Daughters of Scheherazade is an experimental film that traces the figure of virgin and places her at the wedding night in an amorous encounter with pleasure and pain, safety and danger body and mind and the historical and the lived. This video is concerned with the psychic significance of a threshold event–wedding night –that comes with the promise of relationship in a particular culture. The film presents the wedding chamber as a feminine place of contemplation, which is placed at the edgeof time. The film tries to capture the trauma of the ritual wound that makes and unmakes the woman in Patriarchy and while doing so enters the domain of the liminal, primal and the unspeakable. Daughters of Scheherazade draws its inspiration from the story of the Persian Queen Scheherazade, whose story telling frames The Book of One Thousand and One Nights –thefamous book of stories and folk tales. Scheherazade appears in this video as a binding figure who could both invoke the universality of the discourse around virginity and the uniquely feminine ways of re-telling the phallic narrative of desire and erotic danger.

The ill-lit nuptials chamber becomes the contemplative space where gaze and voice come for a face-to-face encounter. I invoke Scheherazade to overcome the anxiety of this claustrophobic encounter. And as the filmmaker my attempt is to come out of the chamber without getting beheaded so that I have a story for my sisters. The project has tenuous relation with the whole process of researching and writing, even when it remains informed by psychoanalytically informed ethnographic research, I undertook around Indian wedding night and its erotic economy. I believe the conceptual and the creative have porous boundaries and the conversation is important to imagine psychological practice that is sensitive to culture and context.