'Bad' Women of Bombay Films

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xx

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2. Introduction: Breaking Bad

   • Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy, Sharmila Purkayastha

   Pages 1-24

3. Part I

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 25-25

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   2. Desire, Deviancy and Defiance in Bombay Cinema (1930s–1950s)

      • Ira Bhaskar

      Pages 27-44

   3. “haan, haan mein alaida hoon!” (Yes, Yes I Am Different!): The Disorderly Bibi in Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam (1962)

      • Shampa Roy, Saswati Sengupta

      Pages 45-62

   4. The Goddess of Mean Things: The Mother-in-Law in Hindi Films

      • Mrinal Pande

      Pages 63-71

   5. “ek admi tha, usne shadi karli...” (There Was a Man, Who Got Married...): Female Agency and Domestication in Omkara (2006)

      • Anjali Yadav, Anusha Choudhary, Divya Gupta, Ifsha Zehra, Neha Jaji Varghese, Prachi Khari et al.

      Pages 73-90

4. Part II

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 91-91

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   2. The Politics of Sanitization/Sanskritization: The Court Dancers and Classical Pasts (Rajnartaki, 1941; Chitralekha, 1964; Amrapali, 1966)

      • Deepika Tandon

      Pages 93-111

   3. Goddess, Saint and Journeying Soul: Courtesans and Religion in Bombay Cinema (1939–2015)

      • Ruth Vanita

      Pages 113-130

   4. The Prison-House of Performance: The Figure of the Dancing Girl in Bombay Films of the 1960s

      • Sameera Mehta

      Pages 131-147

   5. Guns, Gangsters, and “gandagi”: The Moll in Hindi Cinema

      • Neha Yadav

      Pages 149-166

   6. Sex Workers in Hindi Cinema: Imagos and Realities

      • Rakesh Shukla

      Pages 167-184

5. Part III

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 185-185

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   2. The Caged Woman: Female Guilt, Desire and Transgression in Bandini (1963)

      • Smita Banerjee

      Pages 187-201

   3. “itni bhhi mahaan main nahi hoon, raja!” (I’m not that Great, O King): The Angry Young Woman of the 1970s

      • Menka Ahlawat

      Pages 203-221

   4. Outcast[e]/Outlawed: The Bandit Queen (1996)

      • Neha Dixit

      Pages 223-240

   5. The Female “Atankvadi”: Gender, Militancy and the Politics of Representation in the Late 1990s

      • Isha Purkayastha

      Pages 241-257

   6. Honoured Mother and ‘Honour’ Killing: Ammaji in NH10 (2015)

      • Nonica Datta

      Pages 259-274

6. Part IV

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 275-275

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This book presents a feminist mapping of the articulation and suppression of female desire in Hindi films, which comprise one of modern India’s most popular cultural narratives. It explores the lineament of evil and the corresponding closure of chastisement or domesticity that appear as necessary conditions for the representation of subversive female desire. The term ‘bad’ is used heuristically, and not as a moral or essential category, to examine some of the iconic disruptive women of Hindi cinema and to uncover the nexus between patriarchy and other hierarchies, such as class, caste and religion in these representations.  


The twenty-one essays examine the politics of female desire/s from the 1930s to the present day - both through in-depth analyses of single films and by tracing the typologies in multiple films. The essays are divided into five sections indicating the various gendered desires and rebellions that patriarchal society seeks to police, silence and domesticate.  

• Bombay Film
• Indian Film
• Hindi Film
• Women in Cinema
• Cinema and Gender

• Department of English, Miranda House, Delhi University, Delhi, India

  Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy, Sharmila Purkayastha

Saswati Sengupta, Shampa Roy and Sharmila Purkayastha are Associate Professors of English at Miranda House, Delhi University, who explore the social and material relations in cultural narratives. As part of the Miranda House collective they have engaged with a classical Sanskrit text (Revisiting Abhijñānaśākuntalam, Sengupta and Tandon ed., 2012) and a modern Indian novel (Towards Freedom: Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore’s Home and the World, Sengupta, Roy and Purkayastha ed., 2007) before turning to the 'Bad' Women of Bombay Films.


Outside their collective endeavour, Saswati has contributed to Goddesses:The Oxford History of Hinduism(2018), and her novel, The Song Seekers (2011), was long listed for the DSC award for South Asian Literature. Shampa has published In Zenanas and Beyond (2011) and Gender and Criminality in Bangla Crime Narratives (2017). She also translates earlyBangla crime narratives into English. Sharmila is currently working on women’s prison writings of the 1970s in India and in Latin America. 

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