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• W4365508602 abstract "ABSTRACTOn 6 September 2018, after decades of queer activism, the Supreme Court of India declared unconstitutional the centuries-old law against sodomy, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Shelly Chopra Dhar’s Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (How I felt when I saw that Girl, 2019) and Hitesh Kewalya’s Shubh Mangal Zyaada Saavdhan (Be Extra Wary of Marriage, 2020) were the first two popular Hindi-language films, on same-sex love and desire, to be released after the scrapping of 377. We note the significance of Ek Ladki and Shubh Mangal to destigmatizing non-normative sexualities as well as the identitarian impulse of these films to name, illuminate, and mainstream queer love. We examine these films as they intervene in the broader field of representation and make complex maneuvers to normalize same-sex love and coax the consent of mainstream audiences. They do so by incorporating queer identity and same-sex love in ways that render it non-threatening to the heteronormative status quo. The intertextual allusions to popular Hindi cinema, however, carry queer transgressive potential as they allow for a claiming of a genealogy of queer desire in Hindi cinema.KEYWORDS: Hindi filmssame-sex lovequeer desireintertextualityShubh Mangal Zyaada Savdhan (Be Extra Wary of Marriage 2020)Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (How I felt when I saw that Girl 2019) Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The Supreme Court majority affirmed that, “The Constitution protects the fluidities of sexual experience. It leaves it to consenting adults to find fulfilment in their relationships, in a diversity of cultures, among plural ways of life and in infinite shades of love and longing” (cited in Vaid 2018).2. “Hatke” is a Hindi word that means “different”/“a little different;” it has been used to refer to multiplex films whose aesthetics and content are different from mainstream cinema.3. Sangita Gopal (2011, 14) defines New Bollywood “the entire world of cinema—industrial practices, financing, exhibition, audience, tie-ins, and of course the films themselves—of the post-liberalization period (1991–present)” in India.4. Lisa Duggan (2002, 179) explains homonormativity as, “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them..”5. Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2003); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires (Durham: Duke UP, 2005); Kanishka Chowdhury, The New India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Ratna Kapur, “The Cultural Politics of Fire,” Economic and Political Weekly 34.21 (1999). The diversity of views on Fire also goes on to show how the realm of queer representation is a rich and contested field where no homogeneity of opinion may be assumed.6. This view presents same-sex sexuality as biologically inherent rather than seeing desire as socially constructed and queerness as a more expansive rejection of cisheteronormative assumptions, expectations and demands. Shannon Webber (2012) refers to this focus on biology within pro-gay discourses as “biological homonormativity” which excludes a range of queer identities and experiences.7. Furthermore, the films also show us the costs exacted by the institutions of heteronormativity and by the policing of gender and sexual boundaries not just on queer but also on straight individuals. Many examples of forbidden love or thwarted desires are provided in both films. In Shubh Mangal, it is revealed that both of Aman’s parents couldn’t marry who they loved and desired due to societal sanctions and familial prohibitions, which then becomes an avenue for them to sympathize with Aman’s love for Kartik. There are other subplots (around the young women Kusum or Goggle) that similarly relate to heteronormative demands: to get married, and to someone from the same caste or religion or class. In Ek Ladki, Sweety’s father has had to bury his desire to become a chef because his mother thinks that is it unnatural for a man to be interested in matters of the kitchen. It is Chatro (played by veteran actor Juhi Chawla)—a food caterer for Sahil’s theatre troupe and an open-minded middle-aged divorced woman—who helps him along in his journey of acceptance. She articulates the pressures of matrimony and motherhood, telling him that she divorced her husband after realizing that she was done with years of putting her own desires aside.8. The expression of female desire and agency is seen as threatening to the cisheteropatriarchal order; and the film barely portrays any touching and absolutely no kissing between the lesbian couple to avoid alienating its audience or inviting the censure of the Censor Board. Thus, “its privileging of lesbian love notwithstanding, it invisibilizes lesbian sex” (Ghosh 2010, 64).9. Read Meheli Sen’s (2010) incisive essay on the revalorization of the Hindu patriarch in post-liberalization Hindi cinema.10. While any discussion of the myriad forms of discrimination faced by queer subjects is muted in both films, the films do not shy away from naming these challenges whether it is homophobic bullying in school, internalized homophobia, familial rejection, punitive disciplinary practices, thoughts of self-harm/suicide.11. Film studies scholarship has commented on the ways in which Muslims (the largest religious minority in India) have especially been variously exoticized, marginalized, demonized, and accommodated in post-Independence Bollywood from the 1950s to the present (Chadha and Kavoori, 2008).12. The film, as one review astutely notes, allows “straight people to pat their backs for their own magnanimity” (Shankar 2019).13. Similarly, the film appropriates an iconic image from the 1990s romantic melodrama, Aashiqui: of a heterosexual couple kissing, with a jacked pulled over their heads. In Shubh Mangal, as the remix of the original Honey Singh pop song, “Gabru,” draws to a close, Aman kisses Kartik openly in public, pushing Aman’s Uncle to throw a jacket to “cover up” (push back into the closet?) the forbidden kiss. This kiss, in the middle of a wedding, continues the work of reimagining romantic love in Hindi films. It is also important here to note how specific industrial practices, such as the existence of the Censor Board in India, impact content. Hitesh Kewalya, the director of Shubh Mangal, addresses this, “We had already written 70 to 80% of the film when the repealment [of Section 377] happened. It’s just that our approach would have been little different had the judgement not been reversed especially when it came to showing the kiss … because without this judgement, it would have been illegal to show it, and the CBFC (Central Board of Film Certification) would have definitely cut the shot” (Sinha 2020).14. This 1989 film features a heterosexual romance of star-crossed lovers who are reunited, through their parents’ help, after being reincarnated. The invocation of the song (and film) is apt as Aman, in the previous scene, has been made to enact a farcical symbolic ceremony, of death and rebirth (into heterosexuality), before being forced into an arranged marriage. However, these same parents also later rally behind their gay son and his partner against the state authorities (the police), as Section 377 is directly referenced in the film.15. In an interview, director of Shubh Mangal, Hitesh Kewalya, discusses his appropriation of Amitabh Bachchan in/for the film, “Homosexuality has existed forever. It’s just that we’ve never looked at it. Now that we’re looking at it, let’s look back, let’s look at all the icons in popular culture and appropriate them for the queer universe. Amitabh Bachchan ascended as the Angry Young Man for the youth and there would have been a queer group who would’ve looked at him as a queer icon. I wanted to look at these icons in a new light. We all look for heroes to emulate. So there was that aspect too. I wanted to appropriate Bachchan’s heroism for the LGBTQ universe. It also makes sense for my parents’ generation—they wouldn’t understand a new-age hero as well as they understand Bachchan” (Sequeira 2020).16. In the remix, a variety of Anglo-American cultural texts that perpetuate heteronormativity are also invoked—nursery rhymes such as Jack and Jill (which the song and film ask us to reimagine and rearticulate as Jack and Johnny, questioning the certitudes around heterosexual inevitability); and Adam and Eve (in the song, in a queering of religious iconography, Kartik and Aman are seen eating the forbidden apple). In addition, these references subtly undo the Orientalist binary or the developmentalist discourse of the progressive West/regressive Rest present in much global LGBTQ discourse.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAnupama AroraAnupama Arora is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Her work has appeared in numerous journals (including South Asian Popular Culture, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Ariel: A Review of International English Literature); and she is co-editor of two anthologies: Bollywood’s New Woman (Rutgers, 2021) and India in the American Imaginary 1780s-1880s (Palgrave 2017).Nikki P. SylviaNikki P. Sylvia is a first-generation college student who graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, in 2022; she hopes to pursue field experience and a Master’s degree in counseling and social work." @default.
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• W4365508602 title "“Just Like Everyone Else:” queer representation in postmillennial bollywood" @default.
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