What is it about?
This article seeks to engage with the notion of performativity and Bengali masculinity in the popular Bengali cinema of the 1950s. I refer to the popular Bengali film Sare Chuattor/Seventy Four and a Half (1953) to consider, along the lines of Judith Butler’s account of performative identity, Bengali popular cinema’s representation of Bengali middle-class masculinity in the 1950s as a complex, coercive and regulatory normative ideal that tended not only to serve culturally conservative aims, but also to constitute an exclusionary practice.
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Why is it important?
Using the film as a case in point, this article attempts to show how popular Bengali melodramas foregrounded the rhetoric of ‘becoming’ that was conspicuous in the Bengali male in the immediate post-independence period. The basic argument is that if indeed there is a notion of hegemonic Bengali masculinity, then it is always marked by a constitutive contingency – a failure of complete determination that ensures its permanent instability, and, at the same time, its internal and positive condition of possibility.
Perspectives
The paper attempts to show how several male characters in the film ‘fail’ to successfully or ‘seriously’ ‘act’ within the ‘repetitive or citational structure’ of Bengali middle-class masculinity, and who in turn performatively constitute the ‘successful’ inside, in this case, the ideal Bengali bhadralok.
Saayan Chattopadhyay
Baruipur College
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This page is a summary of: Performative Bengali Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Becoming in Bengali Popular Cinema of the 1950s, Studies in South Asian Film & Media, July 2010, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/safm.2.1.3_1.
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