Introduction

Introduction I 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. II 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 1 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 2 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 3 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. 4 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.

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