The Surrogacy Literacy of the Indian Surrogate: The Filmy Way

According to narrative theories, fiction and non-fiction literature are text types that can manifest themselves in different mediums. Cinema is a medium that imitates both text types for a screenplay. However, when a non-fiction work is fictionalised for its cinematic representation, it invites urgent and special attention on the social front. This study investigates the sexual, social and economic typecasting of Indian surrogates through the lens of Indian cinema. The landscape of the media texts used for this study ranges from two prevalent practicing modes of surrogacy in India—the traditional form of surrogacy and the gestational form of surrogacy. The traditional form of surrogacy in this article is represented in the movies Doosri Dulhan (1983) and Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (2001), whereas the movie Mimi (2021) represents the gestational mode of surrogacy. These media texts often represent overtly fictionalised accounts of Indian surrogacy and considerably tamper the authenticated contents of Indian white paper documents on surrogacy. Anindita Majumdar talks about the ‘prostitute surrogate’, a type-casted representation of Indian surrogates, where the character of surrogates is that of sexually provocative women or prostitutes. For scrutinising this prototypical representation of surrogates, the methodological framework of this paper borrows arguments from Aristotle’s theory of mimesis and Seymour Chatman’s narrative theory. The article also advocates a nascent coinage—surrogacy literacy, a literary drive to keep a check on how surrogates are represented in films dealing with sensitive technology like assisted reproduction. The possible changes in such representation due to the new surrogacy law in India are also vital considerations of the article.