Avenging Silhouettes: Female Rage and Vengeance as Radical Resistance across Literature and Film

Abstract

This paper studies how vengeance has been redefined in the film Bulbbul by Anvita Dutt and the novel Shame written by Salman Rushdie. This proves that vengeance does not operate as a simple act of retribution but can be elevated to a symbolic language for all historically silenced individuals through these narratives. They also represent dismantling acts performing violence not refracted through myth, allegory, and cinematic metaphors but as direct articulation of what shall become of marginalised women if vengeance were possible against patriarchal and nationalistic forms of dominance. The study employs comparative textual-visual analysis with close reading of Rushdie’s allegorical prose against a semiotic analysis of Dutt’s storytelling in images. Framing this intersection are aspects drawn from postcolonial feminism, affect theory, and trauma studies helpful in describing how pent-up feelings find expression in violent metamorphosis. It does not read or see Sufiya Zinobia’s monstrous emergence and Bulbbul’s transformation into a chudail as anomalies but rather interprets them as acts of agency that speak of the tragic effects of shame and repression. It advances that this is a new feminist and postcolonial form of vengeance wherein cruelty changes into speech, anger turns to witness and quietness transforms into a powerful factor. This vantage point deposes traditional understandings of female fury, making it a counter-discursive act of resistance with the body.