Abstract
This essay offers a psychoanalytical critique of Assamese filmmaker Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis (2019). Through a narrative rich in food symbolism, the film examines individual female identity and repressed sexual desire in a conservative social order. The characters, as social subjects, embody the crisis of individuality restrained by cultural conventions. The present study recognizes the depiction of cannibalism in the film as a metaphor of excessive desire that leads to social transgression. The study locates the cannibalistic hunger of the female protagonist as a metaphor to articulate her repressed sexuality in conservative society. It argues that Aamis problematizes conventional gender roles by representing the male body as an object of desire while examining the fallacy of the empowered woman in contemporary society.
Keywords: Woman in cinema, Aamis, Lacan, psychoanalysis, transgression
Il n’y a pas La femme.
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
The role of a woman is typically normative in a phallocentric social order. Since social and personal identities are shaped by cultural norms and beliefs, her identity is intricately linked to her location in society. This is what Lacan tried to drive home when he proclaimed, “Il n’y a pas La femme” or “there is no such thing as The woman.”[3] The emphasis on the determiner ‘the’ resists universalization of the identity of woman.[4] The French existentialist philosopher and feminist activist Simone de Beauvoir’s oft-quoted maxim, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,”[5] also argues in favor of the unconscious cultural conditioning that shapes the identity of a woman. There is no universal identifier of womanhood: it is moderated in terms of space, class, race, and tradition which define her performative identity. The idea of womanhood is not biologically inherited, rather it is culturally conferred by social and cultural institutions. It is a process through which the individual assimilates with her socio-cultural traditions and conventions to perform her social role. Barthes identifies toys as the cultural machinery that introduces children with gender and social roles they are expected to perform, noting, “There exist, for instance, dolls which urinate; they have an oesophagus, one gives them a bottle, they wet their nappies… This is meant to prepare the little girl for the causality of house-keeping, to ‘condition’ her to her future role as mother.”[6]
The trajectory of the identity of woman attains its fruition in motherhood. Childhood games and rituals are actualized as the woman is transposed into her destined role of a kind, compassionate, nurturing being, i.e. a maternal figure. The identity of the mother is mythologized as an icon of a life-giver and nurturer. Rather than being a mere biological condition, motherhood is a social destiny for a woman. It is her highest social function—to reproduce and impart her culture and tradition to the future generation. She ensures continuation of the prevalent social and moral order by nurturing her offspring according to traditions and customs, hence she is venerated. Her identity and role as a mother is crucial to the preservation of the dominant ideology. The myths associated with motherhood go hand in hand with impersonalization and universalization of her identity.
The tendency to impersonalize reduces her entire identity to a performative persona which is alienated from the self of the woman. This tendency is reflected in films as the gaze of the camera often represents woman as “image,” as Laura Mulvey has theorized.[7] The alienation of women is engendered by cultural norms and strictures: the duality of a culturally conferred image destines the female identity to be intrinsically alienated. In Lacan’s “symbolic order” her desires are frustrated and denied enactment.[8] Her attempts to enact her desire are readily labeled and considered threatening to the established phallocentric social order.
Aamis explores the story of Nirmali (played by Lima Das) and Sumon (played by Arghadeep Baruah) who develop a platonic relationship over their mutual penchant for exotic meat. Nirmali, a paediatrician, is the lonely wife of a self-absorbed physician who has no time for her, while Sumon is a PhD scholar studying meat eating habits across Northeast India. As their relationship matures, Sumon recognizes a strong sexual desire for Nirmali. As a traditionalist, Nirmali’s powerful sense of morality leads her to repress her own desire for Sumon and she refuses to articulate it. Sumon hesitates to express his desire to Nirmali keeping in mind the illegitimacy of their potential relationship. After experiencing an erotic dream of Nirmali, Sumon determines to feed his own flesh to Nirmali in an attempt to fulfil his desire for her. Nirmali is visibly thrilled by the meat. However, she expresses revulsion soon as Sumon tells her that it is his own flesh. Though momentarily repulsed by the idea of eating human flesh, Nirmali is reminded of its pleasure and she asks for more. Soon, she develops an insatiable hunger and demands larger servings of human flesh. To satisfy her demand, Sumon determines to kill a person and cook the meat for Nirmali. He strangles a rickshaw puller on an empty road and kills him. However, Sumon is caught by the police while trying to dismember the rickshaw puller. Their entire plan is revealed. In the final scenes of the film, Nirmali and Sumon are seen in police custody on charges of murder and cannibalism.
This essay examines various aspects of the alienated female identity in Aamis (2019). Drawing on Lacan’s work on psychoanalysis, the essay probes the protagonist, Nirmali, as a ‘divided subject,’ split between self-identity and a socially conferred image. Articulation of female desire for pleasure is prohibited in the socially conferred image of the female. Hence, she is compelled to repress and disavow the instinctive drives. Her repression enables the symptoms of aberrant desire and social transgression. The essay further draws attention to the subversive strategies of the film that upend gender binaries, and questions cultural hierarchies as they are established in conservative society.
Modernity and globalization have liberated the image of the urban woman in Indian cinema. Predominantly representing the middle class, the ideology of Indian cinema has undergone certain changes in recent times. Contouring itself according to shifting middle class ideologies, contemporary cinema has come to represent ambitious, career-oriented, professionally driven female figures. The twentieth-century identity of the working modern woman as “sexually promiscuous” and a threat to society has been amended in contemporary society and cinema.[9] The identity of modern urban Indian women is no longer presented as a threat; rather it is incorporated in the dominant social order. The purported threat of female modernity is neutralized in cinema through a strategy where her image is modified to represent her as unsexed in the public space. In private or in the home space she must be faithful to her traditional familial role and, after marriage, she is to enact her primal role of reproduction. Her sexuality is utilitarian and serves its destiny in reproduction. The image of the middle class domesticated woman has not been revolutionized or reaffirmed but merely amended to make her not so domesticated anymore. It has undergone a negotiation by which she is granted public exposure against her yielding to the phallocentric ideals of social decorum.
A popular film from recent times illustrates the ideological prohibition on the expression of female sexuality as well as individuality. Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish (2012) portrays the story of a domesticated middleclass housewife and mother. The protagonist, Shashi (played by Sridevi), who has spent her entire life as a housewife finds liberation in New York where she is able to learn English and construct a self-identity for herself. At an English Language class, she joins a group of friends from different nationalities and ethnicities. Her encounters with Laurent (Mehdi Nebbou) verges on an erotic attraction before she thwarts his advances—citing her inherent role as a wife and mother. Hence, her entry into global society is legitimized, and it remains so as long as she does not decide to leap out of her socially conferred image to assert her individuality. In the end, she chooses to return to her normative familial role of a nurturing mother and a wife. That she chooses to conform to her culturally conferred identity is symptomatic of the identity of the modern urban woman in contemporary India.
The figure of the acculturated woman is a crucial trope in Hazarika’s Aamis. The protagonist, Nirmali, epitomizes the figure of the traditional woman. Like Shashi, she is a devoted mother and a dutiful wife. Unlike Shashi, Nirmali departs from the archetype of the housewife by working as a practicing physician simultaneously. In English Vinglish, Shashi’s emancipation from the domestic space is the focal point. However, Aamis investigates the facticity of that emancipation in terms of individuality and sexuality. Brinda Bose observes a perceived threat to the “social landscape” which culminates in relegating female subjectivity and sexuality. She notes, “Clearly, however, even if the notion of sexual desiring (for non-reproductive sexual activity) were to be admitted, it is more than likely to be conceived of as masculine, with very little significance given to ideas about female jouissance or sexual pleasure, subjectivity, and fulfilment.” [10] She adds, “Insisting on the efficacy of such wild notions may even reinforce fears of disorder in the social landscape: female sexual desire therefore emerging in a synecdochal relationship with the modernizing process, which is in turn also equated with the (corrupting, sterile) city of modern times.”
The phallocentric society, which identifies the phallus as the privileged signifier, deems female subjectivity and sexuality as inconsequential—redundant; because desire and subjective perception are privileges reserved for the masculine. It is important to note that the notion of phallus is a strictly Symbolic entity: it is in itself a signifier without any signified. Unto it has been conferred the position of the transcendental signified which sets language’s signifying chain in motion.
The association between food and copulation is universal. Oysters have been known to be a potent aphrodisiac, and red wine is almost a normative symbol of intimacy and sensuousness. In cyberculture, emojis of fruits and vegetables are used to suggest genitals. Carol Counihan argues, “Food and sex are analogous instinctive needs and there is a lifelong connection between oral pleasure and sexual pleasure. Food and sex are metaphorically overlapping. Gifts of food may represent offers of sex, and sex maybe described through food images.”[11] The experience of preparation and eating food is a sensory act; like sex it involves multiple senses—optical, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory.[12] Food and drink are often used to convey information about characters and their relationship. In cinema, food may emerge as the signifier for sexual appetite. Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964) uses the recurrent image of paan or betel leaf as a symbol of Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee) offering her sexuality to Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee), her brother-in-law. Traditionally, paan has been considered a sexual stimulus for the female. Ray’s cinematic strategy at once makes the assertion implicit and subtle while at the same time appropriating the unacceptable actions and maneuvers in the established paradigm of tradition and convention.
A similar strategy is exhibited in Hazarika’s Aamis as the images of food are closely interwoven into the narrative of the film. The protagonists, Nirmali and Sumon develop a bond over their shared craving for different kinds of meat. The Assamese title, Aamis, refers to ‘meat’ or rather animal flesh that is considered edible. The term connotes the cultural assimilation of flesh as an edible substance. To put it in context, a particular flesh needs to be culturally accepted and assimilated in order for it to be considered edible for a community. The idea of edibility is heavily moderated by culture. There are cultural taboos associated with meat. It represents a ferociousness and virility that is typically a male prerogative.[13] The type of meat a person chooses to consume may relegate or integrate their position in the social hierarchy. The concept of cultural assimilation that is subsumed in food habits emerges as the recurrent motif in Aamis. Harsha Vincent identifies the interplay of the vegetarian/non-vegetarian binary in Aamis whereby the former assumes the role of the privileged signifier.[14] Such hierarchies of food habits are quite prevalent in Northeast India. Queenbala Marak elaborates that the Rongdani Rabha tribe of Garo hills gave up eating beef to consider themselves superior to the beef eating Garo tribe inhabiting this region. Consequently, they are also accepted as such by the Hindu groups.[15] It shows that the choice of food may determine an individual or community’s inclusion or exclusion from the larger community.
A community’s choice of food goes on to emphasize how food habits play the role of a decisive agent in terms of social inclusion and exclusion. Certain meats are widely frowned upon like dog or cat, barring a few cultures, while consumption of some meats is prohibited by religious stricture. The question not only concerns the vegetarian/non-vegetarian dichotomy, rather it is about making a clear distinction between the normative which is acceptable and the non-normative which is straightaway proclaimed as aberrant and deviant, relegating it to the margin. The Shillong-born filmmaker Nicholas Kharkongor’s Axone (2019) brings out the politics of exclusion over heterogeneous food habits. The story revolves around the pungent Naga traditional condiment, Akhuni, a fermented by-product of soybean. Set in the capital Delhi, the film explores the ordeals of the excluded ‘northeast’ people as they decide to cook a traditional dish for a friend’s wedding. It creates a row among the locals and their landlady, and lands them in a series of debacles that highlight their innate discriminatory tendency against anything unfamiliar. Axone serves to underscore the primary familiar/unfamiliar dichotomy that leads to persecution of individuals and groups. The binary opposition is sustained by majoritarianism which empowers a section of society and lends authority to dictate social policy and action. The controversial item in question, Akhuni, is a vegetarian product which is essentially the staple diet of the Nagas, but it is uncommon in most parts of India. It is its unfamiliarity that unsettles traditional society.
In Aamis, during one of their rides in car, Sumon tells the story of a certain tribe that consumes the stink bug, Coridius, locally known as Gandhi Puk. The bodily fluids of the insect are consumed by locals for their intoxicating effects. As he narrates the anecdote, Sumon throws the question, is the insect a food, or a hallucinogen? Nirmali replies that it is both. Aamis destabilizes the distinctions between the pleasure of food and pleasure of sex. Consumption of food serves a greater purpose than its functional purpose of physical sustenance. Similarly, intercourse’s purposive pleasure transcends the basal reproductive necessity. At Nirmali’s house party, Sumon brings up the food habits of different cultures which appear non-normative or deviant, demonstrating the relative nature of normativity. Such a remark by Sumon kindles a critical discussion about the very farcical notion of normativity that relegates a particular meat as taboo while accepting another. It is the same normative culture that labels female sexuality as transgressive while celebrating that which culminates in culturally sanctioned reproduction.
The English subtitle of Aamis, Ravening, suggests the symbolic consumption that the film highlights. It is also suggestive of a bestial appetite and feverish passion, foregrounding the primal nature of a psychological drive which is the implicit motif through the film. Symbolism, in Aamis, functions to represent the unconscious desire of the characters, which is otherwise repressed and relegated as forbidden, and is manifested through images of food. For Nirmali, desire is manifested in her appetite for meat. After a date with Sumon, she returns home to gorge on a piece of chicken, feverishly.
The distinction between food appetite and sexual appetite is overlapping as one substitutes the other. In the staunchly conservative Assamese society, verbal articulation is resisted and desires are sublimated to culturally acceptable practices. As Sumon’s conversations with Nirmali become more frequent, he is seen searching the internet for ‘Platonic Love.’ Being aware of the illegitimacy of his desire for a married woman, he embarks on a futile attempt to disavow his sexual instincts and sublimate sexual desire into a socially acceptable practice of eating food.
In a conservative, phallocentric society, non-normative sexual desire is prohibited, especially when it is female desire which is the fundamental property of language that refuses to accommodate it. Desire, according to Lacan, “is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting.”[16] The incompatibility between desire and speech[17] is emphasized when Nirmali’s friend, Jumi (Neetali Das), asks Nirmali about the nature of her relationship with Sumon. Nirmali bypasses the question to assert her own socially mandated image of a mother and a wife. Having assimilated her role and location in the phallocentric society, Nirmali is unable to articulate her desire in language. First, her entry into language inherently produces the split or the barred subject. The matter of the split addresses the impossibility of fully present self-consciousness, as the speaking being is divided between the “subject of the ENUNCIATION from the subject of the statement.”[18] Second, because the order of language denies and defers all possibility of articulation, desire is contained and limited in the non-linguistic domains of Imaginary and Real. Post-structuralist scholarship emphasizes the relational feature of language structure where the possibility of meaning is infinitely deferred. Language, a self-referential system, is virtually incapable of representing anything but its own chain of signification.
Denied and deferred by the order of language, food emerges as the recurrent symbol that is used to represent the repressed psychic drive of the protagonists. Belonging to the urban middle class, the protagonists in the film are driven by petit-bourgeois social norms and dictums. Despite being attracted to each other, they cower from physical touch, repressing their instinctive drive. In Nirmali, the repressed desire is manifested in her feverish passion for meat. Food, in Aamis, is used as metaphor and metonymy to symptomatize the excesses of desire that is repressed in established social order. Further, its unaccountability in the signification chain of language renders the very existence of desire illegitimate. The characters of Aamis resort to images and symbols to realize their desire, frustrated by unfulfilled desire and limited by the order of language that shapes cultural expectations and behaviors.
Aamis retrofits language as the Law in the film. The Law is the cornerstone in Lacan’s Symbolic register. It is the domain of language and the Law where everything is governed according to the norms and conventions of a culture. The characters in Aamis are psychoanalytical subjects whose entry into society has been mandated by their assimilation with Law. The subjects’ position in society is moderated by the Law. Lacan’s concept of the Law with a capitalized L refers to the naturalized order of civilization as it evolved. Language represents the order of the world and vice-versa. The relationship between Law and language is established in the words of Lacan: “This law then reveals itself clearly enough as identical to a language order. For without names for kinship relations, no power can institute the order of preferences and taboos that knot and braid the thread of lineage through the generations.” He adds: “And it is the confusion of generations which, in the Bible as in all traditional laws, is cursed as being the abomination of the Word and the desolation of the sinner.”[19]
As the subject journeys from Imaginary to Symbolic, he/she assimilates the way of the world through language, language ends up redirecting his development as a social being with required mannerisms. Thus, language goads the subjects into the endless sequence of signification which defers from one signifier to the other. It frustrates all possibilities of the realization of Nirmali’s desire. The “name of the father,” a formulation of Lacan, is the supreme authority that dominates her consciousness. According to Lacan, “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law.”[20] The ideological dominance of the “name of the father,” an emblem of authority and Law is established as Nirmali rebukes Jumi because the latter is having an extra-marital affair, reminding her as well as herself that she is a mother and a married woman. The sanctity of marital union and motherhood desexualizes the woman. It is this awareness, or to put it more simply, the internalized Law that prevents her from expressing her attraction for Sumon. Even as Jumi refers to their relationship as an “affair,” she flinches and asks why Jumi keeps using the word. She is insistent on reaffirming that they have not even touched each other, as if to justify their relationship in the eyes of the Law. Jumi serves as the foil to her highly righteous, prudish ideals, which enables Nirmali to assume a moral high ground for herself. She expresses her disapproval for Jumi’s illicit affair, and as Jumi, in turn, refers to Sumon and her relationship as an “affair,” she is quick to dismiss the label to claim her moral superiority.
When Nirmali, a medical doctor, diagnoses Sumon’s sick friend, the whimpering man vows that he will never eat meat again. Nirmali smiles and retorts that the problem is not with meat but with gluttony, forewarning the prohibition on the excesses of pleasure, and anticipating the causality of her transgression. The protagonist of Aamis, Nirmali, is a social being who upholds her cultural traditions and customs. In the introductory montage that introduces her, Nirmali is depicted performing her motherly responsibilities of readying her son for school and then working as a compassionate and nurturing figure at her clinic. Her role as a mother as well as a doctor makes her the standard bearer of the image of the nurturing figure, which when portrayed in cinema constructs the identity of the woman.[21] In a phallocentric social order, it is the image that is privileged against all possibilities of a self-identity. On this tradition, Cowie argues, “[T]here is the image as identity which is possessed and appropriated by the woman as social agent and psychical subject. But insofar as one is an image for oneself, one is also a divided subject, constituted, Lacan says, in that splitting which arises when the subject identifies with its image as other, taking that image as its own.”[22]
This splitting in Nirmali alienates her and reduces her self-identity to an image. Nirmali privileges her ego or the Symbolic identity conferred by society: as a social being she has assimilated the necessary social and gender role conferred on her. Vincent argues, “Sumon is … more close to nature as opposed to Nirmali who is more constrained by culture and society.”[23] Being a mother, she not only upholds culture, she has the duty to embody culture herself. As Sumon narrates an anecdote about killing the chicken he has nurtured for a month, Nirmali asks if he did not feel bad. To which, Sumon replies that he did but the drive of hunger was more pressing for him. As opposed to Sumon who privileges his natural instincts, Nirmali is a traditionalized figure of culture, restrained by Law and alienated from instinctive drives. The “lack” in her identity comes to surface in her encounter with Sumon. According to Lacan, this identification of the “lack,” or the “lack” in itself engenders desire. Living a primarily Symbolic life, according to the dictum of the Law, Nirmali encounters the natural, primal, and sensuous aspect of life in Sumon. The “lack” in her self goads her to direct her ‘object cause of desire’ unto him. The “lack” in her self is emphasized by Sumon who represents the more earthly, primordial drives.
As Sumon brings meat for Nirmali, it stands for her encounter with the repressed primal drive that exists in opposition to the nurturing social image she has assimilated. Vincent notes that the meat Sumon brings gets incrementally eccentric and bold as if to mimic their burgeoning desire that started innocently but developed into violent passion.[24] But her desire for the Other is denied in the Symbolic, which is imperative for the subject in the Symbolic order. The subject is perpetually in awe of “the Name of the Father.” Her heightened puritanical belief system prevents her from even acknowledging her desire to Jumi, and makes her cite her social identity as a mother and a wife.
The film shows the sexual tension turning into frustration. While sharing a meal together, Sumon tries to wipe a bit of food from Nirmali’s chin but she pulls away. Following this event, both the protagonists are seen traveling in a car in awkward silence. Although Sumon is bold enough to make advances, Nirmali’s morality forbids her to comply. The cultural taboo associated with extramarital relationship frustrates and prohibits his sexual desire for her. Later, Sumon laments that only if she was not married, their relationship would have been different. It is not only Nirmali who is barred by the omnipotence of Law but Sumon as well: he too, having internalized the cultural traditions, is unable to act on his desire. In such a crisis, the dream, described below, becomes crucial to bring a resolution to this conundrum.
Sumon, at this point, has a dream which presents a vision of erotic invitation. In the dream, Nirmali’s body, her face, and hands appear in quick succession as her invitation is heard: her desire to consummate their relationship. Evidently, the dream manifests Sumon’s repressed desire to do the same. Yet, the dream presents a montage of food items and dishes replacing the erotic vision. Soon, as he wakes up, Sumon declares that he will feed her his own flesh. It is the dream sequence that inspires in him the will to sublimate his desire for physical intimacy in food. Sumon’s scandalous determination to seek recourse in vorarephilia marks a crucial juncture in the film. He resorts to the metonymic function of signification in order to realize his desire for union, symbolically. Barred by the Law to fulfil his sexual desire, Sumon displaces it through metonymic function of desire, choosing to feed her his own flesh. In a scene, Sumon pursues his veterinarian friend to cut a bit of flesh out of his thigh. Sumon’s friend and confidant, Elias da, uses the surgical instruments at his disposal to operate on him and cuts out his flesh. Subsequently, Sumon uses this flesh to prepare a dish for Nirmali. The sensual method of preparing a meal supplants the visceral, raw flesh, the inedible into an edible substance.[25]
By choosing to feed Nirmali his own flesh, he strategizes to substitute her sexual gratification with gustatory gratification. His strategy, seemingly ignoble, serves a greater cinematic purpose. It rejects narcissistic masculine sexual tendency and performance in favor of a more altruistic one. As he cooks his own flesh, Sumon’s desire for Nirmali is turned into a self-sacrificing one. Though the film subscribes to the traditional tropes of a narrative cinema, it subverts them through its symbolic representations of sexual desire. According to Mulvey, the image of the woman in cinema is subjected to consumption by the male gaze.[26] In the gaze, she is the objectified image of the other to whom the protagonist, and through him the audiences’ narcissistic identification, redirects their object cause of desire.[27] By offering his body as the object of consumption, he delivers his body to Nirmali’s desire while assuming a mere servile status himself. Through food symbolism, Aamis takes a subversive dig at conventional narrative cinema by portraying the male body as an actual object of consumption. Nirmali consumes the dish prepared by Sumon without knowing the kind of meat she is eating. In addition, the dish inspires in her a euphoric reaction. However, soon as she learns that it is Sumon’s flesh, her reaction is that of revulsion and contempt which eventually subsides to give way to an insatiable hunger for the transgressive pleasure.
Lacan’s following remark on the function of desire is actualized in the film as Nirmali’s desire for Sumon’s flesh comes to supplant her desire for physical intimacy: “And the enigmas that desire…poses for any sort of ‘natural philosophy’ are based on no other derangement of instinct than the fact that it is caught in the rails of metonymy…”.[28] This metonymic function of desire is seen in Nirmali’s repressed desire for the other, which finds fulfilment as she is introduced to the idea of displacement. The strategy of displacement introduces to Nirmali the typical phallic tendency to live out fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command.[29] Having encountered the alternate way to live out her unconscious desire, to derive sexual gratification, she caves in. The function of the Law that prohibits jouissance inadvertently leads the subject to the transgressive gratification of jouissance.[30] Nirmali’s surrender to her desire is motivated by the ecstasy that she derives from her act of consuming Sumon’s flesh. Lacan notes, “there is a jouissance that is hers about which she perhaps knows nothing if not that she experiences it—that much she knows.”[31] The extra-linguistic feature of the transgressive pleasure or jouissance is evident as Nirmali fails to articulate her desire for Sumon’s flesh, and instead she declares it as an insatiable hunger. As Probyn notes, the cannibalistic hunger is symptomatic of excesses of desire.[32] Although her “hunger” for transgressive pleasure is inherently prohibited in the Symbolic, it is visually elaborated by her ecstatic face and sounds of waves which seem to stand for orgasm. The excesses of pleasure are associated with jouissance, which is the transcendental position that Nirmali is able to access that opens the possibility of limitless pleasure. Lacan explains, “[O]nce one has entered on that path [that of jouissance], once the process has begun, then there is no longer any limit; it generates ever more powerful aggression in the self. It generates it at the limit, that is to say, insofar as the meditation of the Law is lacking.[33]
As the transgressive pleasures of jouissance flouts all limits and restrictions of the law, it explains the gradual erosion of Nirmali’s righteousness as she begins to pine for larger amounts of human flesh. The puritanical belief system, or the law in Lacan’s words, that she represents so far, undergoes radical erasure in the lust for jouissance or the transgressive pleasure of the excess. As the protagonist flouts the fundamental values of human civilization, a bestial drive is unleashed that threatens the very foundation of civilization. As the couple is detained by the police, the painful consequence of jouissance is actualized in the film.
What starts as a metonymic, evasive strategy to prevent violation of cultural traditions ends up as a serious humanitarian perversion since Nirmali’s lust for human flesh intensifies. While food supplants sexual desire and union in Aamis, it highlights the politics of exclusion with reference to food and the excesses of desire which is fundamentally prohibited. As the couple is booked by the police for murder and cannibalism, they are stripped off of their social image and identity, being labeled deviants. Aamis wraps up with the final scene of Nirmali and Sumon in the police station, holding hands for the first time ever. Already exiled from society, it is in this extra-cultural space that they are able to actualize their desire for intimacy, offering a pathetic commentary on the burdens of tradition and culture.
Ritish Dutta is an independent researcher with a postgraduate degree (M.A.) in English (First Class) from the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Calcutta. His specializations include Modern European Literature, Modernism and Postmodernism, and Postcolonial Literature. He has presented a research paper titled, “The Location of Desire: Psychosis and the Body in Luigi Pirandello's Dramaturgy,” in the Three-Day International Conference on Redefining Theories of Communication: 21st Century Perspectives in Language and Literature, organized by SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Ramapuram, Chennai. His article entitled, “The Poetics of Postcolonial Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines,” is due for publication in a critical anthology published by Book Age Publications, New Delhi. His research interests are psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, and gender politics in literature.
[1] Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (New York: Norton, 1998), 72.
[2] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Random House, 2014), 273.
[3] Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 72.
[4] Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2006), 222.
[5] de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 273.
[6] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), 58.
[7] Laura Mulvey, The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 1172.
[8] Ibid., 1173.
[9] Brinda Bose, “Modernity, Globality, Sexuality, and the City: A Reading of Indian Cinema,” The Global South 2, no. 1 (April 2008): 40, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40339281
[10] Ibid., 43.
[11] Carole M. Counihan, The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power (New York: Routledge, 2018), 63.
[12] Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: Food Sex Identities (London: Routledge, 2000), 62.
[13] Ibid., 75.
[14] Harsha Vincent, “Problematizing the Binaries: A Study on Food Symbolism in Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis,” South Asian Popular Culture 20, no. 2 (2022): 235–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2022.2089462
[15] Queenbala Marak, “Food,” in The Routledge Companion to Northeast India, ed. Jelle J.P. Wouters, and Tanka B. Subba (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023), 171.
[16] Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 580.
[17] Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 37.
[18] Ibid., 195.
[19] Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, 229-30.
[20] Ibid., 230.
[21] Mulvey, The Critical Tradition, 1173.
[22] Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3.
[23] Vincent, “Problematizing the Binaries.”
[24] Ibid., 7.
[25] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 64-65.
[26] Mulvey, The Critical Tradition, 1175.
[27] Ibid., 1175.
[28] Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, 431.
[29] Mulvey, The Critical Tradition, 1173.
[30] Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Routledge, 2013), 195.
[31] Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 74.
[32] Probyn, Carnal Appetites, 102.
[33] Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960,194.
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