Earlier this month in India, the opening of the Hindi film Girlfriend, which contains a brief erotic scene between two women, was marred by violent protests, as critics, conservative Hindus, and lesbian Hindus alike decried the film. But the movie is still playing, and another lesbian-themed Bollywood film is in the works. Is Bollywood finally ready to deal with lesbianism?

Girlfriend, directed by Karan Razdan, is a sort-of Hindi version of Single White Female in which a closeted lesbian (Isha Koppikar) turns into a psycho stalker when her best friend Sapna (Amrita Arora) starts dating a guy. Conservative Hindus protest both the inclusion of a love scene between the women and the lesbian theme in general. "This film is evil and it will be stopped," said Jai Bhagwan Goel, the Delhi chief of Hindu conservative group Shiv Sena. "It pollutes our society and moral culture." Only a few hundred people protested, but their actions (tearing posters down, breaking windows, and even ingesting poison) were enough to shut down future screenings of the films in many Indian cities.

Lesbian Hindus and progressive Hindu women's organizations protest the film as well, calling it "pornographic" and "highly regressive" (at the same time finding it "disconcerting to be on the same side as these right wing organizations," as women's activist Prabha Nagaraja told the India Times). Besides lesbians as psycho-killers, Girlfriend also promotes stereotypes of lesbians as victims of sexual abuse and as effeminate caricatures of men, according to lesbian and women's groups in India. ‘‘Girlfriend follows the 1940s-50s Hollywood formula where films featured the murderous lesbian," Ruth Vanita, co-author of Same Sex Love in India, told ExpressIndia.com. "This is a harmful film," she asserts, but adds "it’s cinematically of such poor quality, it’s so boring, that I don’t think it’s even worth a protest.’’

There is another lesbian-themed Bollywood flick in the works called Men Not Allowed which is likely to provoke similar responses when it hits theaters in India next year. Directed by Shrey Shrivastav, the film tells the story of two women (played by Payal Rohatgi and Monica Castelino) whose past traumatic experiences with men cause them to form a sexual relationship with each other, until one of the women falls for a guy and her girlfriend goes ballistic and seeks revenge.

The actresses themselves express mixed feelings towards their roles. Koppikar tells the India Times that she was initially a little apprehensive about playing the lesbian role in Girlfriend "since I am a normal girl without any lesbian tendencies," but later asserts "there's nothing wrong in being a lesbian. It's the way people are." Rohatgi from Men Not Allowed is more disapproving, telling India Times, "I don't think [lesbianism] is natural, but I wanted to experiment with this topic and get into the mind frame of a woman who falls for another woman."

At first glance, Girlfriend and No Men Allowed's lesbian content evokes similarities to the 1996 film Fire, as does Girlfriend's violent reception in India--but that's about all they have in common with the pioneer film. Fire was written and directed by a woman (Deepa Mehta), and portrayed lesbianism in both a sensitive and compassionate manner, even if it was ultimately more about two women trying to escape the narrow confines of tradition than embracing same-sex love. Girlfriend and Men Not Allowed, on the other hand, are written and directed by straight men and reduce lesbianism to a rejection of men while exploiting it for shock value.

While the content of these films is clearly negative and stereotypical, it wasn't too long ago that the same could be said of most lesbian characters and storylines in Hollywood. In order for India to work through these stereotypes and finally provide a positive portrayal of lesbianism someday, the subject has to first become part of the national conversation in India--just as the protests in the U.S. at the premiere of Basic Instinct in 1992 forced a national discussion in America about the harmful stereotypes of lesbian and bisexual women that Hollywood routinely reinforced.

Films like Girlfriend speed that process along, and despite the violence, some progress is already evident: all screenings of Fire in India were immediately canceled when violence broke out in 1996, but many theaters in India continue to screen Girlfriend under police protection, and the remaining screenings are selling out (although many patrons were most likely motivated by the controversy).

And while it has taken eight years since the debut of Fire for another Bollywood film to broach the taboo subject of lesbianism, it will only be another year or so until No Men Allowed debuts, and another one is likely to come along within a few years of that--until eventually, non-psycho-killer lesbians in India will finally see reflections of themselves on-screen, too.