GHAR KI BAAT: NARRATIVES OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE TRAUMA IN INDIAN FILM

This thesis compares the representation of domestic violence trauma in two Hindi-language Bollywood films, Thappad [tr. Slap] (dir. Anubhav Sinha, 2020) and Darlings (dir. Jasmeet K. Reen, 2022), both of which focalize modes of recourse for abuse along with individual and structural implication in gendered violence. The first chapter explores the sociocultural context of the films and the stylistic choices used to depict the protagonists’ post-traumatic stages, applying current turns in trauma studies, such as postcolonial trauma theory, to critique the prescriptive aesthetics of foundational trauma studies scholarship from the 1990s. In the second chapter, I formulate the notion of exceptional and unexceptional trauma, framing an analysis of the law’s response to domestic violence through character positionality and genre. I argue that the characters’ respective strategies for redressal, legal and illicit, allow them to recuperate a sense of agency after trauma from systemic and structural gendered violence. The concluding chapter shifts redressal to the domestic sphere, where the protagonists implicate their families and immediate communities in patriarchal discourses and gendered violence and establish intergenerational solidarity, which opens an intervention into the didactic potential of Thappad and Darlings.