However, films like Highway (dir. Imtiaz Ali, 2014) and Queen (dir. Vikas Bahl, 2014) share more than a rejection of domestic roles for women. They problematize the interior space of the home as a place both dangerous and oppressive while valorizing the outside/public as an emancipating space for performing women’s agency. While superficially this yields little surprise, it acquires added resonance in the context of India’s current position in the global media spotlight on women’s safety and sexual violence. The Delhi gang rape in 2012 has come to iconicize women’s struggles for gender equality, independence, and livelihood as women enter the public sphere in growing numbers in India. The gravity of the situation is indicated by statistics; a 2013 nationwide poll conducted by India Today International reports that 54% of Indian women do not feel safe going out alone (4 February 2013, 25). In a heavily mediatized political scenario where the increasing visibility of women outside the home is the core pivot of debate about social change, these films dispute the “outside” as a predatory arena for women while necessarily interacting with this discourse. Each film begins with the alienation of its female protagonists and their imminent peril when venturing beyond the home. In Highway, the protagonist Veera is gruesomely kidnapped by a group of men on a late-evening ride with her fiancé in a transparent reference to the incidents of the Delhi rape. In Queen, the eponymous character is rejected by her fiancé after a florid courtship that parodies the idealized tropes of heterosexual romance in Hindi cinema. Her delusions of love shattered, she takes advantage of an already-purchased honeymoon vacation only to find herself traumatized and alone in Paris – whose foreign streets are initially terrifying.

Ultimately these narratives come full circle by placing their characters on a trajectory of self-discovery that allows them to realize their own subjectivity – within limits. In both films the protagonists alternate between a circumscribed set of representational possibilities for women in Hindi cinema. At once victims of their circumstances, each heroine is notable for her naivety that is as much a source of pathos as a mode of vicarious pleasure. In Highway, we witness the heroine express her feelings for the first time in the company of her captors, who (as it turns out) are concerned only with ransom and not her sexual vulnerability. This irony is exacerbated by the whimsical attitude that emerges as she “adapts” to her situation, engaging a romantic bond with the gang’s leader to the point that she refuses to escape when granted the opportunity. In the process she reveals her sexual abuse since childhood by an uncle at home that sets up a meaningful contrast between the open landscapes, mobility and psychological freedom she experiences on her journey and the forbidding domain of middle-class domestic patriarchy. The latter turns out to be more egregious than the kidnappers’ otherwise overt act of repressive violence.

This conflict between interior and exterior is equally pronounced in Queen as the character is empowered to act independently for the very first time – and as far away from home as possible, where the suffocating expectations of marriage and family life seem to overwhelm any sense of agency. Like Veera in Highway, Queen’s disarming innocence enables her to navigate transgressive situations in a way that is minimally threatening to conventional moral constraints on women’s sexuality, even as the audience remains cued in to various implicit pleasures. Queen stumbles onto Amsterdam’s red light district, shares a hostel bedroom with three boys, gets drunk and attends rock concerts while emerging with her chastity and sense of wide-eyed wonder unscathed. Even the prospects of a same-sex romance with a beautiful and openly erotic friend fully elude her. Her experiences in the foreign, urban settings of Paris and Amsterdam represent allegorically the challenges and liberties women face on the “outside” in a newly globalized India with expanding opportunities for personal fulfillment. Significantly, both films conclude on a similar note, featuring solitary shots of each woman outdoors and on her own that suggest an open-ended future unmoored by conjugal romance and family obligation. Not only is the “outside” safe, it is also the primary outlet for women to transform their lives.

The Hindi film industry clearly has a heavy stake in political debates over women’s public safety, bearing the brunt of popular accusation over the objectification of women’s bodies onscreen. Highway and Queen resist women’s visual presence – and sexuality – as a social liability. This is enforced by each text’s conscious use of the dance sequence as an act of self-liberation (rather than sexual spectacle) for their characters. Each contains scenes of the protagonists dancing defiantly for their own pleasure that obstructs the representation of women’s bodies as complicit objects of a prurient gaze. Spontaneous, carefree and mockingly seductive, the women use their bodies as an index of personal expression and not sexual availability.

However, what is most telling about these two films are the processes of displacement the narratives use to deflect an authentic engagement with the issue of women’s rights. The trials and redemptions these characters face are individual, not political, and are mitigated by the standard coming-of-age plotlines and melodramatic devices of commercial storytelling, with family and romance remaining obligatory entry points for considering women’s agency. From media profiling of gender-based violence and discrimination to the active participation of women in the civic sphere, the intersecting realities of women on the “outside” in India are not so easily polarized as Veera and Queen’s victories of independence.

These stories act as contemporary parables for India’s destabilized economic, political and cultural integrity. While Hindi cinema has always explored the couple-in-crisis, the couple’s re-unification at the conclusion of each film was an allegorical enactment of national solidarity, ensuring the viability of both the state and extended social community.While the tragic impetus in previous tales of “doomed romance” was primarily the impossibility of conjugal fulfillment due to class or other circumstantial barriers, the pathos in the current cycle of films is the seduction of zealous communal prejudices that renders existence, either individual or conjugal, wholly impossible.  Even as the couple is granted space for romantic consummation, it is the characters’ allegiance to entrenched kin networks and fidelity to the ideals of self-sacrifice that results in total personal and social annihilation.  In Ishaqzaade, a film charting the romance of a Hindu boy and Muslim girl against the backdrop of a pernicious religious feud, the attainment of individual romantic desire is hampered by mutual suspicion and duplicity, while the couple’s relationship is distinctly combative rather than sentimental. This is best exemplified by the film’s ending, when both characters embrace and shoot one another in the side as their warring families close in on them.

The narrative of Ram-Leela offers a similar trajectory. The protagonists, Ram Rajari and Leela Sanera, first encounter one another in a gun standoff, and while a torrid affair follows, the couple’s misbegotten elopement is never consummated. On their wedding night Ram is deceitfully lured away by friends from his clan, while Leela is forcibly re-captured by her own (the two dynasties have been at odds for nearly 500 years) and they subsequently become divided by feudal entanglements. The couple occupies minimal screen space in the latter half of the film as we witness the formerly desperate lovers stoically perform their communal obligations in a testament to self-sacrifice.   Leela nurtures her injured mother, the ruthless matriarch of the Sanera clan, after an assassination attempt for which she mistakenly accuses Ram. Assuming leadership of their respective tribes, both take on political responsibilities that escalate an already hostile conflict to the brink of full-scale genocide. Like Ishaqzaade, the lovers ultimately shoot one another just as a community truce is declared.

By choosing to subsume their identities within a feudal system and honor existing relational commitments, each set of protagonists in both films courts their own destruction – while leaving an emotional lacuna in its wake. We sense that if these characters had fully recognized their compulsion towards individual destiny, at least the catharsis (if not the outcome) would have been different. The viewer is forced to confront the irony of failed individualism that is the genuine tragedy in both texts. These nihilistic narratives, however, have an almost uncanny prescience in the context of India’s riotous political scene.  Not only is the idea of nation eviscerated in each text – romantic conjugation is obstructed, communalist sensibilities impede civic harmony, and the premise of citizenship, actualized by the individual, is shunted aside – but the state is completely disempowered in the face of exploitative dynastic politics.

The parallels in each story to real-world developments are telling. The outburst of communal violence in Muzzafarnagar (a district in the state of Uttar Pradesh), during an elections campaign last September, in which the calculated political use of religious propaganda sparked the deaths of both Muslims and Hindus, echoes the 2002 Gujarat riots where over 1,000 people belonging to both communities were killed.  Ishaqzaade blatantly evokes the not-so-distant crisis of the 2002 riots by spotlighting the ancestral feudal mentalities and entrenched political interests which continue to inhibit long-term Hindu-Muslim unity – with minimal state intervention. In the opening frames of Ram-Leela, a stunned police officer comments on the fictional town’s outlaw culture, but is quickly eliminated from the scenario, dodging bullets in an effort to escape the town and spare his own life.  In addition, at a time when Indian public media is highly critical of the nepotism, social manipulation and clan-like structure of coalition politics, Ram-Leela presents an oblique parody of venal party agendas. For instance, the Rajari clan is associated with BJP-inspired imagery drawn from its Hindu nationalist legacy and affiliation with quasi-militant organizations that glorify conservative Hindu values, including public religious iconography and worship, particularly of Lord Ram. On the other hand, the Saneras are plagued by opportunistic bids for power not unlike the former ruling Congress party today (it is also interesting that the Sanera’s chieftain is an intelligent and fiercely powerful woman, an allusion to the Congress tradition of strong female leaders from Indira to Sonia Gandhi). In the film, both tribes are equally responsible for the violent skirmishes and political out-maneuvering that occurs at the expense of public welfare.

The two films discussed above reflect a weakening Indian state, and its tenuous national identity, as much as they are a disclaimer on the unsustainability of old-world communal politics that continues to haunt India’s civic culture.  These competing forces strike at the chord of economic and social livelihood, while increasingly clashing with the values of a rapidly gentrifying, cosmopolitan, and young middle class – the target audience for films like Ishaqzaade and Ram-Leela.