Aunties are voices from the sky: Re-imagining resistance in bollywood

Abstract

This article explores the poetics and politics of the Indian aunty. I argue that the aunty in the movie The Lunchbox (2013) negotiates with the ancient Sanskrit tradition of akashvani (celestial voice). In the first part of the article, I track the aunty’s trajectory from a loan word in Hindi to a political statement. I then study the aunty through an analysis of Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox to demonstrate how the aunty figure rewrites Bollywood’s eroticizing gaze and challenges unpaid female domestic labor. Overall, I examine how the Indian aunty offers another idiom of resistance against the discourse of patriarchy.