Vol. 7, Issue 1, Part K (2025)

This paper examines the fluid and contested identity of Aasha Rani, the dark-skinned South Indian protagonist of Shobha De’s Starry Nights, through feminist, gender-theory, and postcolonial lenses. We argue that Aasha’s successive reinventions reflect both her resistance to and entanglement with the patriarchal power structures of Bollywood. Exploited from childhood by her family and industry gatekeepers, Aasha actively negotiates new personal, social, and sexual identities – from abandoned girl (Viji) to celebrity (Aasha Rani) to wife and diaspora mother – by “performing” gender roles strategically Using Butler’s concept of gender performativity, hooks’s notion of self-defining agency, and Spivak’s subaltern framework, we show how Aasha asserts autonomy amid male domination and how her identity oscillates between victimhood and empowerment. The analysis reveals that Starry Nights portrays Aasha as a survivor who, despite abiding by the “rules” of patriarchal Bollywood, ultimately subverts them to claim subjectivity and resist objectification.