Purdein Mein Rehne Do: A Study of Veil in Popular Bollywood Movies

Abstract

The Veil is an integral part of different religious customs and practices throughout the world and has been conferred with multiple levels of cultural meanings. The Orientalists have always described the veiled women of the East as an exotic and mysterious source of the aesthetic embodiment of the female body. Bollywood films informed by early Oriental fantasies like Ali Baba and Forty Thieves and Aladdin had depicted the fantasy of the veiled women in numerous ways. The veil has functioned as the metaphorical partition between the Male voyeuristic gaze and the female body on the screen. This paper seeks to explore how the veil in Bollywood films has related itself to different meanings like virginity, exoticism, and eroticism on one hand and to oppression and Islamophobia on the other. This study shall focus on how with the utilization of symbols like Veil, Bollywood produces and popularizes certain meanings and discourses surrounding Muslim women and how the spectators interpret and consume them. The paper also examines how the connotative meanings of the veil are constructed in the films under study using the ‘Dominant Code’ postulated by Stuart Hall. Through analyzing these films, it can be seen how the veil as a cultural symbol and spatial division facilitates a play of several connotative meanings associated with different cultural and political settings and how it defines the female body.