Caste-ing Women in Bollywood: A Reading of Caste (In)visibility in the Life Writing of Bollywood’s Upper Caste Women

Abstract

The graded hierarchy of caste is the basic organising principle and an important vector of capital and social mobility in Hindu society. In India’s current political climate, caste informs not only national politics and governance, but also Indian society and culture as a whole, and yet, it is often absent from public discourse. Understanding caste at the intersection of gender and class is essential to understand what this absence enables and disallows in caste society. In my thesis, I study life writing by upper caste women associated with the Bollywood film industry in contemporary India to understand how self-representations of their lived experiences render their upper caste identity (in)visible. I use Bollywood as a delimited field where social, cultural, media, and symbolic capital circulate. I read Twinkle Khanna’s autobiography Mrs Funnybones: She’s Just Like You and a Lot Like Me (2015) and her newspaper column/blog for The Times of India with the same name, Soha Ali Khan’s autobiography ¬The Perils of Being Moderately Famous (2017), and two seasons of the Netflix reality television series The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives (2020-), starring Maheep Kapoor, Seema Sajdeh, Bhavana Panday, and Neelam Kothari Soni for how these women, who are in positions of influence, use the social, cultural, and aesthetic practice of life writing to narrate their everyday lives in the context of their relationships, their labour, and their politics in the register of caste, without explicitly mentioning caste. In doing so, I demonstrate how they remain complicit in the caste system, which affords them material and social power.