When they try to force their way in, he lets them know that he will not desist from firing his gun.

On hearing of her plight, the factory’s elderly guard Abu Mian (Om Puri)-the only Muslim character in the film-shuts the gates before the soldiers can catch up.

Sonbai evades the soldiers and escapes into a spice-making factory in the village where she works. The subedar, a minor colonial official fond of caressing his impressive moustache, finds his masculinity challenged and sends his men on horses to capture her. When the sadistic subedar (Naseeruddin Shah) accosts Sonbai (Smita Patil), a poor village woman in Ketan Mehta–directed Mirch Masala (1987), demanding that she surrender to his desires, she slaps him and escapes. While there are obviously significant differences between the narrative of the film and the real-life protest, both allow us to study gendered spaces and reimaginations of citizenships. The narrative of the film revolves around a resistance set up by some of the village women against the local colonial official’s lecherous desires for one of them. Mirch Masala, set in a village in western India in the 1940s, is considered to be one of the first feminist Hindi films. In March 2020, as the country went into a lockdown, the government finally managed to evacuate the protestors, but as several commentators have argued, Shaheen Bagh had ceased to be a geographical site and had become a reimagination of the nation itself.

The peaceful sit-in, which survived repeated vilification, attacks, and even a communal riot, created for the first time a significant challenge to the Hindu majoritarian philosophy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

However, their protest soon captured the imagination of not only other Indians but also the world. These women had never before been politically active, nor had any support from political or social organisations. In late 2019–early 2020, elderly women of Shaheen Bagh, a Muslim ‘ghetto’ in south New Delhi, staged an unprecedented protest against the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). My article looks at the events around Shaheen Bagh through the frame of the 1987 Hindi feature film Mirch Masala and analyses the politics of space and gender in both.

Shaheen Bagh by Ziya Us Salam