Reading patriarchal manhood, violence and love in Kabir Singh (2019)

ABSTRACT The present essay discusses the visual representation of masculinity in Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Kabir Singh (2019). Kabir Singh is a macho-melodrama and a romantic account of the eponymous character, Kabir Singh, and his spiralling into self-destruction following his separation from his love interest, Preeti Sikka. Through the strategic exploitation of masculine tropes and symbols in the cinematic narrative, Vanga aims to construct the male protagonist, Kabir, as the public face of the hegemonic masculine ideology. The film, which offers to its audience a heteronormative heterotopia, also reinforces the patriarchal agenda through the portrayal of a sentimental, submissive woman with negligible autonomy. The article aims to develop its argument of masculinity and its association with pervasive power in the film through the reading of specific scenes through the intellectual and theoretical apparatuses of R.W. Connell, Michael Kimmell, and Michael Kaufman. It looks at the construction of masculinities as a homosocial enactment and also reads the protagonist’s borderline toxic behaviour through the theories of machoism and overcompensation of masculine identities. The paper concludes with situating Kabir Singh in Bollywood’s continuum of toxic masculinity. Through the deployment of masculinities and its nexus with sexism, this research paper also aims to query how machoistic scripts of masculinity implicate heterosexual romantic relationships.