Enduring identities in diasporic cinema

The thorny issue of women’s emancipation lies at the heart of Provoked: a True Story (2006), a film directed by Jag Mundhra that tries to update diasporic cinema by following the story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, a Punjabi woman “married off” to a violent man in London. Their wedding is bound to generate abuses and pain, so that the ill-treated woman tries to set him on fire. When she is sentenced to prison for life, a charity called Southall Black Sisters helps her to resist and react. The plot develops the dynamics of crime and punishment from a cultural standpoint in analysing two conflicting perspectives: on the one hand the cultural structure that imposes on Kiranjit the role of patrivata, namely the “good (submissive) Indian woman”, and on the other the efforts of women to fight domestic violence and achieve dignity and respect. What emerges from this dramatic story regards the scope of identity when women are marginalised and neglected into a condition of subjugation, a pernicious ghost of gender discrimination stat still haunts Asian diasporic communities.