Romancing ruins: architectural memory in Gulabo Sitabo

This chapter will examine the representation of architectural symbolism in the film, Gulabo Sitabo (2020). Drawing on the vexed relationship between class, gender and nostalgic memorialisation, it argues that in the narrative logic of the film, the physical space of the home takes on multiple meanings. Placing my analysis in conversation with both cultural theory and popular film criticism, I examine how in the film the architectural space of a mansion functions as both metonymy and metaphor for the nation, gendered agency, the politics of heritage-making and nostalgia for Lucknow's rapidly disappearing syncretic and nawabi (aristocratic) culture, respectively. I examine how architecture represents affective and material memory in the film and the ways in which the arbitrary governmentality of naming a home as “heritage site” fundamentally changes the nature of human-space relations. Through my reading of the film, I argue that the cognitive processes of remembering articulated via narrative symbolism are intrinsically tied to the material memorialisation of architectural space. In analysing narrative-as-memory, I argue that nostalgic framing of the film creates structures of cinematic meaning (metaphor and metonymy) that blur the distinctions between the material and the affective, humans and objects, character and setting.