Cultural Entanglement of Hair: Exploring the Cinematic Representation of Women’s Hair in Hindi Movie Bulbbul

Hair has been a site of the body which is embedded with numerous cultural and social meanings, defining various everyday practices for women. The physical state of hair, bound or unbound, groomed or dishevelled, generates symbolism for the entangled meanings it carries within it. These meanings impart power to an individual for asserting agency to construct or deconstruct the discourse. Based upon this, women’s hair has been prominently portrayed in numerous literary, cultural and visual works expressing multifarious semiotic significances. The paper proposes to politicise the representation of hair in the Indian context in such works through special reference to the Hindi movie Bulbbul. The paper attempts to investigate the construction of the body as cultured, within this construction, it further looks at how hair is used as an instrument for the cultural conditioning of the body. Further, the paper examines the representation of certain female characters and how they align with the notion of femininity and female sexuality. Furthermore, the paper looks at how the movie represents the manipulation of power embedded in hair to assert agency.