Vulnerability, affect, and relationality: South Asian diasporic maternal subjectivities in Hansal Mehta’s The Buckingham Murders

This article examines the entangled dynamics of the diasporic maternal experience of South Asian mothers as articulated in Hansal Mehta’s film The Buckingham Murders. Drawing upon the theories of Avtar Brah’s ‘Diasporic space,’ Charlyn Marie Ingwerson’s ‘Maternal Critical Theory,’ O’ Reilly’s ‘Maternal,’ and Sara Ahmed’s ‘Affect theory,’ this paper analyzes the representation of three maternal figures in the movie The Buckingham Murders: Jass Bhamra, the grieving diasporic police officer; Preeti Kohli, coerced into motherhood within a fractured diasporic marriage; and Muneera Chaudhury, a Muslim mother whose son is criminalized by Islamophobic discourses in the diasporic space, and argues that the ‘maternal’ in this film is constituted through the entanglement of diasporic space, vulnerability, affect, and relationality. By situating maternal critical theory within diaspora studies, the article foregrounds how diasporic motherhood reconfigures South Asian maternal subjectivity as a site of transformative resistance.