Edinburgh Napier University

  South Asian communities appear on the periphery of Scottish cinema where films have predominantly explored narratives about white masculinity. In a cinema where female voices often struggle to be heard, South Asian women are virtually invisible except in a scattering of documentary and fiction films.

I explore how South Asian female characters/subjects are presented in a selection of Scottish films. I identify stereotypes that are consciously or unconsciously implicit in the cinema of a country that struggles to rid its cultural imagination of the shadows of colonialism.

I propose that stereotypical South Asian female characters are usually submissive (conceding), passive (lacking agency), repressed, mostly invisible (eluding the frame), and/or occasionally rebellious (Assella 2012; Chaudhuri 2009; Desai 2004; Durham 2004; Jiwani 1992; Le Forestier 2015; Rajgopal 2003; Tincknell 2020). The women operate in, or if they are protagonists, push against, an irrational patriarchal universe. They are rarely seen outside the domestic sphere, and their presence in public spaces is usually an act of transgression. Their existence is primarily delineated around a response to paternal pressures involving arranged marriages (Sánchez 2016). As characters, they often lack complexity or ambiguity.

Pointing towards the experimental films of Alia Syed and Jasleen Kaur, I investigate how complex cinematic representation might challenge stereotyping and allow for meaningful diversity in Scottish cinema.