Analysis Of Mira Nair's 'Monsoon Wedding'

EXACTLY AND APPROXIMATELY Viewing Mira Nair’s ‘Monsoon Wedding’ through the postcolonial lens

''We are like that only''-runs the subtitle of a popular production of Mira Nair, representing Indians today. Released in 2001, Monsoon Wedding is Nair's ''love song to my home city". Through a reworking of the tropes of Bollywood cinema, a medium that connects the global audience, Nair's film depicts the enthusiasm coupled with certain darker shades, more so in the midst of a wedding, of a Punjabi middle class family in contemporary India. Set in the metropolitan city of Delhi, this family is found to be negotiating between ideologies and traditions typical to our country and the practice of modernized

This is not to deny the fact of neo-colonialism but to assert the idea of the "Third Space" that Bhabha puts forward. He believes that cultures, not being unitary in nature, negotiate in a space which

"represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot 'in itself' be conscious"(Bhabha

156). It is a space where the ''symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity...they

Redefining the concept of Third World Feminism, Nair emphasizes on the importance of the female voice. We encounter the bride, Aditi, for the first time, on the sets of Delhi.com as the camera zooms in to focus on an intimate kiss that she has with Vikram. A savvy woman of the city, she does not get sentimental about the possibility of Vikram divorcing his wife for she has read too many magazines to know that it might never happen. She enters into an arranged marriage with Hemant not out of any kind of parental pressure or hopelessness but out of the choice to settle down. She makes rational decisions but not at the cost of curbing her desire. Even as the family engages in the preparations for the wedding, she is found to be repeatedly making phone-calls to her ex-boyfriend. This stands in contrast to the western portrait of third world women, usually idealized as the subjugated subject. Even before the wedding, she sneaks out of the house at midnight to meet him. Through the scene of lovemaking, she emerges as a woman who has power over her body, one who can make her own sexual choices and can also, literally, drive away from the man who leaves her vulnerable among the police to face the consequences. As women who exercise their agency, the film portrays characters who take the risk of transgressing the normative order. Pimmi may transgress by smoking, though behind closed doors while Ayesha will make no mystery of her desire for Rahul. Sexual