The Enigma of Identity of the Anglo-Indian Women in Shyam Benegal's Junoon (1978).

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre argues that human beings are consisted of ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’. They do not bear, unlike nonhuman entities, any predecided meaning or purpose of existence. Rather, they play roles to fashion their ‘self’ and thereby obtain an essence of their being. Though, to be recognized as a ‘self’ the social being requires the look of the ‘other’, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegelremarks that the relation of self/other is not simply that of mutual recognition. Rather, it stimulates the primitive urge of dominating the other. This ambiguous relation of self/other is the central theme of the veteran Indian director Shyam Benegal’s feature film Junoon. The paper probes into the enigma of identity of the Anglo-Indian women in the concerned film and subsequently addresses such aspects as the Sartrean notions of role-play and bad faith, the influence of the ‘other’ as the look in the identity crisis of the Anglo-Indian women, representation of different cultures in the film, the contradicting elements of cultural enmity and co-existence, and so on.

Keywords

• anglo-indian identity
• identity crisis
• other as the look