Power dressing: The sari in Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani

The heroine of Kahaani, in taking on a powerful persona in the quintessentially female garment of the sari, represents a sharp contrast with conventional ways of dressing powerful women in western cinematic tradition. There is ample cultural and mythological precedent in India for coding action and violence as female, but Kahaani’s affinity with the contemporary superhero film emerges in an unexpected way in its treatment of costume, specifically the use of the sari as a distinct article of clothing that the heroine assumes only for the first time as she embarks upon the dispensation of justice. Demarcating an ordinary set of clothing from the ‘special’ sari mirrors the superhero division of the everyday person from the heroic one, only here the sari, which is a quotidian form of dress, performs as an exceptional one. The copious symbolic potential of the sari permits this move, while at the same time pointing to many of the tensions and contradictions of life that engage contemporary metropolitan audiences in India. The sari thus functions to help solidify the film’s complex positioning in twenty-first-century Hindi filmmaking.