Rudaali (1993)
The title of this chapter is a play on Gayatri Spivaks’s famous query, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The controversy and ambiguity that may have resulted from the rhetorical form in which her question was posed and the enormous ideological and philosophical charge involved in notions of speech, voice, and articulation are likely to evaporate when the act being considered is not speaking but weeping, not the prestige of logos, associated with man, but the banality of pathos or sentiment, generally considered the province of woman.
If the subaltern woman cannot speak (is spoken for) or speaks only under exceptional circumstances, weeping would seem to be her allotted condition in life, and the conjunction of women’s tears with “third-world” calamities has long been a staple of the mass media. Yet the image of the subaltern as woman and woman as the being-in-pain, while ubiquitous, is certainly undertheorized. Perhaps it is the oozing expressiveness of tears, their visual and emotive quality, that confers on them the taint of womanly body fluids and disassociates them from more acceptable and “legitimate” notions of language and voice.
—Sumita S. Chakravarty “Can the Subaltern Weep?” Mourning as Metaphor in Rudaali (Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World)