Introduction

The year 1996 marked the production of India‟s first bonafide queer film Bomgay by avant-garde film maker Riyad Vinci Wadia. The film based on Indian writer R. Raj Rao‟s poems, had descriptive attributes such as „controversial‟, „low budget‟, „off beat‟. In 2016, exactly after two decades, critically acclaimed mainstream film director Hansal Mehta made Aligarh, a Hindi film based on the real life story of a gay professor of Marathi, with Bollywood‟s eminent actor Manoj Bajpai in lead role. Ashim Ahaluwalia another national award winning film maker, ventured into making a feature length film on R. Raj Rao‟s earliest novel Boyfriend. This project received Hubert Bals fund for script and project development. Moreover, it was selected by NFDC‟s (National Film Development Corporation) Film Bazaar and the International Film Festival Rotterdam‟s Cinemart‟s co-production market (Keslassy 2015) and is coproduced by Paris-based production company Octobre19 (Jhunjhunwala 2014). Indian Queer Cinema has certainly come a long way in a short span of time.

The Hindi anthology film Bombay Talkies in 2013 and perhaps by mere coincidence the Marathi anthology film Bioscope in 2014 inaugurated the celebrations of 100 years of Indian Cinema. Closely a hundred years ago, Dadasaheb Phalke was making films where male actors performed in drag. Zoya Akhatar‟s Sheila ki Jawani, a tale of a 12 year old boy‟s dream of dancing like „Sheila‟ is a fitting tribute to the legendary though with altogether refreshingly new signification. Moreover, what marked the cinematic celebration of queerness in this anthology film was Karan Johar‟s short Ajeeb Dastan Hain Yeh. The title which is a rendition of an old Hindi film classic could well mean “this is a queer tale”. In repositioning the title song along with another, “Lag ja gale…‖ with newer significations, the film in fact paid tribute to a sub-culture of queer audiences who have been locating queer desires in seemingly straight film narratives and songs. The short piece turned out to be more telling of Bollywood‟s coming of age in dealing with its

queer sexuality. Similarly, in Bioscope, Ravi Jadhav‟s Mitraa, based on Vijay Tendulkar‟s book “Mitraachi Gosht” (the story of Mitraa) is a boldly told story of lesbian desires set in Pune in pre-Independence India, much before the era of sexual liberation in the West. The retrospective stance of the film by way of „black and white‟ technique is not just about the „pastness‟ of the fictional narrative. It underlines the fact ofthe writer whose story the film is inspired by, recorded somewhere as the story based on certain real life incidence that took place back in 1940s (Nilekani 2013). It is a decent response to those who in their exclusively heteronormative version of Indian nationalism dismiss non-heteronormative sexuality by labeling it a Western import.

In keeping with this prelude which underlines the growing presence of the Queer in Indian Cinema, the present study will explore much speculated but least explored body of this facet of Indian cinema. The study will show through the semiotic investigation of selected Indian films how queer subjectivities and desires are reclaimed by constructing and positioning the queer in the cultural spaces without necessarily resisting or fully embracing the Western discourse, cultural and cinematic, on the queer.

Rationale and Significance of the study

Film scholars have argued that films are not just visual images shown to the audiences but that they have the capacity to overpower and influence the spectator. With the help of textual and cinematic codes, films present meanings in such a way that they match with our understanding of the real world, as if co-constructing our reality thus connecting us to our histories, experiences and social milieu. Cinema not only performs the function of reflecting culture but it shapes culture as well (Gokulsing and Dissanayake 2004, Edgar Morin 2005).

Among many other art forms, cinema today has become a significant cultural artifact in the study of identities and sexualities due to its “ubiquitous presence as a popular medium, and, consequently, a powerful ideological apparatus negotiating with subjectivities and pleasures” (Dasgupta, 2012). Hall (1994) negates the idea of cinema as “a second order mirror held up to reflect what already exists”, and considers it “as that

form of representation which is able to constitute new kinds of subjects”, thus enabling us to discover places from which to speak” (402). This suggests that Cinema reflects on the „real‟ rather than reflecting the “real” and creates what Muraleedharan (2005) calls “visions and imaginations that help us construct the real and construct ourselves within the real” (73).

One of the thematic paradigm shifts that has resulted into a new kind of cinema, known as Queer Cinema1 especially after the sexual revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s in the Western world is the newly felt awareness of the so far unacknowledged and invisible (rather invisiblised) sensibilities such as non-heteronormative sexualities, which are collectively termed as “Queer”2.The paradigm shift in the form of Queer Cinema, however, did not spring abruptly but evolved over the period. This is most manifest in the Western Cinema, mainstream and indie that has been pioneering in the development of this new genre.

Cinema in India, being the most productive film industry in the world at least from a quantitative point of view has a very strong social presence. It has constantly been in the process of evolving through its adoption of new techniques, technology and themes. The rapid globalization, the free market economy and emirgent movements of people across national borders, especially from the East to the West, made the presence of new sexual politics and their cinematic representation, among other things, globally felt.

The Indian nation-state and Indian Cinema are not untouched by this development. Indian Film scholar Shohini Ghosh‟s remark that “despite love and romance being persistent themes, homosexuality has rarely been directly represented” (419), nonetheless, holds some truth. Only in the mid-1990s films started showing so far unacknowledged and rather invisibilized sensibilities like non-heteronormative sexualities. Commenting on

1 B. Ruby Rich, a queer film critic was the first one to use the term ‘new queer cinema’ which applies to the films made in 1990s in America and Europe by independent film makers. However, the term Queer Cinema was never used / deployed intentionally. Hence, I use it as an umbrella term to cover the films that dealt with non-heteronormative sexualities, both pre-Richian and Richian sense. 2Queer is a term that is currently gaining circulation in India in an attempt to forge a sexuality politics that questions normativity.The term is generally understood as a category in flux, once a term of homophobic abuse, now reappropriated as a marker for self identifying gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and other marginalized sexual identities. Though the definition appears simple it is not

this visibility of the Queer in Indian Cinema, Waugh said that it “has not developed a recognizable domestic queer vector” (280). However, a careful survey of Indian films depicting the Queer, at home and abroad, commercial and independent, narrative and documentary, in Hindi, English and regional medium, one will find an indigenous queer vector in the phase of evolving, though not in the same way as in American or European cinema. The mapping of history of Western and Indian Queer cinema is attempted later in Chapter Two.

It is the academic investment in both, film studies and queer studies in India that is a relatively new development compared to that in the Western and also East Asian countries. As a result there is only a limited body of scholarly research and vibrant plurality to be made available on Indian Cinema‟s engagement with the Queer. Moreover, at a juncture where the fellow citizens are being maneuvered in the direction of collective oblivion and intentional ignorance when it comes to the subject of non-normative sexuality, the need to seriously engage in this subject becomes underlined. The vilification of the “othered”3 citizens exemplifies the suppression brought about by the search for an ever elusive “authentic” cultural self. If cinema is believed to be operating as a kind of “orientalism”, in which the “other” is produced in a stereotypical way and is used as an imagined discursive category, then the same medium, when used with conscious intention, may become resistant to such “orientalism” by challenging and/or subverting the extant versions of the “other”. It has been observed by scholars that “certain film narratives have given voice to the marginalized queer subjects by recognizing and making visible the very fact of their marginalization” (Choudhuri, 2009). Hence, a research oriented approach to this dimension of Indian cinema becomes not just crucial but an intellectually enriching interdisciplinary project.

The Mainstream films, especially Bollywood films, created codified queer stereotypes very much in line with the “sissy” characters in Hollywood cinema in 1970s. The characters were either a-sexual or hyper sexualized effeminate men added as comic

3A concept of identityperceived as dissimilar or opposite to being "us".It‟s a tendency to exclude a person or a group of people that are, in some way, seen as different from the norm. The concept of 'the other' can be understood not only from a gendered lens but also from the lens of sexuality.

sidekicks. Though quite a few films sketched sympathetic portrayals of ―gay‖ menthrough sub-plots, the Queer subject still remained on the peripheries of the film narratives. As mentioned earlier it was the appearance of Riyad Wadia‟s Bomgay (1996) in the international film festivals and private circles and Deepa Mehta‟s Fire (1996/1998), in Indian theatres, more films, especially independent and regional that positioned the queer from the peripheral spaces to the centre of the narratives were made. These beginnings of a new cinema brought out new visibility of the Queer subject in its overt / explicit sense. It is this overt sense of the Queer in these films that the present study engages with. In doing so the study purposefully collapses the many other subjects and subjectivities which constitute the complexity of the Queer.

The overt representation of the queer in Indian films is perceived as a site of signification. The term signification, in semiotics, applies to both, the signifying process involved as well as the signified. As the “signified” that is, the queer subject and subjectivities in the present context, is made “overt” in this new cinema, what assumes primary attention is the process of signification. A research based approach in understanding the process is of substantial import as it may prove constructive in eliciting the politics of representation effectively.

The study adopts Hall‟s (1994) perspective that identity is a “production”, which is never complete and always in the process and always constituted within representation, and not outside, representation. A semiotic framework, therefore, is apt in studying the Queer and its positioning in Indian film narratives.

Review of Literature

Prior to the release of Hindi version of Deepa Mehta‟s Fire in India in 1998, Riyad Wadia‟s Bomgay (1996), a bold and brilliant short film based on R. Raj Rao‟s selected poems inaugurated the era of queer cinema in India. It, however, remained unknown to the mainstream audience due to its limited circulation. The release of Fire and the consecutive controversies, public debates and violence drew attention of feminists, queer activists, media and academic scholars. This, however, is not to suggest that Indian

cinema had not engaged itself in screening the queer subject and sexual desires before. But Fire gave it explicit visibility though with complications. Coincidently, if not consequently, there have been scholarly attempts to explore the queering of the Indian screen and screening of the Indian queer since then. Some scholars offered queer reading of the otherwise “non-queer” films, some questioned the “obviousness” of the heteronormative narrative, some addressed the issue of homoeroticism, post-coloniality and queer subjectivities in literature and film, whereas many offered critique of individual films dealing with the thematic treatment of the Queer subject/subjectivities in mainstream Hindi 4, regional and diasporic cinema. The review is certainly enriching, insightful and at the same, underscoring the need for the present study.

When Indian cinema had a palpable absence of any significant queer representation the queer reading of Indian cinema began as, what Muraleedharan (2005) called an academic project. The studies were inclined to explore the “queer dynamics” that structure the seemingly straight narratives of mainstream films. Queer readings of apparently heteronormative cultural texts are seen as a form of politicized, subversive criticism. R. Raj Rao (2000), Ashok Row Kavi (2000), Thomas Waugh (2001, 2002), Gayatri Gopinath (2000) and Murleedharan (2002, 2005) must be credited for not only offering a queer reading of the films but also bringing to light a queer audience sub-culture.

In her quintessential essay “Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema” Gayatri Gopinath (2000) demonstrates queer themes through several examples taken from four identifiable Hindi film subgenres. Gopinath clearly states that these examples “acquire subversive value and serve as queer points of identification when viewed from a non-nationalist bias” (283). Through a subjective lens of transnational spectatorship these films can be claimed as queer. The article focuses on the Bollywood dance sequence as coded queer desires are much easier, as Gopinath claims, to de-code or re-code when in the diaspora. Gopinath employs “queer diasporic viewing practice” in selected popular Indian films.

4 popularly known as Bollywood Cinema, Mumbai (previously, Bombay) based film industry

Gopinath organizes her analysis into four sections: “sexing the Sisterhood”, “Budd(y)ing Boyfriends”, “Macho Mems, Sissy Sahibs” and “Hijras and Homos”. The attempt is made to find the fissures of rigidly heterosexual structures that can be transformed into queer imaginings. In the queer reception of Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, by a queer diasporic audience, she draws a connection between the scene where two women disappear under a sheet, and the quilt in Ismat Chagatai‟s Quilt. These scenes become eminently available for a queer diasporic viewership because they encode female homoeroticism outside the logic of homophobia. Gender conformity and indeed hyper-femininity do not necessarily imply heterosexuality. In Zanjeer (1973) male friendship is articulated in the same hyper- romantic terms used for heterosexual relationships. Gopinath draws attention to the 1983 film Holi, in which male bonding takes a more sinister turn as the homophobia that underlies desire between straight men is made remarkably explicit. The essay points out how in Raja Hindustani (1996) effeminate man and masculine woman, explicitly cross gender identified, make presence on the screen. In this and many such films effeminate men are given ritualized role as either comic figures or as Hijras. Gopinath also observes that “hijra” becomes a generalized category for all forms of gender or sexual transgression, and thereby closes down the possibilities of representations of other forms of non-normative genders or sexualities. Prevalence of the hijra characters indicates the primary marker of sexual otherness.

Gopinath suggests that within popular Indian cinema the most representations on non- heteronormative desire may exist in the absence of “gays” and “lesbians”. According to her the limitation of representing explicitly marked “homosexual” characters in popular cinema is visible in Holi (1984) and Subhah (1984). Holi‟s gay male character is the object of very strong homophobia and violence. Subhah too marks two characters as “lesbians” only to be pathologized and singled out for punishment. However true this observation may be, in case of Subah Gopinath fails to observe that the film does create an empathetic appeal through the employment of non diegetic sound in some places.

Ashok Row Kavi (2000) in his article “The Changing image of the hero in Hindi films” observes a paradigm shift in the erotic values from female to male character / actor. Kavi notices that “in the 1960s, the subtle homosexual themes in director Raj Kapoor‟s

Sangam (1964) and Satyen Bose‟s Dosti (1964) had already heralded the marginalization of the heroine” (308). According to Kavi “the high-camp gay subtext of the film Pakeezah (1971, Dir. Kamaal Amrohi) took India‟s subterranean gay world by storm. Kavi then points out that a tacit yet strongly homoerotic bond between dying patient and wonderfully young humane doctor in Hrishikesh Mukharjee‟s Anand (1971), evokes a silent, quiet brooding sexuality. Mukharjee‟s Namak Haram (1973) too, as Kavi claims, demarcate homoerotic male bond between the two principals with disalarming clarity. In yet another film Zanjeer, 1973, Amitabh is made the focus of “yaari” (male bond) in a highly sensual male dance performed by Pran as a Pathan. Kavi asserts that Zanjeer “inaugurated the slow but steady climb of the homoerotic themes. Kavi, however, over reads the song from Sholey 1975, “ye Dosti...” by decontextualizing certain lines. Then directing our attention to women centred films Kavi remarks that the mujra… in Umrao Jaan, “Dil Cheeze Kyah Hai” became a gay theme song played out-and acted upon-by gay men. We see this clearly reflected in Shridhar Rangayan‟s Gulabi Aina (2006) when the song reappears, just queered this time. Kavi remarks that Mahesh Bhatt and Kalpana Lajmi who gave screen spaces to the sexual minority ended up criminalizing them, nevertheless. Lajmi‟s Darmiyaan was, as Kavi points out, the first film when “many gay men had started getting angry about the presentation of gay lifestyles” (312). In the concluding part of his argument Kavi suggests that a mainstream gay theme film that is unforgettable is yet to be made.

R. Raj Rao (2000) in his article “Memories Pierce the Heart: Homoeroticism, Bollywod- Style” reflects on the songs and gives an interesting insight into rendezvous in cinema halls amongst men watching Amitabh Bachchan films. The article offers the queer reading of Hindi films with specific reference to Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood superstar. Using translations of songs from Bachchan‟s films Rao attempts to show how homosexuality prospers in covert yet recognized spaces in Indian culture, and “how subtler forms of homosexuality are actually engendered under the auspices of normative patriarchal culture” (299). Rao argues that the two characters played by Bachchan and Pran typify the paradox that two men believing “they represent the masculinity principle to the utmost degree find that they cannot live without each other, they are happy only

when they are together.” The second major focus of the article is the Bollywood audience culture in 70s and 80s, which was male dominant, given the popularity of action films. Rao argues that “the bond that Amitabh Bachchan formed with other male actors on the screen, complemented by the presence of an all-male audience that had gathered to watch him, engendered a sort of homoeroticism in the dark of the movie hall” (303). What Rao calls “ambivalent grayness” that provides enough of buffer should anyone suspect what is going on? Rao problematizes same sex closeness in India by locating it in the public culture. The article briefly criticizes the hypocrite social mores who believe that „sex has nothing to do with love‟. Rao then goes back to the translations and explains the term “yaar” and “Yaari” as a relation that goes beyond the Western notion of Platonic non- sexualized friendship. Rao suggests that the songs Amitabh and his co-heroes sing prove that they too have precisely the same expectations. Rao‟s remark that “on the basis of internal evidence, we have every right to conclude that the two characters are involved in a sort of sexual relationship off the screen…” (305) seems reading beyond the lines into the text. In doing the same, Rao appropriates the term “yaar” by interpreting it as „lover‟.

Thomas Waugh (2001) in his article “Queer Bollywood, or I‟m the player, you‟re the naïve one, patterns of sexual subversion in recent Indian popular cinema” offers a queer reading of male bonding in popular Indian films like Main Khiladi Tu Anari (1994). He further gives a summative analysis of films depicting Hijras as villain in Sadak (1992) and super mother in Tamanna (1997). Waugh remarks that “the Indian cinema has not developed a recognizable domestic queer vector to the extent of…even Taiwan or Philippines- at least „recognizable‟ to Northern eyes” (280). Waugh lists several distinct fields within contemporary Indian cinemas that can be explored for further research. It includes “the state-subsidized parallel cinema, where the bricolage of cosmopolitan queer iconographies is increasingly evident in recent films” (280). The second field is that of the diasporic cinema. According to Waugh “the sexual discourses of metropolitan South Asian cultures are unpacked with a freedom and energy unknown at home” (281) in diasporic cinema and this could be explored from a research perspective.The article mainly focuses on the richly ambiguous indigenous male-male sexual iconographies in commercial popular narratives of Bollywood cinema during 1990s. Waugh finds post-

colonial theory inadequate due to its indispensable frameworks. Waugh claims that postcolonial culture and politics and scholarship on Indian popular cinema do not focus on same-sex practices or identities. Thus he justifies his “bricolage of eclectic sources ranging from Foucault to diasporic queer journalism to first-person-narratives to literary fiction” (282). Waugh categorizes Indian Popular cinema in three parallel generic dynamics, namely, neo-conservative romances, like Hum Dil de Chuke Sanam (1999), Male friendship films like Main Khiladi Tu Anari (1994), the new sexual marginality film of the nineties, like Mast Kalandar (1991).

Akshay vurses Saif binary of butch vurses dandy, naked vurses clothed etc. in Main Khiladi tu Anari and offscreen story of Akshay posing for India‟s first gay magazine and Saif‟s punching of gay critic finds space in Waugh‟s discussion. Waugh reads the choreography of the title song as „surrogate for courtship behavior‟. He also evokes the memories of Yeh Dosti, sung between Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan in Sholey 1975. “Both articulate an over-the-top playfulness, but Main Khiladi adds layers of winking semiotic play to the layers of musical and choreographic play” (292). Waugh concludes with the remarks that “it is dangerous to offer monolithic generalizations in such a pluralistic field as Indian popular culture, but something queer is clearly going on in Bollywood” (297).

In another essay “I Sleep Behind You: Male Homosociality and Homoeroticism in Indian Parallel Cinema” (2002), Waugh analyses four films (namely, The Chess Players 1977, Messey Sahib 1985, Holi 1984 and English August 1996) and claims that homoeroticism is tenaciously suppressed in new-wave and left wing films, nevertheless it disrupts their apparently innocent homosocial configuration.

Simlilarly, Muraleedharan has made seminal contribution to the academic project of queering of the Indian screen through his essays. In his examination of male bonding in three popular Malayalam films in “Queer Bonds: Male Friendships in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema” (2002), Muraleedharan argues that films seemingly addressed to straight audiences have greater potential for encouraging a wide range of queer responses than films clearly addressed to gay and lesbian audiences. In another article “Crisis in

Desire: A Queer Reading of Cinema and Desire in Kerala” (2005), Muraleedharan approaches the viewing of films from Butler‟s „critically queer‟ perspective that rejects predetermined categories of spectatorial desires. A hypothetical viewer is seen forever in a process of getting written, „a text in the making‟ within the shifting layers of the social cinematic fabrics. The essay examines the male intimacies in some contemporary Malayalam films to „tease out‟, as it claims, the implications of same sex desire between men deployed in their narrative constructions of masculinities. It further attempts at showing how these films both arouse an active exchange of desire between men and block it within an economy of „acceptable‟ pleasure. The essay looks at Malayalam and Hindi film versatile male actor Kamal Hasan‟s, bare-bodied appearance on the posters of his Malayalam films as commodity and an integral part of cinematic signification. Muraleedharan sees this as “an important transition in the erotic imagery of Kerala, as it marks the inscription or re-inscription of the male body, defined „masculine‟ as the „object‟, rather than the subject of desire” (74). The essay draws attention towards a significant movefurther in the configuration of male corporeality in 1990s where the heterosexual figures in publicity posters started getting replaced by same-sex pairs.Accroding to Muraleedharan “the physical intimacy between two men is inscribed into a pleasurable spectacle, offering multiple locations of identification…” (76) The essay thus emphasizes that the „act of seeing and deriving pleasure‟ needs to be seen as dialectic with an ever-slipping trajectory of signification.

Murleedharan records a very significant observation about Indian cinema that temporal and spatial continuities are frequently disrupted by songs and dance sequences that constitute a crucial component of Indian cinema‟s technology of pleasure. Most mainstream Indian films are unidentifiable with Western genre in that they offer a „non- continuous‟ narrative through seemingly independent narrative units like songs and dance sequences. These semi-autonomous narrative units in Indian films have been further complicated by T.V. channels through soups and various programmes. These assort dramatic, comic or song sequences harvested from various popular films and provide them with an extended life that transcends the narrative logic of film texts, highlighting their autonomous potential to signify and „entertain‟. Thus the queer sequence from a

film, whether a song or a dramatic or comic sequence, edited or unedited, when telecast separately, its “queerness is no more erased by the heterosexist narrative resolutions within which it was encased while within the film text” (80-81).

The academic scholarship in the above discussed essays makes a very strong case for deconstructing the seemingly heterosexual film text through queer read and / viewing. Such an approach is an academic project that is based on Queer theory best expressed by Alexander Doty:

any text is already potentially queer [. . .] we should drop the idea of „queering‟ something, as it implies taking a thing that is straight and doing something to it. I'd like to see queer discourses and practices as being less about co-opting and „making‟ things queer and more about discussing how things are, or might be understood as, queer. (2000:2)

While the emphasis of all these scholars of venturing beyond the overtly articulated „queer‟ representation is welcome, it undermines certain areas of explorations like overtly queer signification as a practice of response, resistance and reclamation in such films.

Shohini Ghosh‟s (2002) essay "Queer Pleasures for Queer People: Film, Television and Queer Sexuality in India", focuses on the queer emergence in transnationalized mediascope of the popular culture and attempts to give an account of popular Cinema‟s engagement with same sex desire. Ghosh talks about the privileging of romantic love in Hindi popular cinema as opposed to any other emotions, including the romanticisation of friendship. She comments on "family film" that contains moments of queer pleasure which are carefully coded and hidden, even sothey are there.

Ghosh emphasizes that “in an overwhelmingly heterosexual popular culture, reading „against the grain‟ becomes a significant imperative” (209). However Ghosh warns against „crude essentialism in such a formulation‟. Due to the male-centredness of popular cinema‟s narratives, the picturization of female bonding unlike male bonding has almost always lacked vitality. Films like Razia Sultan (1983), Mere Mehboob (1963), Humjoli (1970) and Yeh Aag Kab Bujhegi (1991) are just a few films to name. The 1990s

saw the arrival of real and representational women both in films and television. Female superstar Madhuri Dixit, Film director Tanuja Chandra (Tamanna, 1997) contributed to this paradigm shift. The songs “Choli ke Picchey” from the Hindi Fim Khalnayak (1993) and “didi tera devar divana” from the film Hum Apke Hai Kaun (1994) offered moments of homoerotically inflected visual pleasure embodying transgressive desire. Despite the silent presence of male spectators in visual sequence, the homoerotic possibilities of mise-en-scene are not displaced for the queerly predisposed reader (212). The article constantly oscillates between its queer reading and paradigm shifting moments in popular Indian Cinema.

Ghosh notices that with the release of Deepa Mehta‟s Fire (1998) the „coming out‟ of women in film and TV narrative spaces reached its climax. The public debate around the film marked a significant moment in the history of sexual politics in India. Implicit became explicit. Ghosh is right is claiming that “Fire is important because it is the first Indian film to bring women in love out of the margins into the mainstream and provide a body to the shadowlike subliminal lesbian of film narrative in India” (218). Fire makes the “invisible” lesbian, visible, by representing her on screen. Gosh‟s conclusion that the arrival of homoerotic and ambivalent discourse with Mehta‟s Fire has reopened older texts for newer reading hold, is potentially significant however, Ghosh does not offer a sample demonstration.

In yet another essay Shohini Ghosh (2007) maps the journey of queer desires through emergent sexualities in popular cinema and their relationship to a larger public discourse around queer sexualities. The essay brings out two currents, namely, the emergence of an ambivalent discourse that invokes queer desires through a simultaneous address to the erotic and the phobic; and the second is the beginnings of a new queer cinema that displaces conventional cinematic codes of masculinity and femininity. Ghosh shows how these currents hint at the crisis around the inevitability of heterosexuality and a desire to reimagine possibilities around sexuality and gender.

While discussing the love-hate relationship between the queer audience and popular cinema, Ghosh suggests that the queer spectators may compensate for under-

representation of queer desires through „analogical identification‟. Despite the absence of explicit depictions of homosexual love, the passionate engagement of Bombay aka Bollywood cinema portraying intense love between two friends (usually male) can be read as homoerotic texts. This position is easy to understand as the yaari / Yarana / Dosti/ Dostana trope easily accommodates queer desires. Ghosh notes that „queer images‟ in the intended sense, began to appear on Indian Film and TV screen in the mid 1990s. Deepa Mehta‟s Fire is the first among such films that not only makes the „invisible‟ lesbian visible by representing her on screen but facilitates interpretative strategy that visibilizes lesbianism. The arrival of this new way of seeing has opened up older texts for newer and queer readings. Homoeroticism can be read between the overlapping lines of love and friendship. These films play on the borderline of homosociality / eroticism and invite the audience within the paradox of affirmation and reprimand to acknowledge the presence of queer desire and pleasure. One can notice what Ghosh hints at is already explored by scholars like R. Raj Rao, Muraleedharan and Ashok Row Kavi.

Ghosh further briefly discusses how Indian independent films, Bomgay (1996), A Marmaid Called Aida (1996), Summer in My Veins (1999) and Performing Goddess (1999), provide visual represention of the „real‟ queer subjectvisible. Moving on to the contemporary flims that articulate the conflicted ambivalence around queer sexualities, Ghosh notices that the acknowledgement of same sex desires without invoking homophobia does not get reflected in mainstream cinema; however films like My Brother…Nikhil (2005) and Shabnam Mausi (2005) make it possible to reimagine the emergentsexual and gender identities without taking recourse to homophobia or pose a paradox between the phobic and erotic.

Shahani, Parmesh (2008) in his article discusses the politics of male same-sex desire in Riyad Wadia‟s documentary short Bomgay and Rangayan‟s Gulabi Aaina (Pink Mirror, 2003). The article interrogates the structures on which gay identities in Bombay cinema are constructed. Shahani's insights into the lived realities of gay Bombay underscore how class, caste and gender shape urban gay culture. Situating the problematic of sexuality in mainstream media in relation to the commodity culture in post-1990s Bombay / Mumbai, this essay pays close attention to the ways in which gay identity, as read through these

two important films, intrudes upon the life-worlds of Bollywood actors, producers and festival participants. In doing so, Shahani seeks to defamiliarize received notions of "authentic" gay identity/culture by foregrounding issues of language, class and performativity in Indian context.

Sabharwal and Sen‟s (2012) article is a take on mainstream Hindi cinema aka Bollyood. The article condemns Bollywood Cinema which is the most widely distributed cinema in India and abroad, for traditionally adopting an attitude of denial or mockery towards queer community.The article shows that representations of sexual minorities move between the sarcastic, the comic and the criminal. Alternative Cinema on the other hand, portrays sexual minorities in more realistic manner and is successful in raising, expressing and suggesting possible solutions to their problems in a more effective manner when compared to the mainstream cinema. However, it is confined to film festivals and a handful select group of viewers.

Rituparna Chatterjee (2013) explores the archival evidence for the role Indian cinema played in the last hundred years to break taboos and create tolerance towards the transsexuals, transgenders and homosexuals; though its history of perpetuating the worst stereotypes of sexual minorities for derisive laughs can hardly be ignored. Chatterji appreciates works such as Santhosh Sowparnika's Ardhanari (2012), Santosh Sivan‟s Navarasa (2005) and David Atkins‟ Queens! Destiny of Dance (2011) for a serious and sincere engagement with subjectivities of the ‗hijra‘ community. Chatterji notes that the 90s filmmakers were more generous in awarding screen time to a few notable third genders in films such as Mahesh Bhatt‟s Tamanna (1997), setting a trend for films of the turn of century - there were a whole bunch of them - Appu (2000), Shabnam Mausi (2005), Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) and Jogwa (2009) among others. Chatterji remarks that “books had men declaring their sexual identity in no uncertain terms while cinema struggled to strike a balance between the morally acceptable lines the makers still complied to, with the changing times” (n.p). While admitting the cinematic intervention in the Queer movement in India, Chatterji like Sabhrawal and Sen, expresses her disappointment with the mainstream cinema as it kept queer subjects on the periphery of its narratives despite its seemingly sympathetic treatment.

Rohit Dasgupta‟s essay “The Queer Rhetoric of Bollywood: A Case of Mistaken Identity” (2012) addresses the queer representation of fictional characters and gay framing, analyzing the concept of "dosti" and "yaarana" and the trope of homo-social triangle in Hindi cinema, which is very much in line with what Rao and others have brought out through their „queered reading‟. By acknowledging the slippages between "real identity" and "mistaken identity" the films usher in a new queer cinematic discourse within the gamut of popular Bollywood cinema. The article takes Nikhil Advani‟s Kal Ho Na Ho (If Tomorrow Never Comes 2004); and Tarun Mansukhani‟s Dostana (Friendship, 2008) as case in point to critique how Queer representations in Indian Cinema address the invisible queer politics through a case of mistaken identity. What this and many other writings on Dostana do not notice, is how the film manages to introduce narrow codes of queer cultures which are and can be noticed only by a specific queer audience. For instance, the imagined narrative of first meeting between Sameer and Kunal introduces Western gay cultural codes like clothing fetish.

Sucheta Choudhuri in her Ph.D thesis Transgressive Territories: Queer Space in Indian Fiction and Film (2009) argues that the representation of queer space in colonial and postcolonial Indian fiction and film counters the marginalization of the sexual dissidents, both in the Indian nation-state and the Indian diaspora. The spatial repossession in these texts interrogates the received notion of queer empowerment by shifting the emphasis from visibility and inclusion to alternative agential modes such as concealment. The major part of her dissertation, besides the focus on literary texts, consists of analysis of the film by Anglophone, regional and diasporic Indian filmmaker, Nisha Ganatra, Chutney Popcorn (1999). Choudhuri examines the different ways in which these texts represent queer spaces and how they imagine an alternate cartography for the disenfranchised sexual citizens. Cultural geography and postcolonial rethinking of the constructions of gender and sexuality provides the theoretical framework. Choudhuri analytically examines how queer space emerges as a site of contestation with an underlying consciousness of conflicts and not as any disconnection with reality. However, it is important to note that Choudhuri selects films located in diasporic spaces.

Hence, her observations remain limited to queer subjectivity and resistance within those spaces.

As mentioned earlier, Deepa Mehta‟s Fire generated a lot of discussion both at the academic and public level. Since this film forms an important part of analysis in the present study a cursory review of writings on this film will be worthwhile.

In a review of Deepa Mehta‟s Fire Gayatri Gopinath (1998) critiques mainstream reception of the film in the U.S., as expressed in reviews of the film that read its narrative as a failure of lesbian “agency”. Indeed, almost all mainstream U.S. reviewers stress the failure of “these Hindus” to articulate lesbianism intelligibly which in turn signifies the failure of the non-West to progress towards the organization of sexuality and gender prevalent in the West. Gopinath rightly points out that ironically to these critics “lesbian and gay identity becomes legible and indeed desirable when and where it can be incorporated in this developmental narrative of modernity” (637). The “developmental narrative of modernity” that Gopinath refers to, is the one with resolute emphasis on visibility as the only agential mode in the context of queer self-expression. However, commenting on this aspect of Gopinath, Choudhuri writes that the queer subject resorts to alternative agential modes, which does not necessitate a radical departure from loci of patriarchal control, but a subversion of hegemonic heteronormativity from within it (24). This theorization by Gopinath is considered very important by the upcoming scholars. (Choudhuri, 2009)

In yet another article “Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational Trajectories of Deepa Mehta‟s Fire” (2002), Gayatri Gopinath explains how “essentialized concepts of national and diasporic identity are most fruitfully contested from a “queer diasporic” positionality” (150). Gopinath considers the queer diasporic positionality as a lens through which sexuality is viewed subjectively. It is this positionality that “…disorganizes the dominant categories within the United States for sexual variance…and it marks a different economy of desire that escapes legibility within both, normative Indian contexts and homo-normative white Euro-Americans” (150). In other words, the “queer diasporic” positionality challenges the categories of homosexuality that

are dominant and prescribed in the United States. Gopinath shows how in „Fire‟ the relationship between Sita and Radha varies greatly from their heteronormative culture. Also, the homo-normative couple, as the United States society sees it, is usually a female butch with her femme partner or the feminine male with his masculine partner. In contrast to homo-normative white Euro-American, the film Fire demonstrates a homosexual couple that is comprised of two visually feminine females. Gopinath successfully makes a case for plurality of imagining the queer by drawing home the point that Euro-American is not the only model to view a female same sex relation.

Another critic, Ratna Kapur, in her essay “Too Hot to Handle: The Cultural Politics of "Fire" (2000), explores how the definition of Indian culture has become a site of contest, and how this contest is played out in the controversy that erupted over the release and screening of Deepa Mehta‟s diasporic film, Fire, in India. Kapur locates this controversy within the broader controversies that are taking place over culture, particularly when issues of sex and sexuality are involved. Kapur discusses responses to the release of the film by Hindu Right wing forces as well as feminist and lesbian groups and critiques the simplified understandings of culture that informed these positions. Kapur challenges the positions that suggest that women are represented as victims in the film and draws attention to the cultural, sexual and familial ruptures brought about by the protagonists through their desire for each other. Kapur explores the complicated understanding of agency and desire that are represented through the assertion of this relationship.

In her dissertation Lesbian Desis in Indian Cinema: Re-defining the Boundaries of the (Glo) bal and the Lo (cal), Arudhra Krishnaswamy (2009) questions the legitimacy of strong oppositional relationship between the local and the global by illustrating how in the case of lesbian representation, there is in fact a constant interaction between the two forces making their relationship rather dialectic unlike commonly assumed. She suggests that this interaction is one of ambivalence and overlap, thereby showing them to be harmonious entities rather than two mutually exclusive antithetical formations. “It… is… this consistent attention of the global forces by the local and the evident amalgamation of Indianness and Westernness in transnational cinema that makes it a marker of Glocalisation” (VI). Thus she proposes that a better way of interpreting sexual minority

representations in Indian cinema, national and transnational, is to read them as a Glocal enterprise. Krishnaswamy‟s claim that Lesbianism either stereotyped in a negative way or aborted by killing its presence in the end is ultimately due to its general perception as the Western intake needs to be reexamined. The trend of treating a homosexual character as a psychopath or a monster / ghost was in fact the initial practice observed in mainstream American and European Cinema. This negative stereotyping can be seen as a direct Western intake. Moreover, Krishnaswamy‟s use of the term „New Queer cinema‟ for the films made in 1990s and 2000s is inappropriate. This is because historically India did not have Queer Cinema before 1990s. That preempts the possibility of “New” queer Cinema.

Raj Senthorun (2012) probes into the dominant tropes of „coming out‟, the public visibility and consumption, that are used to understand sexuality in Indian Cinema. Representing a queer female subject position in diasporic Indian popular culture is fraught with epistemological and political challenges. Senthorun uses the term „queer‟ to contest the ethnocentric implications of terms such as „gay‟ and „lesbian‟. Framing the position of queer female desire in Deepa Mehta‟s film Fire, Senthorun, like Gopinath, argues that new modes of queer intimacy are enabled within the provided domestic space, rather than their being alien to it. Viewing the private sphere as a site of production rather than repression, the protagonists Radha and Sita explore diverse intimate attachments through platonic, filial and erotic terms, such as dancing, kissing and conversation that occurs at „home‟ situations (para.1). The article connects ideas surrounding subaltern subjectivity with eroticism and agency to consider how South Asian female sexualities are negotiated within the spaces of diasporic and domestic milieus. Senthorun, thus, focuses on how alternative readings of the queer intimacies in domestic sphere can articulate new claims for recognitionwhile in doing so dislodges the nationalist and patriarchal polemics and ethnocentric gay and / lesbian ideologies that saturate the representation of queer subject in Fire. Senthorun admits that Fire is a complex film to define. It is easy to contextualise it as anincongruent cultural production.

Senthorun argues that Fire exemplifies how fantasies of the communal nation are sustained through the shadowing regulation of female (hetero) sexuality. Women‟s bodies become the sites through which communal identities are formed. For example, the

female body in Fire remains a repository of tradition and culture in order to maintain the authenticity of home and family as the privileged unit of society or nation. Senthorun observes that „Fire‟ does not rely on orientalist aesthetics that exoticises same-sex eroticism nor does it recuperate Western epistemologies of the lesbian subject to represent queer female desire in Indian domestic space (para.11).The writer points out that the political and academic invisibility of the colonised subject results in the emergence of subaltern as a noirfigure, deeply in shadow and positioned „in between‟ spaces of culture. The female subject is positioned between a space of patriarchal nationalism and colonizing Western discourses. The Queer female desire becomes a discursive and political rupture. Senthorun like Gopinath cautions against privileging visibility in representations of sexuality. For him the film demonstrates that any attempt to dislocate queer desire or sexual identity from the domestic space is problematic. The film locates queer female desire, is linked with domesticity, privacy, filial duty, friendship and eroticism. In doing so, the film dislodges nationalist cultural politics that refuses to imagine the existence of public queer subjects. At the same time, it refuses the Neo-Orientalist claims of the „West‟, that the Third World private sphere is a site of ongoing repression. He further emphasizes that the recognition of queer intimacies is not reducible to the public sphere or seeking „liberation‟ necessarily. Senthorun‟s article ends with a significant remark that “by transforming our conception of desire in the domestic sphere we can enable a queer politics that provides us with different „choices‟ with which to live” (para. 35).

Mokkil Maruthur in her PhD dissertation (2010), especially in Chapter 4 “Shifting Spaces, Frozen Frames: Visions of Queer Politics”, brings together a discussion of two films namely Desatanakkili Karayarilla (The Wandering Bird Does Not Cry 1986) and Sancharram (The Journey 2004), in order to disrupt a linear understanding of change from “silence to speech” (16). In her interpretation of Desatanakkili Karayarilla, Maruthur draws on existing codes in Malayalam cinema about romantic couplehood and shows how this film adopts these conventions in order to disrupt them. In her analysis of formal devices in Pullappally‟s Sancharram, she places cultural forms in the field of aesthetic judgments in that region. However, Maruthur, unlike Gopinath, emphasizes

mapping of the particularities of vernacular public spheres inwhich these texts circulate and get materialized. She claims that the “focus on a regional archive of sexuality and its networks of containment and excess challenges the current dominant teleological narrative of sexual progress in the time of globalization” (44). Maruthur observes that from the 1990s onwards there has been a shift in the articulation of sexuality-based issues. This has played an important role in engendering an LGBT movement in metropolitan India that relies heavily on an international language of sexual rights. Sancharram is a film that locates itself centrally within this international LGBT counter- cultural space. Maruthur criticizes the film for resorting to the matrilineal past. She further comments that regulatory mechanisms of sexuality by resorting to a matrilineal past, it is productive to locate tentative, fleeting gestures of resistance that push against these norms in the postcolonial period rather than erasing the violent past. However, Maruthur‟s critique that the film‟s nostalgia for the pre-colonial era might result in an erasure of the see thing sexual tensions in postcolonial India ignores that the film very effectively challenges the common myth of associating same sex desire with contemporary Westernized discourse by relocating it in time and space.

Kumaramkandathin his Ph. D. thesis The Discursive Formation of Sexual Subjects: Sexual Morality and Homosexuality in Keralam (2014), remarks that Sancharram‟s dealing with an openly lesbian theme countered the progressive narratives in representations in Malayalam. Openly affirming lesbian desire within the cinematic space of Malayalam films, Sancharram however faced with huge opposition during its screening. The film, which was apparently an emblem of radical desire to openly challenge moral discourse within the region, was widely euphemized as a product of economic materialism and the emerging global language of unfettered desire. The film was definitely restricted to foregrounding the significance of gay / lesbian identity politics and did not in any way address the multiple ways in which the politics of sexuality operated in the region. Even then the film that could have been an inaugural attempt to introduce and familiarize the language of body politics in the cinematic space of Malayalam film industry could not invoke much response due to the label of embodying “transnational gay / lesbian desire” and “sexual liberation” with which it was

already received. The limited response to the film had aggravated the common perception that the film (or even such films) was merely an offshoot of metropolitan instincts which were said to evidently lack any sense of regional sentiments.

However, the review presented here may belimited, it can be easily noticed that the major thrust of these writings has been (a) to offer a queer reading of the otherwise heteronormative text and to explore the queer audience culture both in national and diasporic spaces (b) to critique the depiction of the non-normative sexualities in a denotative sense in mainstream Indian cinema and TV films / serials and (c) a socio-political as well as cultural critique of queer films, mainly Deepa Mehta‟s Fire. Though there has been a discussion about transgender in Indian films, it is limited in scope and requires more serious engagement. The studies mentioned, no doubt, are of importance; however, a large body of cinema depicting the „Queer‟ explicitly and unapologetically remains to be examined critically. The literature review highlights the shift in Indian Cinema compared to that in Western Cinema from the „connotative‟ visibility to the „denotative‟ visibility of the queer (to borrow the terms introduced by Roland Barthes). The existing body of research on „connotative visibility‟ which takes a queer theoretical perspective also underscores the need to engage in more such explorations especially of the regional films. However, the present study will study the films that offer „denotative‟ visibility of the queer sexuality. What becomes interesting to observe is how this „denotative‟ formation of queer sexuality in selected Indian films respond to the versions created by the Euro- America influenced global discourse on the queer sexuality, discourse of contemporary Indian queer culture and mainstream Indian Cinema. It has to be ackhnowledged that such a selection shrinks the possibilities of exploring the queer to its fullest.

Aims and Objectives

The study examines as to how the films under discussion respond, especially, to the Western and Indian discourses on the Queer, both, socio-political and cinematic. The study particularly investiates whether and how the selected Indian films respond to what Gayatri Gopinath (2005) calls “the developmental narrative of modernity” that is, the uniform celebration of visibility, central to Western coming-out narratives.

The study scrutinizes if positioning of the Queer from margin to midpoint is strategized and articulated in any specific ways. Through the semiotic investigation of selected Indian films, the study shows how queer subjectivities and desires are reclaimed by constructing and positioning the queer in cultural spaces without necessarily resisting or embracing the Western discourse on the queer, both socio-political and cinematic.

The studyas well scrutinizes if the films deploy and appropriate signs in construction of the Queer. An extensive endeavour is made to understand whether the queer subjectivities and desires are reclaimed by constructing and positioning the queer in cultural and geographical spaces and whether this positioning resists or embraces the globalized Western discourse.

Hence, the proposition statement reconnoitered in this study is that Indian films discard a monolithic version of queer sexual desire and identity and instead, through its cinematic representation that negotiatesbetween the globalized Western discourse and Indian cultural spaces, offer a hybrid configuration of the Queer.

The study sets the following objectives:

1. To develop a pragmatic understanding of Queer cinemafor the investigation of positioning of the Queer in selected Indian films. 2. To explore the plurality of the „Queer Cinema‟, by mapping the cinematic engagement of queer in the Indian cinemaandWestern cinema. 3. To analyze selected films to investigate positioning of the Queer in the narratives.

Methodology and Techniques

The method adopted for the present study is primarily through a textual analysis of the selected films by using semiotic tools in sync with library research. As the study is descriptive in nature, a qualitative method of analysis has been used. The major concern is the scrutinyof thematic treatment of the Queer and representation of queer identity in the said films.It must be stated that the studyis not concerned with the theoretical issues associated with film language. Semiotics is an interdisciplinary range of approaches

having no one specific method. This entails that the analytical framework needs to be designed keeping the focal concerns of the study. The study makes use of concepts from general as well as film semiotics as tools in the analysis of the selected films. Secondly, rather than employing a Queer theoretical standpoint, the study takes a strategic position on the notion of the Queer, based on the Western and Indian discourses around non- heteronormative sexualities. This has been elaborately discussed in Chapter One that canvasses various concepts to carve out a pragmatic framework for the further analysis.

There is no extensive corpus of Indian Queer Cinema compared to that of America or Europe; nevertheless, it has seen a gradual and steady growth in the last two decades. Many such films are mainly short films or documentary films and a modest body of feature length films, in English, Hindi and other Indian languages have made their presence felt. However, the films selected for the present study are only narrative feature films. Moreover, the selection of the films is based on significance, representativeness, and availability. „Representativeness‟ refers to the fact thatfilms selected are able to represent a range of themes as wide as permissible by the scope of this study.

There are a number of films that could have been chosen and were perfectly well suited for the analysis but due to the limited scope of the thesis chosen six films form the primary source for the present research work. The following is a brief description of the selected films. A detailed description of each film is attempted in chapters that offer analysis of these films.

1. Fire (1996/1998) English/Hindi, dir. by Deepa Mehta

As mentioned earlier, this is one of the most controversial and path-breaking films in India. It is the first in the trilogy: Fire, Water and Earth by Deepa Mehta, the Indo- Canadian film maker. Fire is a story of Radha, a middle aged married woman and Sita, her younger sister-in-law, in a contemporary Indian middle class Hindu family in Delhi. Both women neglected and mistreated by their husbands for different reasons, develop a close friendship which leads to a passionate and intense love

relation between them. The film sparked a large controversy in the political terrain with respect to the issue offemale homosexuality. Hence, it is historically relevant.

2. Mango Soufflé (2002) English, dir. by Mahesh Dattani

Promoted as the first openly gay male film from India, Mango Soufflé is a screen adaptation of Mahesh Dattani‟s play On a Muggy Night in Mumbai. The film captures the dramawhich begins after gay fashion designer Kamlesh, recovering from a recently ended relationship, invites a group of queer friends for dinner for a special announcement. The situation reaches a point when Kamlesh‟s sister, Kiran arrives with her fiancé, Prakash/Ed. From there the action unfolds as sexual tensions build and confessions come out of the closet.

3. Sancharram/Journey (2004) Malyalam, dir. by Ligy Pullappally

This film by US-based Indian Film Maker Ligy Pullappally tells the story of Deliliah (Shrruiti Menon) and Kiran (Suhasini Nair), and their unbridled, deep, passionate love for each other as they come of age, both being childhood friends. The film has got critical attention, awards and appreciation for being a brave film that breaks imposed boundaries. Sancharram was honored with the Chicago Award from the Chicago International Film Festival, The Lankesh Award for India‟s Best Debut Director and the John Abraham Special Jury Award for Best Malayalam Feature Film. The film was lauded as an incredible act of affirmation of queer desire. Ironically, the film was not screened in Kerala.

4. My Brother…Nikhil (2005) Eng/Hindi, dir. by Anirban Dhar A.K.A.Onir

Based on the life of AIDS activist Dominic D‟Souza, the film tells the story of young swimming champion Nikhil in the late 80‟s and early 90‟s who, after being tested positive for HIV, loses everything and is locked away in isolation until his sister, supported by Nikhil‟s boyfriend rehabilitates him. The film is very innovative in its breaking of several stereotypes, such as homosexuality and the identity politics around it as major one.

Yours Emotionally (2006) English, dir. by Sridhar Rangayan

It is one of the first feature films to depict the underground gay sub-culture in India as the main thrust of its narrative. The plot centers on two friends, Paul (Jack Lamport) and Ravi (Premjit). The two visit a small town near Bangalore in India on an invitation to attend a gay party where Ravi meets Mani (Prateek Gandhi) and instantly falls in love leading to further complications. Though it is 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 movie explores cultural identities and openly challenges the Indian gay stereotype.

5. Arekti Premer Golpo/ Just Another Love story (2010) Bengali/English, dir by Kaushik Ganguly

The story revolves around Abhiroop Sen (Rituparno Ghosh), a Delhi-based transgender documentary filmmaker, who with his bisexual lover and cinematographer Basu (Indraneil Sengupta) visits Kolkata to make a documentary on the life of real-life legendary jatra actor Chapal Bhaduri, who in his youth was known as „Chapal Rani‟, noted for his portrayal of female roles on the stage at a time when women did not perform on stage. As the film begins, the two stories become entangled. The irony of Abhiroop‟s situation is highlighted when apparently much more in control of his life and sexuality than Chapal, he finds himself equally emotionally ravaged by similar betrayals. The film takes the viewers through the present life of Abhiroop Sen and the past life of Chapal Bhaduri with the same actors. This happens to be the first film on homosexuality to be shot after the short lived decriminalisation of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code by the Delhi High Court.

Though, the focus of the present study is restricted to these six films other Indian films such as Bomgay, Bombay Boys, Umbartha / Subah (Threshold / Morning), Mast Kalander, Summer in My Veins, Gulabi Aaina, Desatanakkili Karayarilla, Anand, Sholey, Baghdad ka Jadoo, Dosti and Dostana have been referred to and discussed. The secondary data is collected from books, journals, articles, theses, reviews, web material

and newspapers. It is collected from the personal participation in various conferences and training programmes and visits to university / institutional libraries.

The analysis of these films is attempted in Chapter Three, Four and Five. The criteria used in clubbing these films in each chapter are female-same sex desire, queer subculture and documentary apparatus respectively. However, it must be mentioned that the clubbing is mainly for the structural pragmatism of the study rather than the thematic purpose, in that, the analysis in each respective chapter does not restrict itself to the criteria by which the films are clubbed.

Scope and Limitation of the Present Study

It must be stated at the outset, that the study restricts itself to a limited number of films and depends on the English subtitles for its interpretations (especially in the case of Malayalam film Sancharram and Bengali film Arekti Premer Golpo). This study explicitly acknowledges its strategic deployment of an array of concepts and theories. The research deploys certain concepts / theories in circumscribed ways. The study creates a temporary hybrid of ideas that meet the study‟s purpose. Particular conceptual / analytical frameworks are only utilized in so far as an agreement, based on research and reflection, is found between that framework and the agenda or demands of the research project.

It must, however be stated that bringing these films under the umbrella of „queer‟ does not represent any attempt atthe simplification in that it does not eliminate the possibility of individual traits, distinctions and nuances in these films or reading these films otherwise. The study offers an analysis of positioning of the Queer in selected Indian film narratives. Secondly, the “representativeness” of these films as mentioned earlier does not entail an assumption of a „typical‟ Indian queer life or identity. Such a „typical‟ Indian queer life should not be assumed for although these films reflect to an extent on the reality in various ways, it is almost impossible to offer a „typical‟ account of queer identities and cultures in India, not only because of the limited number and range of these films, but also because of the fluid nature of sexual identities and cultures. Therefore, the

study does not claim to be an extensive and comprehensive mapping of Indian Queer culture.