“Fantasy Ladies”: Female Performers and Actresses in Qurratulain Hyder’s “The Missing Photograph”

Authors

  • Nandi Bhatia, University of Western Ontario, Canada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v10i1.745

Abstract

This essay examines Qurratulain Hyder’s short story “The Missing Photograph,†as a site that interrupts what Priti Ramamurthy identifies as the relative silence of feminist and film historiography on the role and contribution of actresses in early Hindi cinema, a silence that is attributed to the fact that they did not fit the dominant paradigm of social reform, nationalism, or radical movements. By providing an acute awareness of multiple and intersecting social forces that impacted the lives of actresses, “The Missing Photograph,†I suggest, is an important imaginative fragment that highlights how actresses, while remaining invisible, were central to the early film industry.

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Author Biography

Nandi Bhatia, University of Western Ontario, Canada

A Professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario, Nandi Bhatia works on film, theatre and literatures of India and the British Empire. She is the author of Performing Women/Performing Womanhood: Theatre, Politics and Dissent in North India (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (University of Michigan Press and Oxford University Press, 2004). Additionally, she has edited a collection of essays titled Modern Indian Theatre (Oxford University Press, 2011) and has co-edited with Anjali Gera-Roy, Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement (Pearson-Longman 2008).

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Published

2016-06-15

How to Cite

Bhatia, University of Western Ontario, Canada, N. (2016). “Fantasy Ladies”: Female Performers and Actresses in Qurratulain Hyder’s “The Missing Photograph”. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 10(1), 81–94. https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v10i1.745

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2016): June

Section

Section I: Articles on South Asian Women’s Writing

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