazes at her with both love and desire in his eyes while he holds an umbrella over both of their heads. Bollywood is infamous for its erotic rain scenes, most notably in classics such as Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Raja Hindustani: the lovestruck hero typically confesses his love to a glowingly drenched and sari-clad woman whose breasts are accentuated by the soaking fabric. Alice and Dubey’s marriage scene pays tribute to these past Bollywood monsoon lovers, and they both take turns slowly eating orange marigolds— similar to the ones Alice had placed in her hair during her first run-in with Dubey—while sensual flute music plays in the background. As Dubey holds Alice against his chest, we get a close-up shot of the two lovers cuddling in the rain (01:44:46 – 01:46:16). This shot is reminiscent of the prior close-up of Aditi and Vikram’s embrace at the TV station, which Sharpe used as an example of Aditi’s sexual passion. By applying Sharpe’s example of Aditi’s sexuality to Alice’s wedding scene, we can see that Alice is not the “pure” Bollywood heroine that Sharpe claims she is. The simplicity of their wedding—and the fact that it is not complicated by familial drama—does not take away from the heightened sensuality of it.
Monsoon Wedding’s inclusion of female characters like Alice and Aditi, who blatantly express and act on their sexual desires, speaks to Mira Nair’s socially conscious storytelling skills. While Sharpe’s analysis of the film uplifts the modern and sexually liberated Aditi, it falls short of acknowledging the sexual agency which also exists within Alice as she pursues a relationship with Dubey. Though a lower-caste status would typically relegate Alice’s character to a purely functional role as the Verma family servant, she is instead presented to us as a woman who is unafraid to both feel love and pursue it despite the limitations of her sex and social class. Monsoon Wedding is a film that allows room for its most subjugated female character to give dimension to her desire, which is, in the shadow of a restrictive Bollywood tradition, a revolutionary act of cinema.
Works Cited
Nair, Mira, Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, and Shefali Shetty. Monsoon Wedding. Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Alliance Atlantis Communications, 2002.
Sharpe, Jenny. “Gender, Nation, and Globalization in Monsoon Wedding and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.” Global Migration, Social Change, and Cultural Transformation, 2007, pp. 70–74., https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230608726_3.
