Performing gender through purdah: Curtains as material and symbolic boundaries

This article reframes the practice of purdah as a gendered medium of communication, analyzing how its material forms; from architectural curtains to bodily veils, filter women’s visibility and structure social power. Moving beyond binaries of oppression and tradition, it employs a feminist media ecology lens to argue that purdah operates as a dynamic interface where control is both enforced and negotiated. A comparative thematic analysis of early twentieth-century life writing (Sunity Devee, Zarina Bhatty, Rokeya S. Hossain) and contemporary Indian cinema ( Lipstick under My Burkha , Thappad ) reveals a central tension: while purdah’s materiality disciplines the female body and segregates space, it simultaneously creates the conditions for its own subversion. The study finds that narrative genre fundamentally shapes the representation of this agency; textual memoirs articulate resistance through introspective reflection, while films externalize it through embodied performance and the reclamation of domestic geography. Ultimately, the analysis contributes to feminist media studies by demonstrating how purdah functions not as a static cultural artifact, but as an active, communicative system that mediates social reality across historical periods and narrative forms.