The Pakistani Woman as Feminised Border: Intimacy, Containment, and the Regulation of National Feeling in Contemporary Hindi Cinema

Abstract

This article examines the recurring figure of the Pakistani woman in mainstream Hindi cinema as a privileged site for the production and regulation of national feeling. It argues that these figures operate as a feminised border: not merely a metaphor for geopolitical division, but an affective threshold through which proximity is staged without political transformation. Drawing on a corpus of commercially successful, state-adjacent films from the early 2000s to the post-2019 period, the analysis traces how Pakistani female characters circulate across genres romantic melodrama, espionage thrillers, and nationalist action cinema while performing a remarkably consistent narrative function. Across this corpus, Pakistani women are rendered ethically legible and affectively transparent. They embody care, restraint, and sacrifice, enabling forms of cross-border intimacy that leave geopolitical antagonism fundamentally intact. What appears as a softening of hostility instead functions as a technology of regulation: difference is not erased but domesticated. Variations in accent, profession, and setting are permissible, yet epistemic and political differences are foreclosed. Pakistani women are granted intimacy but denied sustained anger, historical depth, or political articulation. The article contends that this patterned constraint is structural, sustained by genre conventions and the ideological horizons of contemporary commercial cinema. Against readings that frame such representations as evidence of liberalisation, it demonstrates how affect itself becomes regulatory. Sympathy operates as containment, producing a moral coherence through which the nation imagines itself as ethically self-assured even as its borders remain secure. Contemporary Hindi cinema thus recalibrates, rather than departs from, Orientalist logics.

Keywords: Pakistani women, Hindi cinema, Gendered Orientalism, Feminised border, National feeling, Monolithic representation, Affective nationalism, Postcolonial feminist media studies