CONTINUED FROM PART 2
Here's a look at how Indian cinema (both in India and the diaspora worldwide) has represented queer issues in India over the ages. Vikram Phukan had originally compiled this Alternative Guide to Cinema as part of the April 2009 issue of Bombay Dost magazine, India's first and only registered LGBT publication, issues of which can be purchased online.
Mera Naam Joker (1970) Hindi, dir. by Raj Kapoor with Raj Kapoor, Padmini
Features a third act in which we are introduced to petty thug Minoo Master (Padmini) who passes as a man, but is exposed as a woman (quite literally) after an ill-judged stunt performance involving knives. Later, Raj Kapoor (as Raju the Joker) himself turns in a gender-bending act as a flamboyantly effeminate qawwal, a perverse allusion to being cuckolded when Minoo falls for a dashing film star (Rajendra Kumar). Ultimately the Joker’s dysfunction in his relationship with women, and his uneasiness about his sexual trysts, could be a symptom of his repressed cravings. Indeed, the young Joker’s (Rishi Kapoor) burgeoning sexuality is fraught with guilt and trepidation, rather than the exuberance of erotic discovery, as if he were being dragged to the slaughter, forced to conform to standards of behaviour not in keeping with his own possibly queer disposition.
Mermaid Called Aida, A (1996) English, dir. by Riyad Vinci Wadia
Aida Banaji is the whimsical fluttery being dubbed ‘India’s first transsexual’ in somewhat hyperbolic fashion, in this self-conscious rambling documentary that even so draws out much of her irrepressible essence through many insightful vignettes from her life, sometimes captured using experimental cinematic devices.
Migration (2007) Hindi, dir. by Mira Nair with Shiney Ahuja, Irrfan Khan
One of four films in the AIDS Jaago series commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this features a combustible relationship between two men. The actors Irrfan Khan and Arjun Mathur, who took on the roles that were rejected by most other marquee names, play out the dynamic convincingly and in non-stereotypical fashion, although Khan does try to gamely inflect his role with a few subtle ‘gay’ tics.
Milind Soman Made Me Gay (2007) English, dir. by Harjant Gill
With a title that is in itself worth the price of admission, this is a somewhat disjoint narrative of testimonials by three South Asian gay men, in which cultural references like the anti-Sikh riots and the Matthew Shepherd lynching are doled out almost as non-sequiturs. This doesn’t quite take away from the powerfully lyrical central piece featuring the director himself, naked and juxtaposed against newsprint, cobbled paths and grainy visuals of the very Tuff shoes ad that lent the eponymous model his iconic status.
My Beautiful Launderette (1985) English, dir. by Stephen Frears with Daniel Day-Lewis, Gordon Warnecke
Daniel Day-Lewis plays Johhny, a white working-class National Front type, who is in love with the ambitious young second-generation British Pakistani Omar (Warnecke), an affair rooted in a childhood friendship, but now left to grapple with issues of race and class and the accelerated change that the Thatcher era’s ‘hard economics’ appeared to have brought about. The two men display a playful chemistry that is unconcerned with what their love insinuates, a dynamic reflective of writer Hanif Kureishi’s other work like the BBC mini-series The Buddha of Suburbia in which Naveen Andrews plays Karim, multi-racial, matter-of-fact bisexual, who falls in love (or not quite) with the spaced-out son (Steven Mackintosh) of his father’s mistress. Karim represents the free spirit of ’70s London as he escapes his suburban trappings into a world of promiscuity, drugs, pop spirituality and rock ’n’ roll (as captured by a masterful David Bowie soundtrack) while eschewing any notion of sexual identity politics.
My Brother Nikhil (2005) Hindi, dir. by Onir with Sanjay Suri, Juhi Chawla
Based on the life of AIDS activist Damien D’Souza, in this film a champion swimmer (Suri) is literally (and figuratively) incarcerated for testing positive for HIV with no recourse to treatment or even succour in a climate where even medical care-givers seem terrified of AIDS. His relationship with a man (although toned down considerably to mainstream taste) is depicted as loving and stable, throwing into sharp relief his otherwise crumbling world, as is given voice by the frequently appearing talking heads in some of the film’s more stagy moments.
Nagina (1986) Hindi, dir. by Harmesh Malhotra with Sridevi, Rishi Kapoor
Sridevi in one of her most iconic roles, as an icchadhaari nagin (literally shape-shifting snake-woman) who sporadically breaks into an almost infectious dance, writhing on the floor, flashing her imported coloured lenses, and striking like a serpent at onlookers, tantriks and snake-charmers alike. A gay icon is born and re-born (as in the equally electrifying sequel Nigahen) and rehashed several times — latest to succumb is Mallika Sherawat in Jennifer Lynch’s Hisss.
Natarang (2010) Marathi, dir. by Ravi Jadhav with Atul Kulkarni, Sonali Kulkarni
(Review coming soon)
Navrang (1959) Hindi, dir. by V Shantaram with Mahipal, Sandhya
In this generous helping of glorious technicolour kitsch, the legendary V Shantaram serves up an onslaught of the most gorgeously incongruous set-pieces which includes a cross-dressing Holi dance by that hopelessly mannered screen performer, and star of all his films, the androgynous Sandhya, who plays muse to the artist Divakar (Mahipal), an animated, expressive being who is atypically masculine and persistently spurned by his frigid wife.
Nina's Heavenly Delights (2006) English, dir. by Pratibha Parmar with Shelley Conn, Laura Fraser
Young restaurateurs in love in this lusciously mainstream comedy set in Glasgow, as Nina (Conn) and Lisa (Fraser) enter a curry competition to get their food business back on track. It is liltingly directed by Parmar, and shorn of the usual conflicts that beset queer Asian cinema, while not appearing to whitewash what is still essentially contentious about an inter-racial lesbian romance in which the white girl is the outsider. And oh, Ronny Jhutti provides comic relief as the flamboyant gay friend Bobbi.
Page 3 (2005) Hindi, dir. by Madhur Bhandarkar with Konkona Sen Sharma, Jay Kalra, Rehaan Engineer
In this overrated film, Madhavi (Sen Sharma) takes in a belaguered friend (Engineer) after he’s gay-bashed, and he appears suitably indebted by her uncommon charity, though it doesn’t quite stop him from entering into a dalliance with her underwear model boyfriend (Kalra). In the film’s one show-stopping moment that’s supposed to blow the lid off the hypocrisy of urban gays, Madhavi walks in on the two men attempting to work at what’s probably still the first chapter of Gay Lovemaking for Dummies. She won’t take them back.
Pakeezah (1972) Urdu, dir. by Kamal Amrohi with Ashok Kumar, Meena Kumari
Fourteen years in the making, Pakeezah reflects the despondence of tragedienne par excellence, Meena Kumari’s own life. The actress lends astonishing verisimilitude to the character of Sahib Jaan, the courtesan in the proverbial gilded cage, at once a young effervescent girl with the right amount of lachak in her stride, and a crushed woman with fragile porcelain-like features provided a specious virginal glow by Lata Mangeshkar’s magnificent vocals. Gay men have long been cast as self-flagellating victims in the Meena Kumari mould but they have also appropriated as their own the magnificent mujra set-pieces from this film, which includes the pulsating Thare Rahiyo.
Pankh (2010) English, Hindi, dir. by Sudipto Chattopadhyay with Bipasha Basu, Maradona Rebello
As an actor, once famous for female roles as a child, Jerry (Rebello) seems to occupy a kind of twilight zone in which he can flirt with being a young adolescent man with flesh-and-blood desires as well as have a back-story that makes him a more ethereal being. Bipasha Basu, in her frequent visitations to his dreams, ostensibly embodies both his fantasy woman Nandini and his own innate feminine self. Jerry could have been an antidote to the kind of gender stereotyping or gay panic that abounds in contemporary circles. In a pivotal scene, and one of the few sequences allowed some levity, he auditions for a film by performing both the male and female parts, drawing us into the interior world of his character, almost but not quite evoking Billy Crudup in Stage Beauty. However, the tragedy of Jerry is that he has been marked out as a defective piece and therefore he is doomed, always diffident about his own burgeoning masculinity and subject to vicious taunts even in his own head.
Read Complete Review HERE
Passage To India, A (1984) English, dir. by David Lean with Judy Davis, Victor Banerjee
Later discourse has established that E M Forster based the central friendship between Aziz (Banerjee) and Fielding (James Fox) on his own love affair with an Indian man, although in this version we are allowed just a modicum of sexual tension, when Aziz waits in the study while Fielding is in the bath behind a shower screen, and later offers him his collar pin, a phallic symbol almost. In the film Aziz is infantilised and deferential, almost absolved of any sexual complicity, and Fielding must ignore his own compulsions, as the narrative of this sprawling epic film is clearly headed elsewhere. What remains is a grand old tale of a doting friendship quite along the lines of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s classic Anand.
Piku Bhalo Aachhey (2004) Bengali, dir. by Tirthankar Guha Thakurta with Tirthankar Guha Thakurta
Piku is a rather circumspect young man who is castigated by his homophobic peers when he professes love to one of them, in this bleak cautionary tale, that seems wholly primed at social education, and in which the only relief is sought to be provided by dour Tagore songs.
President Is Coming, The (2009) English, dir. by Kunaal Roy Kapoor with Shernaz Patel, Konkona Sen Sharma, Shivani Tanksale
The astounding (and criminally neglected) Shernaz Patel displays a delicious flair for physical comedy as she attacks her part as a PR agent with gusto, drawing out her myriad idiosyncrasies, which include rampant kleptomania and dominatrix-like tendencies, as well as repressed lesbian urges that causes her to publicly humiliate a homosexual man in a stunning display of self-hatred, while also being readily seduced by a writer-activist (Sen Sharma) of dubious sexual persuasion, whom she ultimately selects as the ‘Young Indian’ who gets the coveted hand-shake with President Bush. The closet is entertainingly thrown open in this adaptation of the director Kunaal Roy Kapur’s own play.
Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008) Hindi, dir. by Aditya Chopra with Shahrukh Khan, Anushka Sharma, Vinay Pathak
Gay men who have long had to put themselves through the wringer in order to win over the most resolutely shallow paramours could possibly derive succour from this story of middle-aged wish-fulfilment — a bespectacled and nondescript older man, Suri, in love with his teenaged wife, transforms miraculously into a loose-limbed younger man with a penchant for the bawdy line. In a film that abounds with references to God, the only other character is Suri's best friend Bobby (Pathak), an over-the-top hairdresser whose wardrobe seems populated only with bright shirts and skinny jeans, and whose extreme macho posturing and solicitous match-making is almost a dead giveaway about his own deep feelings for Suri, in what is perhaps the only significant relationship of his life.
Rafoo Chakkar (1975) Hindi, dir. by Narendra Bedi with Rishi Kapoor, Neetu Singh
A remake of Some Like It Hot, with Paintal taking on the Jack Lemmon role. Famous last scene is reproduced faithfully, when the down-on-his-luck female impersonator finally lets on that he’s a man, and his unfazed suitor (Rajendra Nath) just says ‘Koi baat nahi. Nobody’s perfect.’
Raja Hindustani (1996) Hindi, dir. by Dharmesh Darshan with Karisma Kapoor, Aamir Khan
While we’ll forever owe a debt to Raja Hindustani because of the Manish Malhotra make-over that gave us Karisma Kapoor at her most stunning, there is little else to recommend about this by-the-numbers re-working of Jab Jab Phool Khile. A motley crew of sidekicks include a butch lesbian and an effeminate gay man who seem to have settled into what is initially a farcical marriage of convenience, but which incredulously ends with each appropriating the other’s gender identity and sexual preference. As if.
Razia Sultan (1983) Hindi, dir. by Kamal Amrohi with Hema Malini, Dharmendra, Parveen Babi
Although Hema Malini had to spend some agonizing moments in Manoj Kumar’s Kranti trying to retrieve a bunch of keys from a sleeping Parveen Babi’s ample cleavage, here they are in a more acquiescent mode, as Khakun (Babi) coos the lilting Lata lullaby Khwab Bankar Koi Aayega in soft rushed tones, trying to soothe her empress Razia’s nerves, with a lot of hand-holding and feathers a-swaying, in what appears to be a luxurious unmoored yacht. It’s a scene that evokes the breath-taking eroticism of the famous feather scene from K Asif’s Mughal-e-azam, featuring Dilip Kumar with Madhubala.
Rules Pyar Ka Superhit Formula (2003) Hindi, dir. by Parvati Balagopalan with Tanuja, Meera Vasudevan, Milind Soman
Breezy comedy in which Radha (Vasudevan) tries to win over a soap star (Soman) by following five rules laid down, almost implausibly, by her grand-mom (Tanuja). Sub-plots abound, including an uplifting one featuring a gay couple who are shown unapologetically together, and happy!
Saathi (1991) Hindi, dir. by Mahesh Bhatt with Aditya Panscholi, Mohsin Khan
Yes, granted that the two leading men were brothers. But scene upon scene of the most ludicrously poetic dialogue between two men ever, lets this film take the cake and more, when it comes to that unassailable mainstay of Bollywood melodrama — the buddy film chock-filled with the most drippy gay subtext.
CONTINUED IN PART 4
Comments