UCL Film Studies Speaker Series: Ritika Kaushik (University of Warwick)

The year 1975, designated as the International Women’s Year by the United Nations, marked a newfound course in the configurations around the woman’s question in Indian official documentary films. Films Division of India (FD), India’s official documentary film unit, commissioned several films about Indian women, including titles like Woman: A Tribute, Indian Woman: A Historical Assessment, and Women of India, as well as biopics on women’s rights activist and poet Sarojini Naidu and on Sheikh Abdullah, who promoted the cause of Muslim women’s education in India. Framed between the Indian Emergency (1975-77)—helmed by a woman Prime Minister—and the rise of women’s movements of the 1970s, these films surrounding the woman’s question allow us to trace the project of seeing gender through the Indian state’s developmentalist agendas.
 
This talk will trace how state media infrastructures construct epistemic categories related to progress, development, and modernity that are inflected by gender. By drawing attention to the “developmental montage” in many of these films and comparing them to previous iterations and the reuse of film fragments over different films, the talk will trace the contentious formulations of developmental discourse in official documentary films. To see like a state in India meant to see women in these films through essentialized gender categories that either meant traditional roles like wife or mother, modern professional roles like managers, lawyers, scientists, or pilots, and even as police officers since, as the narrator of Women Police in India (1977) says, “women lag behind in nothing,” not even crime. To unsee like a state, compels us to look closely at films that defy a developmental montage, and identify widely dispersed and heterogenous fragments and discourses that do not simply cohere with this goal.

Wednesday 29 January 2025 5pm-6:30pm
Meeting Room 1, Rockefeller Building, 21 University St, London WC1E 6HX