For much of the noughties and a decade or so beyond, a freakish, comic-filler kind of a gay man began to appear in Bollywood movies.
The vile pits of this trend could be seen in Dostana (2008). A hit song from the film went, ‘Maa ka Laadla Bigad Gaya’ (roughly translated, ‘Mama’s boy, he's gone rogue’). In 2022, if you play that song off YouTube, like I did before beginning to write this piece, expect violent activation of the forehead vein.
The characters played by Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham, friends and roommates, are on the beach, their bodies and faces distorted beyond recognition, heaving and sighing in squeaks, to fake the assumed body language of a gay couple, while one of the characters’ moms played by Kirron Kher watches the laadla and goes into paroxysms of violent tears of her own. How could her son be homosexual? Was he that damaged? Was she that unlucky?
A few years later, in another Dharma Productions hit, the debut of Alia Bhatt, Student of the Year (2012), Rishi Kapoor plays a school teacher with the same distorted version of a gay man, subjecting his acting prowess to replicate the same gay template. The same year, Abhishek Bachchan tried a similar stunt in Bol Bachchan—his mannerisms closer to how hijras communicate in Indian weddings. Anything to foil the macho gravity of the hero.
Fast forward. Fast. In 2022, in one of the best scenes of Amazon Prime Video’s legal drama series Guilty Minds, a lesbian couple Vandana (Sugandha Garg) and Sunanda (Chitrangada Satarupa) face Sunanda’s pesky, overbearing mother about their relationship. Forcing rasgullas down their throats is just one way this mother shows her love. When she realises her daughter is in a live-in relationship with Vandana and that they are not just roommates, she tells Sunanda how disappointed she is, at how low her daughter had stooped. Sunanda, unable so far to come out to her mother, breaks the wall down. In a nutshell, this is what she tells her imperious Bengali mom: I am disappointed too, because you are my mom and yet you can’t understand and respect the person who is my friend, my partner and the love of my life, the one I want to marry. You want me to get married, right? The moment gay marriage is legal, I will marry her, or if you can’t wait, we will go to another country where gay marriages are legal, get married and get done with it.”
Brave new world
So yes, as several OTT stories will affirm, Indians on screen no longer want to hide from homophobic parents. Or homophobic colleagues, or neighbours, or aunties and friends. Over the last decade, diversity and inclusion have redefined entertainment in Hollywood and the stories coming out of America, and Indian writers, directors and producers have followed suit—we are catching up to the representation fervour instead of just queer-baiting or pandering to the Indian lowest common denominator version of homosexuality, which is comic and crass.
The characters from the last two years that immediately come to mind: Dr Saira Sabharwal (Kriti Kulhari) in the medical thriller series on Disney + Hotstar, Human (2022); Peeplika (Monica Dogra) in The Married Woman (2021), a Zee5 and ALT Balaji original; Kunal (Satyadeep Mishra) and Preet (Mrinal Dutt) in His Story (2021), another Zee5 and ALT Balaji original; Amal (Aahana Kumra) in Call My Agent Bollywood (2021) on Netflix, an adaptation of the original French; Ayehsa (Plabita Barthakur), an openly bi-sexual character in Netflix’s Bombay Begums (2021); ACP Khan (Vikas Kumar) in Aarya (2020 and 2021) a Disney + Hotstar original; Manzu (Pratik Gandhi) in Hansal Mehta’s story 'Baai' in the Amazon Prime Video anthology Modern Love Mumbai (2022); Umang (bani J) and Samara (Lisa Ray) in season 2 of Four More Shots (2022) on Amazon Prime Video.
The character of Karan Mehra (Arjun Mathur) in Excel Entertainment’s series Made in Heaven for Amazon Prime Video , which dropped in 2019, was the first gay protagonist with a fully-realised, relatable character graph—the traumas, struggles, the secrecy as well as the acceptance—in this new slate of OTT stories, LGBTQI is an accepted and embraced spectrum for characters. The second season of Made in Heaven, which is scheduled to release soon, has Mathur playing the same character, but, as he has said in interviews, with more complications in his life and a much more amplified chest and torso.
Right in the middle the pandemic, a love story was shot in Chandigarh—a love story between a testosterone-soaked body builder played by Ayushmann Khurrana and a trans woman who has undergone sex reassignment surgery played by Vaani Kapoor. It released in theatres in December 2021, just before the Omicron variant hit the headlines, and managed to garner a decent collection of over Rs40 crore at the box office.
Teething troubles
As is bound to be in any filmmaking culture with a new, borrowed standard of representation, sometimes these characters end up being painfully awkward and inauthentic.
In adaptations, as in Call My Agent Bollywood, some of these characters are merely translated—as opposed to transmuted—without taking the Indian context into account. In this series, the courtship between Amal and the woman she woos exists simply as a gratuitous force of “girl-on-girl action”, meant to pay lip service to the idea that Mumbai is up to date when it comes to freedom for same-sex couples—a kind of a cheerful raunch. It was a missed opportunity. Many Indian LGBTQI characters have got somewhat lost in contextual translation—which is why Konkona Sensharma’s role as Bharti Mandal in Neeraj Ghaywan’s story 'Geeli Pucchi' in the Netflix anthology Ajeeb Daastaans (2021) was a quiet explosion.
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The world has othered Bharti. The overwhelmingly male work force at the Uttar Pradesh factory she works at sees her as an upstart. The managerial job she covets eludes her. She lives alone. In get-up (no makeup, curly hair tied up in a shabby ponytail, faded loose trousers and oversized shirts) and attitude (an imploding anger, self-bulldozing her way to survive), she truthfully and artfully inhabits her Bengali Dalit Queer self. She is attracted to women and explores her sexuality without trepidation or shame. When Priya (Aditi Rao Hydari), a hyper-feminine, soft-spoken, married Brahmin woman joins the office, an attraction develops between the two. The factory manager has never thought of making a ladies toilet till Priya comes along, because the idea of a woman is so warped in mass consciousness. You expect men to be working in a factory, but you don’t expect a woman there. The factory setting helps bring out male hypocrisy—the male idea of beauty to be adored and fawned over is Priya. While embracing sexual openness and negating shame, 'Geeli Pucchi' takes into account murkier questions of power, trust, caste and class identity and trauma, and places Bharti in India’s historical fault-lines—a rarity even in shows coming out of countries where sexual openness has existed for much longer than in our society.
First movers
Film historians have a consensus about the first gay scene in Hollywood. German-American star Marlene Dietrich is a club singer in the 1930 film Morocco. In a black tuxedo, she enters a club, approaches a woman stead with two men around a table, takes the flower that the woman is holding and kisses her on the lips—much to the uproarious glee of everyone in the nightclub. In 2020, the Art Museum of Illinois, USA, live-streamed what is probably the first Hindi film with a gay relationship at its centre. Produced by the Film Finance Corporation (which later became the National Film Development Corporation) and directed by Prem Kapoor in 1971, it’s called Badnaam Basti, in which a bus driver who moonlights as a bandit in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh, falls in love with a temple volunteer and cleaner.
A film and theatre actor who identifies as queer told me on condition of anonymity that the industry is a much friendlier place for non-straight professionals now compared to 12 years ago when he came to Mumbai in search of film roles from Bihar. He explains that for people whose sexual experiences are limited, disappointing or tinted with shame, the euphoric generalising—which is essentially an extension of the need for representation—can be alienating. That’s why a character like Bharti Mandal reveals to us that unless accompanied by the intersection of emotions and social identities, sex positivity and sexual diversity remain mere statements, rather than granular, authentic exploration.
As soon as ‘representation’ becomes a potentially acceptable, pleasing or profitable industry buzzword, it gives filmmakers as well as producers and OTT platforms an excuse to do less, instead of motivating the industry to do more. Representation can’t merely function as a stopgap between the outmoded ways of imagining non-binary and LQBTQI characters and the substantive changes that the filmmaking industry can do with. Until we see more LGBTQ+ people, from a wider array of backgrounds and life experiences, with the power and privilege to actually fund productions, make casting decisions, and greenlight shows, we’ll continue to get the same stock characters and their predictable arcs. Now it is more of a reflection of what’s normative in social media as opposed to what’s happening in society or filmmaking cultures and industries as a whole.
How we got here
In 2015, when Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh, written by Apurva Asrani, released, it opened up the Hindi screenwriting world to a kind of sinewy gay experience that rests on the inner as well as external struggles of identifying as homosexual in India outside of the metros.
In between the overwhelmingly caricaturist portrayals of non-heteronormative characters in Indian cinema, there have been realistic characters like Ramchandra Siras of Aligarh, and the works of two filmmakers are important in this context. Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh, because of the way he lived his life and Onir, who made the first Hindi film in India with a gay protagonist and his tragic end, My Brother Nikhil (2015).
Kolkata was Ghosh’s muse, home and battleground. It was the city that embraced his gender—man, woman and what emerges when these identities meld into each other. He was the first in India to host a gay pride, attended by 15 people, back in 1991. Ghosh was 49 when he died in 2013, without any friends by his side. In the last few years, he lived alone after the death of his parents in his ancestral home in the city in which he set his 20 films. He had alienated close friends and colleagues while growing paranoid about his own gender, which, many say, was because he wanted desperately to become a woman—he became obsessed with himself. He is reported to have undergone surgeries like breast implants and abdominoplasty.
The turmoil also reflected in his acting to which he turned in the last few years of his life—Chitranganda (2012), based on a story from the Mahabharat, in which he plays the role of a choreographer struggling with his gender identity, and Arekti Premer Golpo (2010), in which he plays the role of a gay film-maker. He had lost the distance between himself and his art.
Ghosh would have probably found new agency and energy in an India where homosexuality is not a crime, a third gender legally exists, and representation of characters beyond the cisgender, heterosexual bracket is beginning to be a norm in the OTT universe of storytelling.
Sangeeta Dutt’s 2018 documentary on Ghosh, Bird of Dusk, reminded us why defying categories of gender and normative behaviour and finding unconditional acceptance for it has been such a radical idea in the country where many centuries ago Vatsyaana was feted.
Onir was in the process of trying to make We Are, a film about a gay character who is in the armed forces. In his memoirs, I am Onir & I am Gay (Penguin Random House), a book about his finding his voice as a gay man, a filmmaker and artist, co-written with his sister Irene Dhar Malik, Onir recounts an episode when My Brother Nikhil was screened at an armed forces gathering in Assam. It felt to him like any other screening, he writes - he got the usual questions that he got elsewhere from audiences about making a film with a gay protagonist.
He goes on to explain why he believes that now we have regressed as a society: “These days, you need to take an NOC from the Indian Army if you portray anyone from the armed forces in your film. I had watched an interview of Major Suresh on NDTV in 2020 where he spoke about why he quit the Indian Army. It was because he could not be open about his sexuality. Even after the Supreme Court ruling on IPC 377, the LGBTQIA community is not accepted in the armed forces. I had decided that the first story in my film would be based on this—the story of an army man falling in love and then quitting the army as he could not be honest about his identity and express the basic human feeling of love. I sent an email seeking an NOC from the Ministry of Defence on 16 December 2021. I received an email stating that the NOC was refused on 19 January 2022. I was told on a WhatsApp call that the reason for refusal was that my protagonist was a gay army man.”
His other project, a biopic of the filmmaker Riyad Wadia who made the anthology BOMgay (1996) and lost his life to HIV at the age of 36, has not found any producers yet. Onir says most non-heteronormative, non-cisgender characters in the new OTT age work only as representation and tokenism, and does not align with his experience of being an openly gay filmmaker since he started his career. “It is a good thing that a gay or trans character appear in our stories now, but most of these characters are targeted at acceptance within the larger hetero-normative culture. Unless we ourselves get enough opportunities to feel our stories, there will always be a gap. Personally, I have not found any character from an Indian film or web series that has resonated with me in the last few years, I am unwilling to fit into other people’s baby steps.” Onir says whenever he has approached any OTT platforms with his stories, he has only received very emphatic no’s.
Onir’s voice in the book is not one that grumbles. It is an authentically celebratory voice about his journey as a gay man—vulnerable as well as empowered. It tells us in brisk, conversational prose, who it takes to be oneself in a country in which homosexuality was a punishable offence until a few years ago. His book shows us, through one man’s journey, how storytellers and filmmakers have reached this point, when being gay or bi-sexual or trans is not out of the ordinary—and also why, perhaps, most writers and directors have missed the big picture of the Indian LGBTQI experience while focusing on representation.
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