LIST: 100 Queer Films of India (Part 1)

With Kashish, the first international queer film festival of its kind, currently underway in Mumbai (see MQFF201) here's a good time to look back at how Indian cinema (both in India and the diaspora worldwide) has represented the queer people of India over the ages. I 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.

68 Pages (2007) Hindi, dir. by Sridhar Rangayan with Mouli Ganguly, Joy Sengupta, Jayati Bhatia

68 pages of an AIDS counselor’s diary draw out the hidden stories of India’s most repressed, through compelling narratives featuring as its dramatis personae — sex workers, bar dancers and gay men, in life-size avatars, who persist with their lives doggedly despite the odds being stacked against them in a society that’s far from egalitarian. While wearing its agenda on its sleeve, the film plays out as an evocative melodrama rather than merely a public awareness infomercial about AIDS and safe sex.

Agreement (1980) Hindi, dir. by Anil Ganguly with Rekha, Shailendra Singh

This film starts promisingly enough, with Rekha turning up in androgynous formal attire and a boy-cut, as an educated heiress Mala, who spends her time at feminist meetings with her more straight-laced soul-sister (Nandita Thakur), whilst trying to rescue her family business from the throes of a smuggling racket masterminded by a female goon in leopard print (Bindu). In typically retrograde fashion, the film then degenerates into The Taming of the Shrew, when Mala procures a comely and effeminate house-husband (Singh) who’s initially relegated to only wifely duties (under a pre-nuptial arrangement), but ends up making a good woman of her.

Andar Baahar (1984) Hindi, dir. by Raj N Sippy with Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff

A comedy thriller, this film introduces one of Indian cinema’s hottest screen pairs (as least as attested to by gay men who grew up in the ’80s) — Anil Kapoor and Jackie Shroff, where one makes up in hirsuteness what the other lacks in verbosity. Eternal brothers-in-arms, the two actors also display a smouldering chemistry in many of their later films like Parinda and Ram Lakhan, in which the friendship or blood-bond between two men is treated as the central relationship, tacitly dictating the flow of melodrama in a sentimental rather than comedic manner (unlike say, the Johar Mehmood films). 

Badnam Basti (1971) Hindi, dir. by Prem Kapoor with Nitin Sethi, Nandita Thakur

A man enters into a relationship with another man, after his girlfriend dumps him. The physical intimacy between the men is alluded to, but in a more forthright than discreet manner, making this the first film in India to depict homosexuality without necessarily employing the idiom of identity politics — the men do not label themselves as gay (but this was 1971).

Bath, The (2005) Hindi, dir. by Sachin Kundalkar with Chinmay Kelkar, Rajit Kapur

A short film from the Marathi playwright Sachin Kundalkar, whose play Chhotiyasa Suttit is perhaps the best-known work of his oeuvre. This film is about a male prostitute (Kelkar) in Mumbai, who’s picked up one day by a client (Kapur), who proceeds to give him a bath, in what proves to be an almost cathartic experience for the young man. It’s a scene shot with a lingering tenderness, and reflects the sensibility that Kundalkar invests in his other short films, Dhruv and I and Positive Portrait.

Bend It Like Beckham (2002) English, dir. by Gurinder Chadha with Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley

Originally intended as a lesbian romance, this premise is frittered down to just Juliet Stevenson in gay-panic mode as a suburban mom who imagines her daughter (Knightley) and her football buddy (Nagra) are a couple. The token gay guy (Ameet Chana) is allowed an ‘I am gay’ moment, and a glimpse of David Beckham. So much for small mercies.

Bollywood/Hollywood (2002) English, dir. by Deepa Mehta with Rahul Khanna, Lisa Ray

Ranjeet Chowdhry is a chauffeur by day, spending his time being seduced by a large Russian woman with a working knowledge of Raj Kapoor songs. At night, he’s transformed into Toronto’s only sari-clad drag queen who sleepwalks through a rather morose rendition of that old Helen ditty Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo, and answers the inevitable “Er.. How do you?” question with the witty riposte “Duct tape, darling!” Also features thespian Dina Pathak in one of her last roles, as a Shakespeare-quoting grandma.

Bombay (1995) Tamil, dir. by Mani Ratnam with Arvind Swamy, Manisha Koirala

In the middle of much chaos and communal tension during riots in Mumbai, a hijra shelters and then ferries a child across the city to his parents, unmindful of prevailing sectarian concerns, in what is considered to be one of the first sympathetic portrayals of the third gender.

Bombay Boys (1998) English, dir. by Kaizad Gustad with Naveen Andrews, Rahul Bose, Alexander Gifford, Roshan Seth 

This cult film follows Xerxes (Gifford), who’s arrived in India to ‘search for his soul’ but ends up discovering he’s gay after a session plucking petals from one too many daisies! The gay sub-plot is surprisingly layered, and Gustad tosses in a paean to unrequited love featuring an in-form Roshan Seth, encounters with policemen cracking down on buggery, male strippers in G-strings, as well as Kushal Punjabi as a gay man well-versed in the rules of urban courtship, although he still drinks whisky out of hot-water bottles and has Brooke Shields plastered all over his walls.

Bomgay (1996) English, dir. by Riyad Vinci Wadia with Rahul Bose, Kushal Punjabi 

Indeed India’s first bonafide gay film, an assortment of guilty pleasures, featuring poems by R Raj Rao narrated by Rajit Kapur, and infused with a quixotic charm that almost belies the sparseness of its cinematic style. Six shorts, including Lefty, in which a stark naked Rahul Bose is almost willingly ravished by the object of his longing at the Fort campus library, and Underground, in which a closeted gay man’s already tenuous hold on his morale is undermined further when his furtive quest for anonymous sex at a city subway turns all wrong. “The meek shan’t inherit”, says the voice-over, in tremulous fashion.

Chameli (2003) Hindi, dir. by Sudhir Mishra with Kareena Kapoor, Rahul Bose

In this ‘talk’ movie that largely takes place on a single set where an investment banker (Bose) is forced to take shelter from the rain, with only a prostitute (Kapoor) on the prowl for company, characters arrive and leave as in a play, including the transsexual Haseena (Kabir Sadanand) who’s about to elope with a young man. A drenched Kareena Kapoor dazzles in a red and blue sari, and makes some positive noises about gay couples, which includes that iconic line, “Apna to ek hi usool hai saab, koi bhi ho, kaisa bi ho, bas pyar hona chahiye.”

Chicken Tikka Masala (2005) English, dir. by Harmage Singh Kalirai with Chris Bisson

The tag-line announces ‘A big gay comedy about a big fat wedding’, something this film doesn’t quite live up to. Jimi (Bisson) tries to wriggle out of an arranged marriage by conjuring up a love child, which leads his family to believe he’s in love with the perennially inebriated mother (Sally Bankes) of his best friend Jack. Truth be told, Jack is actually his boyfriend and must effectively switch places with his own mum before the wedding nuptials are completed.

Chutney Popcorn (1999) English, dir. by Nisha Ganatra with Nisha Ganatra, Sakina Jaffrey

Director Nisha Ganatra, who took on the central lesbian role after talks with other actresses fell through, treads somewhat difficult territory in this energetic cross-cultural comedy set in New York, in which henna artist Reena (Ganatra) offers to act as a surrogate for her infertile sister Sarita (Jaffrey), something that all but wreaks havoc in their domestic lives. Sarita’s husband Mitch turns overtly solicitous towards Reena, whose girlfriend Lisa (Jill Hennessy) feels left out of this whole blooming shindig. Madhur Jaffrey as the sisters’ traditional Indian mother is good for some spirited inter-generational conflict.

Daayra (1996) Hindi, dir. by Amol Palekar with Nirmal Pandey, Sonali Kulkarni

One of Palekar’s most accomplished films, both Nirmal Pandey and Sonali Kulkarni walked away with Best Actress honours at the Valenciennes Film Festival in France. Against a backdrop of Indian folk-music traditions, a piquant drama is played out between a cross-dressing street performer (Pandey) and a young rape victim (Kulkarni) on the run, who takes on the guise of a man. An almost hand-crafted fable, the film delves into gender as something that transcends the limiting notions that it is usually saddled with, never quite letting its central conceit of the cross-dressing duo appear too contrived.

Dance Like A Man (2003) English, dir. by Pamela Rooks with Shobhana, Arif Zakaria

From Mahesh Dattani’s play, this film hinges on the assertion that “A woman in a man's field is progressive, a man in a woman's field is pathetic”, voiced by the belligerent father of a classical dancer Jairaj (Zakaria) who is married to the more accomplished Ratna (Shobhana). Jairaj’s conflict is essayed well; indeed this is a probing and incisive work in many ways, but the film doesn’t quite pack a powerful punch, possibly because it doesn’t fully shed its theatrical tropes.

Darmiyaan (1997) Hindi, dir. by Kalpana Lajmi with Kirron Kher, Arif Zakaria, Tabu

An over-the-top central performance as the fast fading actress Mumtaz Begum, by the otherwise well-heeled thespian Kirron Kher makes this a grisly affair, almost summed up by the less than ingenious invocation of the Pieta, when a distraught Kher holds the stricken frame of her hermaphrodite son Immi (Zakaria) in her arms. In Immi’s tale, Lajmi has found a queer parable for our times; his story is also the inspiration for the Paresh Rawal vehicle, Tamanna.

Devdas (1997) Hindi, dir. by Sanjay Leela Bhansali with Shahrukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit

For some inexplicable reason, Bhansali’s shrill calendar-art version of the Sarat Chandra Chatterjee novel, has acquired a cult following among not just gay men adamantly spouting its melodramatic lines like it were latter-day Shakespeare, but also with drag performers for whom emulating Madhuri Dixit in Maar Daala is now de rigueur.

Dostana (2008) Hindi, dir. by Tarun Mansukhani with John Abraham, Abhishek Bachchan, Priyanka Chopra

Not quite the breakthrough gay film, this is a tepid romance at best and a comedic misfire at worst, with humour so broad you could fit most of John Abraham’s buffed up body in it (to be fair, his butt does have a starring role). After wading through a morass of stereotypes, you do chance upon a rather gamine Chopra delivering a panegyric in aid of gay couples that induces a sobbing Kirron Kher (as mother extraordinaire) to whimper out the lament Maa Ka Ladla Bigad Gaya to the beat of the word GAY repeated ad nauseum (which some say introduced the term into the common lexicon). Probably enough for spin doctors to proclaim Dostana as the pre-eminent gay film of the century. Well, you heard it here first, it’s not gay, it’s pretend gay, and that was not a kiss, just a lot of frenetic camera angles and no tongue action.

Dosti (1964) Hindi, dir. by Satyen Bose with Sudhir Kumar, Sushil Kumar

Director Satyen Bose, as in his earlier film Jagriti, invests the friendship between two young men with as much tenderness, empathy, and felicity as romantic love. The film resonates for gay audiences at so many levels from the alienation felt by the two disabled men (one is blind, the other a cripple) acting as a cipher for homosexual repression, to instances of affection so physically demonstrated, to the alternative hospice in which they take refuge, replete with androgynous dancers and women wrestlers (which for all purposes could be a gay ghetto).

East is East (1999) English, dir. by Damien O’Connor with Om Puri, Linda Bassett

Arranged marriages loom large over this bitter-sweet comedy featuring Om Puri as George Khan, an overbearing chip-shop owner from Salford, who runs a menagerie-like household of seven children with his English wife (Bassett). His eldest son Nazir (Ian Aspinall) beats a retreat from the wedding altar, only to resurface as an owner of a fancy hat-shop in Manchester, with a tidily trimmed poodle and delicate French boyfriend to boot. Based on the play by Ayub Khan-Din, the brilliant ensemble cast gives this film its edge, with both Bassett and Puri nominated at the BAFTAs.

Eklavya (2007) Hindi, dir. by Vidhu Vinod Chopra with Saif Ali Khan, Amitabh Bachchan

Boman Irani interprets an impotent king as a creature of the dark, an effeminate and spineless cuckold left cowering in the almost sexually pervasive presence of a manipulative older brother (Jackie Shroff). Eerie.

English August (1994) English, dir. by Dev Benegal with Rahul Bose, Tanvi Azmi

A young IAS officer stationed in the outback remains disaffected and undirected, prone to long spells of masturbation and ‘pot’ sessions with crotch-scratching groupies. Dev Benegal gave us one of the first sexualised leading men in Indian cinema, and an early Rahul Bose fleetingly became a poster-child for avante garde cinema.

Fashion (2008) Hindi, dir. by Madhur Bhandarkar with Kangana Ranaut, Priyanka Chopra, Kitu Gidwani

Self-styled auteur Bhandarkar paints a dismal picture of the homosexual mafia in fashion, letting some atrocious hams enact a long line of bizarre gay characters, from depraved designers to dour junkies to the embittered marrying kind. Ashwin Mushran, as an industry lackey, manages to just about pass muster. At another level however Fashion is the quintessential gay film. Its high-camp ramp interludes, around which much of the narrative pivots itself, are invested with such portentous melodrama, alluding to the true measure of a model’s self-worth and her resilience, that it can be seen almost as a metaphor for a gay man’s life. And in allowing Kangana Ranaut to sink her teeth into the famous “I am not mad” scene from Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam, Bhandarkar signals her as a true successor to the original tragedy queen Meena Kumari, albeit in a drug-addled diva-esque avatar, the snapping of whose bustier would be mimicked in gay house parties for years to come. Could be.

Fearless — The Hunterwali Story (1993) English, dir. by Riyad Vinci Wadia with Fearless Nadia (as herself)

One of India’s legendary screen icons and all-fighting action star of many high-camp 30s extravaganzas like Diamond Queen and Hunterwali is the subject of this documentary made by her grandson, also the director of Bomgay. (Check out Photo Album)

Filhaal (2002) Hindi, dir. by Meghna Gulzar with Tabu, Sushmita Sen

An interesting adaptation of Chutney Popcorn, writer-director Meghna Gulzar does away with the lesbian girlfriend, but infuses the central friendship between Rewa (Tabu) and Sia (Sen) with an overpowering intensity (they were sisters in the original). Sushmita Sen excels in one of the most progressively etched female characters ever, stealing a march on even the typically competent Tabu.

CONTINUED IN PART 2

Comments

[Sumeet]

For more Indian queer films, please check out http://www.indianqueerfilms.com