Introduction: Transnational Figurations of the South Asian Aunty

Abstract

In February 2016, Union Minister Smriti Irani delivered a torrential speech in India’s Lok Sabha, in which she refuted the need for an apology from her government for the death of Rohith Vemula (a Dalit student at Hyderabad University) or for the arrests and aggravation at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where students had been arrested under specious accusations of sedition. Her melodramatic delivery and grand gestures recalled the theatricality of her soap operatic past as the protagonist of the hit series, ‘Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’. The morning after this speech, The Telegraph newspaper printed coverage of Irani’s diatribe with an image of her staring widely at the reader; the headline read ‘Aunty National’. As wordplay on antinational, the moniker marked as harmful to the nation Irani’s alignment with Hindutva politics and her lack of culpability for the violence done to Dalit and Muslim students. This was a particularly pointed move as JNU students were simultaneously being accused of sedition, of being anti-national. The use of ‘aunty’ amplified disdain for Irani by tapping into the fatphobia, sexism and ageism that is often wielded against older South Asian women; it was meant to sting. One editorial criticising The Telegraph’s use of ‘aunty’ calls attention to the hypersexualisation of aunties—a large body of softand hard-core erotica circulates under the category of ‘Aunty Porn’. Despite the public contempt for The Telegraph’s punny headline, several months later, Irani herself signed off on a Facebook post with ‘Regards, Aunty National’, defanging the newspaper’s subversive moniker. The many uses and meanings of aunty in the Irani case stages how aunty becomes associated with negativity, sexuality and both subversive and suppressive politics. This special section of South Asia looks at the ubiquitous though undertheorised figure of the aunty not only as an object of study (an archetype, a relation, a role), but also a figuration (a representative form, an optic) that can provide alternative orientations for our field of study, certainly around questions of gender and sexuality, but also nationalism, kinship and disciplinary borders. Aunties appear constantly in South Asian public culture: Netflix’s Masaba Masaba features a song about her; listicles detail the characteristics of Tamil maamis;