The Subaltern Gazes: Commentary on Amit Masurkar’s Sherni

Abstract

In this essay, I draw from my ongoing Ph.D. thesis to discuss Amit Masurkar’s recent Bollywood film Sherni and argue that the subaltern might not speak but it gazes, creating the possibility of registering subaltern agency beyond the mechanisms of speech.  Among the myriad discourses on subalternity, discussions on cinematic representability of identities on fringes are rife with issues of scopophilia, objectification, and lack of agency. Turning towards mainstream Bollywood, one often finds a subaltern entombed within hegemonic utterances, silenced, violated, and/or forgotten. Scholars like Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, and Ania Loomba have excavated historical accounts of such identities from social, cultural, colonial, and/or political spheres. I discuss Sherni to show how Masurkar establishes marginalized indigenous identities, shifting the focus from native elite speakers to those who are being spoken to. I further argue that Masurkar’s genius also lies in coalescing the wildlife and human subalternities—a need for environmentally vulnerable global societies.