Though stories of vengeance have been narrated around non-urban spaces as well, they are beyond the reference points of this paper since it brings into focus a different sociological context and a different way of seeing of the spectator. Whether it is film or literature, the privileged eye that desires to record/interpret/control the chaotic signifiers or significances in the urban space, has been, more often than not, male. However the feminist preoccupation with whether it is possible to write/read the woman into the figure of the flâneur points towards the historical exclusion of women as experiential agents in the city, not merely living in it or suffering it but being aware of it as presence, a process that determines and is determined by her. Benjamin's image of the stroller in the city has been seen as decidedly male by critics such as Griselda Pollock or Janet Wolff. This diversity of experience has been sought to be studied in the figure of the flâneur and a positing of the equivalent of the flâneuse.
(One may argue that men may also experience the same but not only is that not the concern of this paper but surely different gender groups live in and experience the city in different ways.) In the city's promise of opportunity and anonymity at the same time there lies a register of empowerment (problematic, no doubt) for women. Satyajit Ray had famously compared the city to an 'overpainted courtesan'-an act of gendering that offers an insight into the gaze of the filmmaker who is both seduced by and suspicious of, even repulsed by, the city's overtures. She also remarks on the distinct discomfort of (predominantly male) filmmakers with changing faces of woman-her sexuality needed to be accommodated into spaces like the cabarets, notions of promiscuity or manly women thus giving her a habitation and a label.
As Ranjini Majumdar aptly points out in her Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, the city is perceived as dangerous both for and because of women. Why urban, one might ask? The city as a mask/face of modern living is seen as a place/space where women become visible calling into question available cognitive tools to read the transformation of our experience(s) of space. One more aspect of the title needs to be touched on here. What is more at stake here is a definite tenor of discourse that appears to run through them, signaling towards some interesting continuities and ruptures. When I say 'kind of economy' I do not mean to reduce these films to any absolutist framework. Before I proceed any further, let me add a disclaimer. What I propose to highlight, is a certain kind of economy of representation that has gathered around Hindi popular films depicting women avengers in the last few decades.
What is particularly relevant in the context of this paper is how such narratives complicate the notion of agency and willy-nilly shed light on the discursive universe that buttresses it.
Brown's reading of action heroines in Hollywood flicks, the body of the woman and its representation is seen to articulate a host of often conflicting notions of/about gender and desire. When it comes to cinematic texts, studies of the vigilante woman be it of the biographical Bandit Queen by Priyamvada Gopal or Jeffrey A.
'Honour' or loss of it, becomes a central category through which the act of aggression is experienced as a threat to identity, be it the self or the group/clan one belongs to. Most studies of revenge in recent times, whether it is recorded in history, literary texts of yore or cinematic ones, have focused (and instructively) on such questions as masculinity and the patriarchal structures of legitimating vendetta, inter alia. Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the PacificĪ Semiotic and Cultural Analysis of the Urban Woman Avenger in Popular Hindi Cinema