{"id":573,"date":"2019-02-08T13:41:26","date_gmt":"2019-02-08T18:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/?p=573"},"modified":"2021-02-02T12:35:24","modified_gmt":"2021-02-02T17:35:24","slug":"needham-anuradha-dingwaney-performing-women-the-nachne-ganiwalis-of-bhumika-mandi-and-sardari-begum-new-indian-cinema-in-post-independence-india-the-cultural-work-of-shyam-benegal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/?p=573","title":{"rendered":"Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney. &#8220;&#8216;Performing Wom[e]n:&#8217; The &#8216;Nachne-Ganiwalis&#8217; of Bhumika, Mandi, and Sardari Begum.&#8221; New Indian Cinema in Post-Independence India: The Cultural Work of Shyam Benegal&#8217;s Films. Routledge, 2013, pp. 47-78."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>From the Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This chapter addresses three films \u2013 Bhumika (The Role; 1976); Mandi (Marketplace; 1983); and the eponymous Sardari Begum (1996)&#8230;.\u00a0[A] continuity of interests and ideological investments link the &#8230; three films &#8230; including: each film\u2019s focus on a female protagonist and subject; her conscious and unconscious efforts to emancipate herself from the debilitations of her gender, class, and caste oppression; and, finally, for the purposes of my argument, her function as a figure through whom women\u2019s relationship to the hegemonic values and ideological agendas of the Indian nation-\u00ad in-the-\u00ad making are assessed and interrogated. The nation remains, then, a salient frame of reference for grasping the ideological investments of these Benegal films&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>The performing women&#8230; represent professions, identities, and cultural repertoires that flourished under, and were indelibly associated with, a feudal order, but which were delegitimized, marginalized, even excised from the self-\u00addefinitions and constitutive narratives of the new Indian nation. \u201cWomen performers,\u201d Singh notes, \u201cwere kept out of the frame of the nation in the making\u201d (see epigraph; 2007: 94). By focusing on protagonists who belong to professions and identities that are devalued and marginalized in the new Indian nation, these three later films, I argue, \u201cunsettle\u201d (Singh\u2019s term) the processes through which the Indian nation constituted itself, thereby also unsettling an unambiguously negative assessment of feudal social and cultural arrangements. Thus, [these] films undertake a more fundamental interrogation regarding India\u2019s nation-\u00ad formation itself \u2013 what the nation deliberately excludes in order to become a nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the Introduction &#8220;This chapter addresses three films \u2013 Bhumika (The Role; 1976); Mandi (Marketplace; 1983); and the eponymous Sardari Begum (1996)&#8230;.\u00a0[A] continuity of interests and ideological investments link the &#8230; three films &#8230; including: each film\u2019s focus on a female protagonist and subject; her conscious and unconscious efforts to emancipate herself from the debilitations <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/?p=573\">Read More &#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[31,56,71,58,38,26],"class_list":["post-573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","tag-courtesan","tag-courtesan-films","tag-film-analysis","tag-film-tropes","tag-nautch","tag-secondary-source"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}