Servants, Selfhood, and the Limits of Love: Caste, Class, and the Cinematic Politics of Domestic Labor in Rohena Gera's Sir (2018)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55737/trt/v-iv.239Keywords:
Indian Cinema, Domestic Workers, Caste, Class, Intersectionality, HabitusAbstract
Paid domestic work is one of the largest sectors of women's employment in urban India, yet it remains one of the least visible in popular Hindi cinema, where servants tend to occupy episodic, decorative roles, and the structural conditions of their labor are seldom interrogated. This article examines Rohena Gera's Sir (2018), an internationally circulated, woman-directed independent film that places a live-in domestic worker at the center of its narrative and uses the conventions of cross-class romance to stage a careful argument about the politics of servitude. The analysis is built on a qualitative film study that combines close textual reading of the complete dialogue transcript with reflexive thematic analysis of representative sequences and reads the resulting themes through two complementary lenses: Bourdieu's theory of capital and habitus, and the intersectional framework associated with Crenshaw. Findings show that the film maps the master–servant relation through tightly interlocking spatial, embodied, and linguistic boundaries that polite employer behaviour does not dissolve; that it traces the intersecting effects of class, gender, widowhood, and migration on the worker's aspiration without collapsing them into a single grievance; and that it engages the unlikely-couple tradition only to refuse its standard romantic resolution and to relocate the worker's mobility outside the employer's gift. The article contributes to media and social-science scholarship by showing how an arthouse Indian film can politicize the silence around domestic labor, by extending the conversation on cross-class romance as social criticism, and by offering a model for reading representation alongside the empirical literature on paid care work.
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