Reconceptualising the (in) visible aging self of women in select Bengali films

ABSTRACT For several decades now, the incidental category of ‘woman’ has been systematically analysed through a pluralistic lens where race, class, and sexuality have cohesively positioned women as discursive subjects. Yet, age persists to be one such integral variable, which women across all cultures strive to cope with as it emerges as a potent threat to the Other’s subjective identity, her embodied experience and feminine desirability. In the Indian context, the body of an aging woman is usually situated within a contested and complex nexus, where senescence is a multi-layered experience often getting shaped by the dynamics of power. The old female selves find themselves reduced to a sheer condition of abjection and are often displaced from their former state of belonging and engulfed by the socially scripted embrace of denial. Indian cinematic discourses often represent the aged woman as a pathologised body surfacing as familial/societal burden, forcing us to address the double marginalization associated with gender and age. This paper analyses how in two Bengali films- Pather Panchali (1955) and Sonar Pahar (2018), the directors focus on the social predicament of sexageism and subvert the dominant narratives treating feminine age as a ‘crisis’. The select films attempt to deconstruct the aged ‘problem body’ through an alternative lens and refigure it as an agentic identity with an embodied presence.