This chapter focuses on a Partition film titled Khamosh Pani and argues that it subverts patriarchal religio-nationalism and re-envisions the totalized history of the two national constructs through the liminal figure of the female protagonist Ayesha. It also focuses on the "Recovery Act" of Partition to argue for a nuanced understanding of agency in understanding Ayesha's subjectivity. Ayesha/Veero's final plunge into the silent waters serves as a moment of agentic revelation that reminds us that the author in the chapter refuses to be pinned into fossilized religious-ethnic identities and transgresses the boundaries of a statist notion of religious identity. The reception of the film was controversial and one may argue that the film presents a monolithic version of Islam under the reign of General Zia ul Haq in Pakistan. The chapter shows the women characters' resistance and agency in constructing a varied account of Islam in the film that goes against any notions of an essentialized understanding of the Islam.
About the book
This book is a study of the resurgence and re-imagination of feminist discourse on gender and sexuality in South Asia as told through its cinematic, literary, and social media narratives. It brings incisive and expert analyses of emerging disruptive articulations that represent an unprecedented surge of feminist response to the culture of sexual violence in South Asia. Here scholars across disciplines and international borders chronicle the expressions of a disruptive feminist solidarity in contemporary South Asia. They offer critical investigations of these newly complicated discourses across narrative forms – hashtag activism on Facebook and Twitter, the writings of diasporic writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Bollywood films like Mardaani, feminist Dalit narratives in the fiction of Bama Faustina, social media activism against rape culture, journalistic and cinematic articulations on queer rights, state censorship of "India’s Daughter", and feminist film activism in Bangladesh, Kashmir, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.