Demystifying the state of Minorities in Contemporary India: Reading Amit Masurkar's Sherni (The Tigress) from the Vantage Point of Marginality

Abstract

Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party of an emergent Indian nation-state, has, from its genesis ventriloquized and brandished its exacerbating agenda of Hindu Fundamentalism in a flawed myth of an anecdotal Hindu Nationalist past where non-Hindus are conveniently ostracized. This political gambit is deployed to manufacture an overblown theory of a decline in Hindu culture, the best resonance of which is the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019, discriminating, and interrogating the legitimacy of specific communities on sheer grounds of religion. Amit Masurkar's film of 2021, Sherni (The Tigress) provides a critical insight into this brutal Racial Politics pervading an upper caste Hindu society, in the guise of a subtle sub-text, camouflaged within a distracting narrative of Man versus Nature. This paper facilitates the reading of this hidden discourse of Realpolitik alongside the predominant cultural narrative of gender and natural domination. Through a palimpsestuous reading, it explores themes of racial exclusion and segregation in an Ultra-Right Hindu Nation that the film silently addresses. Furthermore, this paper challenges the dominant narrative of Ecofeminism, to instead investigate the categories of race and ethnicity that intersect gender issues.