Deconstructing Domestic Violence in Bollywood:

Instances of domestic violence against women persist globally,particularly prevalent in various forms across South Asia. It is atopic that has gained attention in various forms of media, includingBollywood movies. One of the recent Bollywood productions, Darlings(2022), directed by Jasmeet K. Reen, addresses this issue differentlythan its predecessors. A grim subject like domestic violence which israrely material for humor has been presented through a dark comediclens while bringing back the Muslim social genre. This paper seeks toassert by referring to western and non-western feminist discourse that,despite successfully subverting the popular representation of womenin feminist revenge narratives and emphasizing the perpetuatingmaltreatment of women in South Asian patriarchal households, thefilm could not liberate itself from the two oppositional representationsof women – “angel” and “madwoman” (in case of Darlings, it ismurderer), popularized by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in TheMadwoman in the Attic. Concurrently, while correlating Simone deBeauvoir’s positioning of women in her influential text, The Second Sexwith Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s postcolonial alignment in “UnderWestern Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” thepaper will also argue that, in spite of raising awareness about violenceagainst women and deconstructing the stereotypical portrayal ofdomestic violence in Bollywood, the film inadvertently normalizesintimate partner violence (IPV) and potentially undermines theseriousness of this critical social issue.