Girls Will Be Girls is set in a conservative boarding school, much like the school I attended, where girls are policed, ostensibly to protect their “virtue.” Male sexuality is allowed to express itself, sometimes in aggression towards girls, while we’re instructed to be submissive and ashamed of our bodies. Despite this, I saw fierce, funny girls and women all around who subverted and circumvented the social and moral codes. In Girls Will Be Girls, I wanted to write about these subversive women who populated my life but never my screens, and to expand the narratives that are available to Indian women. Films from India (and the West) often erase real female bodies. Breasts and butts are hypersexualized, but masturbation, menstruation, vaginas, etc. are treated with revulsion or embarrassment. This erasure is part of the way girls are trained to be invisible in a world that’s afraid of their sexuality, identity, and voice. But Mira (16) and her mother Anila (38) are embodied beings with secretions and desires. Mira examines her vagina in a mirror, masturbates by rubbing up against a teddy bear, and plans her first time having sex. Anila shuns the self-sacrificing, asexual roles mothers are relegated to. She envies her daughter’s youth and boyfriend, and pursues her desires with fervor. Both mother and daughter are outspoken, subversive characters who emerge defiant, if not necessarily triumphant.
The film is set in the late 1990s, when the Indian economy was opened up to Western exports. This sparked fierce culture wars between debauched “Westernness” and virtuous “Indianness.” Women’s bodies became battlegrounds in the war, and women in miniskirts or with sexual agency became symbols of corruption. Unfortunately, this is still scarily resonant in many parts of the world today. Though the film is rooted in the 1990s in India and is a close observation of gender roles, sexuality, and oppressive patriarchy, I’m not interested in a grand thesis statement or preaching about social issues. It’s very important to me that Mira and Anila are not defined by their identities as Indian women and that they don’t have to become stand-ins for their community. I want to allow them their full range of humanity: to be in love, experience disillusionment, envy, and grief, and to represent only their peculiar and singular selves, not their full cultures. Because this is how their stories will also be universal—a luxury mostly reserved for characters from dominant cultures.