Consumer Pleasures and Hindi Cinema’s En-gendered Distribution of Moral Capital in Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994) and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011)

Abstract

The figure of the consuming woman enables us to investigate Bombay cinema’s fissured relationship with globalization, and especially its anxiety around the ways in which consumer culture causes women to turn “bad.” The anxiety, as explored in this chapter, is, in fact, twofold. On the one hand, the film industry reveals a preoccupation with what liberalization/commodity culture does to women themselves. But accompanying that is another anxiety: how “bad” women sabotage the true/real purpose of liberalization—to produce the ideal male consumer. Two films—Hum Aapke Hain Koun and Zindagi Na Milegi—are studied and it is argued that they present the female consumer as whittled down remnants of the erstwhile filmic vamp, insisting that such bad-women-consumers be tamed-through-punishment. Or, failing that, the women must be forsaken by men for prioritizing self-care and exercising a self-referential commodity consumption, outside/independent of their identity as wives and mothers.