Nobody puts Rani in a corner: Making of the new Indian woman in Queen (2014)

Abstract

Queen (dir. Vikas, 2014) is a coming-of-age Bollywood film that uses the travel trope to illustrate the female protagonist’s awakening. This article examines the journey and transition of Rani, a middle-class upper-caste Punjabi heterosexual Hindu Indian woman, into the ‘New Indian Woman’. Through its female protagonist, Queen offers an iteration and embodiment of the new Indian woman who emerged in the context of upheavals caused by India’s economic liberalization in 1991, one who came to be viewed simultaneously as a marker of modernity and the last bastion of India’s commitment to traditional values. Rani’s refashioned self carefully straddles tradition and modernity desired of the new woman in India. Organized around four interrelated sections, the essay traces Rani’s remaking into a new woman within the context of global travel, new kinship networks, assertion of desire and consumptive practices. Through Rani’s particular embodiment, we see how Bollywood’s new Indian woman can function as a strategy of containment whose object lessons on screen offer moral instruction in maintaining authentic Indian-ness even as economic and cultural markets open themselves up to women. With its possibilities and its limitations, Queen, along with a slew of other New Bollywood films, is symptomatic of a society in transition, one that continues to navigate the effects of changes set in motion since the early 1990s.

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