Hot flashes, brain fog, nobility: menopause narratives and breached cultural silences in Bombay Begums

In contradistinction to an expanding corpus of texts that depict experiences of menopause in the Global North, there has been a paucity of cultural representations of the menopausal experience in the Global South. A recent exception to this has been the Hindi web series Bombay Begums (2021), directed by Alankrita Shrivastava and Bornilla Chatterjee, which has explicit depictions of a middle-aged successful professional coping with menopause. The character’s body is repeatedly shown as the register for her experiences of menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes, in lieu of a merely diagnostic or medicalised presentation. The article argues that the audiovisual medium emerges as the primary representational site where long-standing cultural reticence in depicting menopause is addressed in India. Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz’s argument of ‘textualised bodies’ the paper proposes the concept of menopause textualities as an alternative framework to analyse the complexities of cultural productions such as Bombay Begums, where the semantics of menopause are presented by the character’s physical actions while the audiovisual mode employs its narrative devices to stay sympathetic and give an account of such embodiment. It is through the experiences of the central character, who is facing a crisis in her leadership role, as also her simultaneous exploration of new desires and ambitions, that the series addresses and presents a nuanced intertextuality of gender, class, age and health of the urban subject, thus breaching collective silences in a manner that has no precedence in the Indian cultural industry.