Towards the end of the film, Shashi raises a toast to the newly-wed couple. Yet, Shashi doesn’t see his misogyny, and continues to play the role she has been playing in her family-that of a metaphorical doormat. This is one of those few scenes where his frail ego is on display, without the garb of humour that he often employs. There’s a hint of insecurity in his demeanour when he communicates his surprise at the way Shashi has been going about her daily tasks in the US. He doesn’t feel happy or proud of his wife’s newfound power and freedom. Her family later joins her in the US her husband is clearly surprised at how Shashi is able to manage her way around the city on her own-he didn’t think of her as an individual who’d be able to navigate any circumstance without his help. Though Shashi’s journey is filled with relatable challenges and emotional crescendos, at no point does she try to use these experiences and opportunities to assert herself and her identity more strongly. Menon goes on to write, “A feminist perspective recognizes that the hierarchical organising of the world around gender is key to maintaining social order that to live lives marked ‘male’ and ‘female’ is to live different realities” (viii). The maintaining of social order is rather like that” (vii). She writes, “The whole point of nude make-up, clearly, is to spend hours painting your face in order to make it look like you had not touched it at all. In her book Seeing Like a Feminist, author Nivedita Menon draws parallels between social order and nude make-up in her introduction. As per this understanding, the film isn’t furthering the feminist cause.
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While this seems like Shashi is finally breaking free from her limited existence as the wife/mother, we have to keep in mind that it is more than just learning a skill-what’s important is how those learnings help people break free of their chains and become the person they wanted to be. Shashi quietly joins a four-week English course to try and learn the language. As per my reading of the film, she looks for external validation to counter this inferiority complex that had been imposed on her by her near and dear ones. She had developed this inferiority complex due to many reasons, one of which was her inability to speak English. When she goes to US for a family wedding (she had to go alone, her family joined her after some time), she looks for validation for her cooking and her laddoos from the guests in the days leading up to the wedding. Hence, she has a very limited belief in herself and her capabilities. This stems from the way her family treats her-she views herself from the lens of her family members, who often humiliate her and berate her.
Shashi constantly looks for external validation as it helps her feel secure and seems to be the only way she assesses her self-worth. Toward the end of the scene, Shashi looks a bit dejected but she nonetheless seeks validation from her family members and hardly ever confronts them by articulating how their spiteful behaviour affects her mentally. Instead, Shashi’s daughter makes fun of Shashi’s pronunciation of an English word, and her husband joins in on the joke.
Despite all that she does, there isn’t any depiction of gratitude from her family members. She makes four or five different dishes to suit the dietary requirements and taste buds of her husband, her kids, and her mother-in-law. When we first meet Shashi (played by Sridevi) in the opening credits of English Vinglish, she’s catering to the early morning needs of all of her family members.
In this essay, I will argue that English Vinglish, unlike what most reviews said, doesn’t just peddle patriarchy, but also tries to push women to be better trained and learned only to serve their family. But far from being a film about a woman finding freedom through education and life-changing experiences, the film turns out to be a primer in new-age conformity for housewives in twenty-first-century India. Through the journey of a married, homely Indian woman’s quest to learn English after her circumstances force her to be alone in US for two weeks, we get to experience the unique challenges faced by someone who is not only linguistically limited, but also culturally inept at navigating the multicultural environment of New York (representing the outer world forbidden to women).
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Tamilyogi, Tamil Yogi, Tamilyogi Movies, Tamil Yogi Movies online, Tamilrasigan, Cooltamil,run Tamil, Full Movies,tamilrasigan.English Vinglish (2012) was touted as a film furthering women’s causes with its portrayal of a married woman’s aspirations and her willingness to adapt to a dynamic world by learning English.
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