LIST: 100 Queer Films of India (Part 4)

CONTINUED FROM PART 3

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.

Saawariya (2007) Hindi, dir. by Sanjay Leela Bhansali with Ranbir Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor

In this homage to one of Indian film’s greatest showmen, Bhansali trains Raj Kapoor’s voyeuristic gaze away from women cavorting in waterfalls, and on to his grandson, in a highly sexualised towel-dance on a window sill that’s lit to highlight the lithe young actor’s erogenous zones, although it would appear only American audiences have been allowed the extended shot of his derrière. In one fell sweep, the director evokes Simi Garewal in Mera Naam Joker, Rishi Kapoor in Bobby (the original Bollywood butt-shot) and maybe even Dimple’s wardrobe malfunction from Saagar, who knows, who cares?

Sadak (1991) Hindi, dir. by Mahesh Bhatt with Sanjay Dutt, Pooja Bhatt

While many accuse Sadashiv Amrapurkar’s aggravated portrayal of the vile brothel-madam Maharani of vilifying the hijra community, ultimately this remains merely one of Indian cinema’s enduring screen villains rather than an indictment of queers in general. The character remains moored in the film it inhabits much like the other villain from the Bhatt stable, the cross-dressing child slaughterer from Sangharsh played so chillingly by Ashutosh Rana. Even though based on the offensive ‘Buffalo Bill’ character from The Silence of the Lambs, somehow the anti-gay slant gets lost in translation. Yeah, imagine substituting Akshay Kumar for Hannibal Lecter (says it all, really).

Sancharram (2004) Malayalam, dir. by Ligy J Pullappally with Suhasini V Nair, Shrruiti Menon

A moving ode to the blossoming love between two village girls, Kiran and Delilah, who have to decide if the codes of handed-down propriety are stronger than the deluge of feelings for each other that they cannot now disown. The two young actresses complement one another as they flit across the going-ons as incandescent fireflies whose spirit cannot be extinguished.

Shabnam Mausi (2005) Hindi, dir. by Yogesh Bharadwaj with Ashutosh Rana

A bio-pic of the first hijra to be elected to public office. A cast of actors enthusiastically create the alternative world of hijras with its unique culture and mores. Vishwajeet Pradhan as a head eunuch impresses. 

Sholay (1975) Hindi, dir. by Ramesh Sippy with Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra

Quintessential buddy film routinely cited in any discourse about queer elements in South Asian cinema, a fact that owes more to its reputation as one of Indian cinema’s longest running films, than any actual homo-erotic subtext.

Sixth Happiness (1997) English, dir. by Waris Hussein with Firdaus Kanga, Souad Faress

Based on the autobiography Trying to Grow by Firdaus Kanga, this film is an ultimately uplifting saga of a young disabled man experiencing the first stirrings of love and sexual longing. A much more significant work than its short shelf-life would indicate, Kanga blithely peppers the narrative with observational details about the condition that makes his bones brittle, his Parsi ancestry, his innate Indianness, and his voracious appetite for sex with men.

Split Wide Open (1999) English, dir. by Dev Benegal with Rahul Bose, Laila Rouass

A homosexual priest (Kiran Nagarkar) finds celibacy a tough ask, especially with his protégé (Bose) now grown to be a robust young man with no qualms of walking about naked in the friary. Elsewhere, Aamir Bashir forms a cumbersome ménage à trois with his wife (Iravati Harshe) and his fitness trainer.

Straight — Ek Tedhi Medhi Love Story (2009) Hindi, dir. by Parvati Balagopalan with Gul Panag, Vinay Pathak, Anuj Choudhury

One of Indian filmdom’s most unlikely, even refreshing, leading men Vinay Pathak plays a restaurateur who is mortified to discover he could be gay, after a rather fraternal lip-to-lip kiss with a man leaves him visibly aroused, and leads him to start fishing around for what now appear to be the unmistakable symptoms of his burgeoning nouveau sexuality. He soon discovers that being gay is not just about sex but about love, relationships and cultural expression as embodied by his swashbuckling Gujju cousin, Ratan (talented Sid Makkar), who clocks in throughout with the choicest insights about love and living, before bursting into the delightfully breezy Homo Song in a well-appointed gay bar in London. Gul Panag plays Renu, a woman in love, with her usual grace and dignity. As a caricaturist, Renu infuses tenderness and empathy into her drawings, in much the same way this little film deals with subject matter that can as easily be lampooned.   

Summer In My Veins (1999) English, dir. by Nishit Saran

With just a hand-held camera Nishit Saran manages to create one of the most enduring images of Indian queer cinema, that of his mother’s unscripted reaction to suddenly being confronted with the revelation that her son’s gay. Some delightful cameos by Saran’s aunts, coupled with a parallel track dealing with an AIDS test that follows a not-quite-safe sexual encounter, makes this a compelling short film, and one which has been lent an almost unbearable poignancy by Saran’s untimely death a few years after its release.

Surviving Sabu (1998) English, dir. by Ian Iqbal Rashid with Navin Chowdhry, Suresh Oberoi

The Indian star of ’40s Hollywood jungle capers, Sabu is the subject of a documentary being made by a young gay man, Amin (Choudhury) in collaboration with his father Sadru (Oberoi), during the making of which the tempestuous yet adoring relationship between the men is brought into focus, in part by their contradictory reading of Sabu’s legacy. In Rashid's other short Stag (2001), Luke (Stuart Laing) is best man at his closest friend Sammi’s (Nitin Ganatra) wedding. They end up making love the night before the big day after getting totally sloshed at a stag do. Luke now wants to salvage what he believes their friendship was, a full-blown relationship.

Tamanna (1997) Hindi, dir. by Mahesh Bhatt with Paresh Rawal, Pooja Bhatt, Manoj Bajpai

Paresh Rawal handily plays the role of a hijra Tiku who adopts a baby he had found discarded in a garbage dump, and brings her up into a rather personable young woman (Bhatt). The central performances are pièce de résistance, as Rawal literally chews the scenery in bringing out his character’s resilience, compassion and joie de vivre, without ever kowtowing to the common disregard that exists against others of his kind. Even in such a plain-speaking film, there is still room for subtext — Manoj Bajpai plays an unmarried man who buoys up Tiku through many a crisis in almost spouse-like fashion.

Tedhi Lakeer (2004) Hindi, dir. by Aparna Sanyal & Amrit Sharma

A documentary in which some very uniquely Indian homo-social contexts are depicted, as in the lifelong friendship between two men who live with their extended families while being relatively open about their own far-from-platonic alliance, and also the story of an openly gay outreach worker whose dreams of getting married with all the requisite pomp are put to hold when his paramour gets hitched to a woman.

Teen Deewarein (2003) Hindi, dir. by Nagesh Kukunoor with Naseeruddin Shah, Juhi Chawla

An HIV-positive rapist’s homosexuality is treated as sinful and pathological in this rip-off of The Shawshank Redemption.

Thang (2006) Marathi, dir. by Amol Palekar with Mrinal Kulkarni, Rishi Deshpande

This film is spared the awkward accents and stilited dialogues that beset its English version, titled The Quest, but nonetheless comes across as didactic and choppy in its telling of the story of an educated woman Sai (Kulkarni) who discovers her husband is having an affair with another man. In trying to exemplify the plight of homosexuals Palekar achieves little more than celluloid triteness.

Touch of Pink, A (2004) English, dir. by Ian Iqbal Rashid with Jimi Mistry, Kyle MacLachlan, Suleka Mathew

The tender and amusing story of Ali (Mistry), a young gay British Indian man with a chip on his shoulder that manifests itself in the form of a full-blown imaginary friend, that’s none other than the Hollywood star Cary Grant (MacLachlan), delivered in his trademark affected style, and given to crisply succinct rejoinders to the actual commentary of Ali’s life. Sulekha Mathew brings in a disaffected charm to her role as Ali’s mother Nuru, who herself has delusions of grandeur, and is coaxed into a day out to London by Ali’s charming British boyfriend Giles (Kristen Holden-Reid), that proves to be liberating in a rather whimsical manner, sending up Doris Day in A Touch of Mink as it does, although it doesn’t help her accept her son’s sexuality quite as easily.

Two Men In Shoulder Stand (2006) English, dir. by Paul Knox with Manu Narayan, Karam Puri

A male couple try out yogic postures on a Kerala beach in what proves to be an almost meditative little film, as the camera lovingly captures the palpable intimacy between the two men, and indeed the conflicts inherent in their love, whether it is due to faith (one’s Muslim, the other is Hindu) or arisen from the HIV-positive status of one of them.

Ugly Aur Pagli (2008) Hindi, dir. by Sachin Kamlakar Khot with Mallika Sherawat, Ranvir Shorey

An opening montage features some strikingly positive images of a lesbian twosome in a variation of the film’s central theme of mismatched couples. Feisty and eccentric Kuhu (Sherawat) writes futuristic scripts in which men have been turned into ‘women-like’ docile beings. Elsewhere, Ishq Bector’s spirited item Karle Gunaah abounds with Kama Sutra-style female homo-eroticism.

Umbartha (1982) Marathi, dir. by Jabbar Patel with Smita Patil, Girish Karnad

Two inmates in a remand home for women are drawn into a lesbian relationship, which is etched with some sympathy, although it is mentioned that they can be ‘cured’ by therapy, though not before one of them has had the opportunity to lip-synch to the monumental Lata melody Tum Aasha Vishwaas Hamaare, in the process almost bestowed the respectability of a leading lady.

Umrao Jaan (1981) Urdu, dir. by Muzaffar Ali with Rekha, Farooque Shaikh

Rekha’s soul diva persona and Asha’s assured delivery of Khaiyyam’s magical ghazals makes this a heady alternative to the tired tales of the courtesans of yore. Umrao is not quite the fallen woman, and not quite the damned one, and in her many mujras in the film, she demonstrates a flair for the most dexterously floral hand gestures that have for long become an essential part of any desi drag performer’s repertoire.

Uttara (2000) Bengali, dir. by Buddhadev Dasgupta with Jaya Seal, Tapas Pal, Shankar Chakraborty

The idyll of a wrestling drill, around which two men centre much of their spare time, is unsettled when one of them takes a wife. In this breathtakingly shot fable, the erotic interplay between the sparring partners is treated quite unambiguously and even the jealous wife Uttara (Seal) throws herself gamely into the tangle, vying equally for her conjugal rights, without retreating into self-righteous martyrdom.

Vettaiyadu Villaiyadu (2006) Tamil, dir. by Gautham Menon with Kamal Hassan, Jyothika

Gay serial-killers in the tradition of Leopold and Loeb from Hitchcock’s Rope. The psychopathic behaviour of the killers on a rampage is linked to their homosexuality in an incredulous moment at the climax. Disdainful stuff, this.

Water (2005) Hindi, dir. by Deepa Mehta with Lisa Ray, Seema Biswas

This film focuses on widows in 1930s Varanasi whose plight is paralleled by that of a hijra commune, both groups are pariahs in a social order where Gandhian change is in the offing but could possibly pass them by. Raghubir Yadav plays a hijra pimp with a lot of vim, in a film that ultimately underwhelms because it seems made up entirely of platitudes and employs a cinematic gaze that borders on voyeurism, although central performances by Biswas and Ray are compelling enough.

Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) Hindi, dir. by Shyam Benegal with Amrita Rao, Shreyas Talpade

A little dose of Benegal lite, this film is at times cloying and preachy, at times disarmingly charming. Set in mofussil India, one of the sub-plots hinges on a hijra Munnibai (Ravi Jhankal) seeking election in a local poll. The script hints at the almost endemic homophobia in rural India but never really pushes the envelope in its quest to resolutely stick to its little-India fabulist tenor.

Yours Emotionally (2006) Hindi, dir. by Sridhar Rangayan with Premjit, Jack Lamport

One of the first films to depict the underground gay sub-culture in India as the main thrust of its narrative, it follows two British men to a sleepy Indian outback where they are guests at a gay-owned lodging, and get immediately embroiled in a love-and-sex muddle with a fetching local man. An unapologetic view-from-the-ground of gay relationships in still largely closeted India, it is hampered by amateur acting and low production values, the bane of many gay-themed films that attract only low budgets and meagre talent and almost no recourse to public distribution in a film culture that remains largely homophobic.✑

Comments

[Vikram Phukan]

Thanks Deepa. I can get you the ones I have, but first I need to bring you Kunku :)

[Deepa Deosthalee]

Fascinating. Haven't seen at least half the films on your list. Now tell me where can I get them?