Sexual Cultures and Imaginations of Justice in Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul (2020)

Abstract

This paper locates Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul, a Hindi-language film released on Netflix in 2020, within the contentious cultural milieu of contemporary public discourse on issues of sexual violence, the need for legal reform, and extralegal modes of testimony. It reads the multiple imaginations of justice as redressal for gendered and sexual violence offered within Bulbbul through its delineation of four intertextual formations: child bride, widow, avenging woman, and devi (goddess). In doing so, it considers the manner in which Bulbbul offers a speculative space at the limits of judgement and sentence, which emerges out of the need to go beyond proceduralist concerns and address the possibility of desire as a legitimate axis for women’s self-expression.