Shyam Benegal's Zubeidaa: memory as 'voice'

Abstract

The demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the Mumbai riots that followed in its wake in January 1993 motivated Shyam Benegal to respond to his feelings for the minority community. His empathy for the minority was triggered mainly by the violence he was personally witness to at the crowded streets of Tardeo where his office stands. He saw a Muslim bakery being set on fire by an angry mob. His response brought in its wake three films in quick succession – Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa, a family trilogy relating to the stories and journeys of three women from Muslim families. All three films defined Benegal’s concern with marginalized women. The three central women characters in these films were marginalized thrice over – one because being Muslim, they were part of a minority group in India; two, as Muslim women, they were a minority-within-minority within their own communal group; and three, because they were women, per se. Within the first area of marginalization, they were targets of oppression that is the fate of Muslim women by virtue of the ideologies and philosophies of Muslim faith. Though these three areas of the oppression of Muslim women come across lucidly, subtly yet strongly in all three films, it is not the victimization that interested Benegal but rather, the strength and the power that lay hidden within these women, waiting to be tapped, drawn out and executed across the span of their respective lives. The aim of this paper on Shyam Benegal’s Zubeida is to show how the filmmaker has made imaginative, aesthetic and emotional use of ‘memory’ reconstructed from erased history as ‘voice.’ Memory reconstructed from archives like a family album, a forgotten/hidden roll of film containing a song-dance sequence, diaries written by the woman whose strident and vocal ‘voice’ has been reconstructed from the past. Oral accounts offered by the woman’s mother Faiyyazi to her grandson Riyaz, reveals Zubeidaa’s ‘voice-as-it-was’ in the present. It tries to discover how cinema as language, medium and agency, makes it possible to reconstruct erased memory of the past through the memories of people in the present and agencies of the past.