The Performance of Space: A Spatial Paradigm for Reading Sai Paranjpye’s Cinema

Film director, screenwriter and playwright, Sai Paranjpye is best known for her mastery of the art of translating human follies into humour. While numerous popular and journalistic readings of her films celebrate her aesthetics and middle-class narratives of romance and comedy, these have tended to foreclose other possible critical discussions of her films. This article offers a new theoretical paradigm for analysing Sai Paranjpye’s films by focusing on space and spatial experience as the site of sociocultural investigation. In doing so, it moves beyond the historic orthodoxies of ‘middle-class cinema’ that perpetuate class identity as the predominant tool of cinematic inquiries. Instead, I argue that the narrative concerns and aesthetic configurations of Paranjpye’s films strategise an encounter between the spatial and the social. This encounter is crucial in delineating ideas of social identity and interpersonal relationships, where space is the key structuring element. With a methodological focus on lived space and experience in Paranjpye’s Sparsh (1980), Chashme Baddoor (1981), Katha (1982), Disha (1990), Papeeha (1993), Choodiyan (1993) and Suee (2009), I propose the centrality of five dominant themes – border crossing; perceptions of home; private–public divisions; paradigms of social and spatial marginalities; and acts of mazaa/fun – as critical knots in accessing what these films reveal about the texture of late twentieth-century Indian life at the intersections of the spatial and the social.