“Rosy Ki Khwaheeshein”: Scripted Romance and Acquaintance Rape in Alankrita Shrivastava’s Oeuvre of Female Desire

Abstract

In this chapter, I study Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016), Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (2020), and Bombay Begums (2021), to understand how her cultural productions explode the politics behind the scopophilic representation of female sexual desire by invoking certain widely marketed and frequently censored genres of erotic expression (erotic novels and app-based telephone sex) and then exposing their disturbing social underbelly where sexual violence resides. Shrivastava’s agentive female characters rupture these commercialized pulp sexual narratives and the fetishized figures of their heroines, replacing them with a far more problematic female voice of desire that speaks the truth about acquaintance sexual violence-a form of violence (marital rape, intimate partner sexual violence, sexual harassment, or intrafamilial sexual abuse) that is birthed by our misogynistic sexual culture and ignored by our legal structures. With reference to sociological and legal scholarship, I discuss how these works portray the distressing and unlegislated reality of acquaintance sexual violence-revealing the complex nature of sexual consent (which can be partial, subjective, and temporary), the varieties of nonconsensual sex (which can be unwanted/unwelcome even when not forced, and psychologically coercive even when not physically imposed), and the grimmer impact of acquaintance assault as compared to stranger rapes (Drakulich, Sociol Forum 30(1): 103-126, 2015). I will argue that this mordant critique is lodged in the new Indian Indie current-which, as critics have noted, spells the demise of the archvillain and transformation of the familiar ‘heroine’-and that it consequently stages socio-political intervention by demolishing the stereotypical ‘romantic hero’ and subversively projecting in his place the figures of the sexually desirous woman and the acquaintance rapist.