At the conclusion of Deepa Mehta’s groundbreaking 1996 film Fire, the protagonists of the movie undergo a literal trial by fire as they escape an oppressive, patriarchal household and begin their lives together as women in love with each other. The fire is symbolic of the rocky road that Indian lesbians are forced to travel in a traditional culture that frowns upon homosexuality and continues to employ arranged marriages as a matter of course for its daughters.
For lesbians of Indian descent, whether living in India or in the diasporic South Asian community, finding positive representations of themselves on-screen was once a rare event – before Fire, there were no widely available images of female same-sex love in modern Indian culture. But since that watershed film, other films have emerged that provide a broader picture of what lesbianism means within Indian culture.
For Indian lesbians, the experience of coming out is situated within a dialogue about tradition and modernity, homeland and adopted land, and films from Fire to last year’s Scottish lesbian film, Nina’s Heavenly Delights, grapple with these cultural issues as well as the coming-out tropes that are present in the majority of lesbian films.
Though Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta’s film Fire first premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1996, it was not released in India until November 1998, when India’s Censor Board of Film Certification finally released the film uncut. The film, which is set in New Delhi, tells the story of two sisters in law, Sita (Nandita Das) and Radha (Shabana Azmi), who are trapped in loveless marriages.
As the two women become friends, their relationship develops into a sexual one. Fire, which was the first widely distributed film to depict same-sex love between women in India, was also groundbreaking because the women experience a happy ending.
But director Mehta has always insisted that Sita and Radha’s relationship is not necessarily a lesbian one, but rather a relationship that emerges out of a particular situation. Mehta recently confirmed to AfterEllen.com: “I’ve always said Fire is a film about emotional nurturing and the vacuum that is created in loveless, arranged marriages in India. Which, in the case of Fire, is filled by the love between two sister-in-laws.”
So although Fire undeniably does address love between women, the motivation for their love arises from their unsatisfying heterosexual relationships, and is essentially an indictment of traditional Indian marriage rather than an affirmation of lesbianism.
Director Ligy Pullappally, whose film The Journey (2004) told another story of love between women in India, acknowledged, “Even Fire has – a fabulous film, beautifully done, I’m so happy that it came out in 1996 – but it had that one drawback which was that the lesbianism was a fallback position, because the heterosexual relationship didn’t work out.”
Despite the ultimately problematic motivation for lesbianism in Fire, the film is significant not only because of its pioneering status, but because of the controversy it ignited. Two weeks after it opened, 200 men and women from the conservative Shiv Shena political party stormed the New Empire and Cinemax theaters in Bombay where Fire was playing, claiming that the film was “against Indian tradition.”
This set off a string of reactions that led to counter-protests organized by the Campaign for Lesbian Rights, a coalition of several Indian lesbian organizations.
On Feb. 12, 1999, the Censor Board once again released an uncut version of Fire, and by Feb. 25, both Hindi and English versions of the film reopened in India without additional violence.
Thus, Fire was the catalyst for the organization of lesbian groups in India that had previously operated largely underground. When the next major Indian film to depict lesbianism, Girlfriend, was released in 2004, these groups were already well-organized and were able to protest the film’s extremely stereotypical representation of lesbians.
Unlike Fire, which was directed by an Indian Canadian and was made for a global audience, Girlfriend was a Bollywood film made for distribution in India. In Girlfriend, Tanya (Isha Koppikar) and Sapna (Amrita Arora) are housemates who have been friends since college. Tanya is a hard-working jeweler who moonlights as a street fighter to make ends meet; when she returns from a business trip to discover that Sapna has fallen for a man, Rahul (Ashish Choudhary), she becomes enraged with jealousy and battles Rahul for Sapna’s love.
Tanya essentially becomes the stereotypical, man-hating yet unnaturally mannish lesbian (who becomes increasingly masculine in her dress and appearance throughout the film, even cutting her hair shorter), while Sapna is a femme in distress who must be saved from her slide into homosexuality by the male hero.
These stereotypical elements have been employed in Bollywood films before, albeit in less explicitly lesbian ways. Scholar Gayatri Gopinath wrote in her 2000 Journal of Homosexuality article, “Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema”: “Women with short hair, trousers, and a tough demeanor, have figured quite prominently on the Bollywood screen.
In particular, cross-dressing of both men and women has been a standard comedic and plot device in popular Indian film for decades.”
However, these transgressors of gender and sexuality are quickly silenced. “Masculine women in film are not allowed to exist more than momentarily, and are inevitably feminized in order to be drawn back into heterosexuality,” wrote Gopinath. “Strong women are acceptable only as long as they can still be contained with heterosexuality and properly feminine behavior.”
Like Fire, Girlfriend was protested by conservative groups in India upon its release, but this time, it was also protested by lesbian groups, who objected to its homophobic and stereotypical depiction of lesbianism. Girlfriend‘s negative portrait of lesbianism does reflect, however, the widespread homophobia in India.
Indian-American director Ligy Pullappally was inspired to make The Journey by the tragic story of two South Indian girls who committed suicide after being outed as lesbians in the town where Pullappally was born.
Pullappally recently acknowledged to AfterEllen.com that her film had a definite “activist purpose,” and she recalled that after receiving news of the girls’ deaths, she thought to herself, “there but for the grace of God go I.”
The Journey tells the story of two girls, Kiran (Suhasini V. Nair) and Delilah (Shrruiti Menon), whose friendship develops into romance. Their story is very much a coming-out tale; Kiran discovers her love for her friend while helping a neighbor boy woo Delilah by ghostwriting his letters for her. When Delilah finds out that Kiran is behind the letters, she quickly returns Kiran’s affections. Their families, who eventually realize that their daughters are in love with each other, have mixed reactions, but ultimately the girls do not suffer too many consequences, and the film ends on a positive note.
Pullappally told us that she wanted to avoid the stereotypes about lesbians in films such as Fire and Girlfriend, and instead wanted The Journey to depict a rural experience and a local story, as opposed to an urban one.
“If I had to make some well-founded generalizations,” Pullappally said, “I would say that homosexuality generally [is] frowned upon everywhere, and I would say that there are more opportunities to connect with other members of the gay community in urban areas.” The Journey provided a much-needed positive point of reference for lesbians in rural India.
Other than The Journey and Fire, however, Indian films do not typically portray lesbians in a positive light. For representations of Indian lesbians in a broader and more accepting context, one must turn to films made by and about the Indian diasporic community.
Films such as Touch of Pink and Bend It Like Beckham offer portrayals of gay Indian men, while Chutney Popcorn (1999) and Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006) offer stories about Indian lesbians in the United States and Britain.
Chutney Popcorn, directed by out lesbian filmmaker Nisha Ganatra, focuses on the issues that arise between Punjabi-American lesbian Reena (played by Ganatra), who is living with her girlfriend, Lisa (Crossing Jordan‘s Jill Hennessy), and Reena’s family, who struggles to accept their daughter’s sexual orientation and how it intersects with Indian tradition. Similarly, Nina’s Heavenly Delights, directed by Pratibha Parmar, an out lesbian Indian-British filmmaker who previously chronicled the queer South Asian diasporic experience in the documentary Khush (1991), involves the interplay between Indian tradition and Western, queer identity.
As Pullappally put it: “I find that [in] films in which there is a gay Indian character, the primary issue seems to be that conflict between the parents’ old world ways and the gay offspring’s trying to come to terms with their identity, and at the same time maintain their relationship with their parents.” This dynamic is reflected in nearly all films about immigrants’ coming-out experiences in Western society, including Saving Face (2005) and Red Doors (2006), both films featuring Chinese-American lesbian characters.
The upcoming film When Kiran Met Karen, which is due to begin shooting this spring, incorporates the coming-out theme as well as the conflict between tradition and modernity. The film is about an Indian-American actress, played by Indian-American actress Purva Bedi, who is cast to play a lesbian in a film and discovers that she is falling for her co-star, a Chinese-American lesbian actress.
Last year, the differences between India and the United States in relation to acceptance of lesbianism were thrown into sharp contrast when a Bollywood actress, Perizaad Zorabian, turned down the role of Kiran because of her “own personal inhibitions about playing a lesbian.”
When Purva Bedi accepted the role of Kiran last December, she told AfterEllen.com that “there is not a single actress … living in India … who cares about her career there who could play this part.” She added, “I want to make this movie so that actresses there can start to play those parts and not be so scared of it.”
Bedi explained that Zorabian’s decision to turn down the role is paralleled in the film’s story itself. “There’s a constant doubling: When I’m talking about real life and when I’m talking about the movie,” Bedi said. “So the joke of the movie is that the director [of the film within the film] casts the Chinese woman as a lesbian and actually is able to find a lesbian actress, but when she’s looking for the … Indian woman, she can’t find anyone who’s a lesbian and an actress that’s right for the part — that will maybe admit to [being a lesbian] — so she casts a straight woman.”
Bedi continued: “Of course in real life, that was exactly what the director [Manan Katohora] went through, in that he was not able to find a suitable actress who’s a lesbian who’s South Asian — or who will be open about it. Which goes back to … how much stigma there is in Indian culture with being a lesbian.”
Despite the continuing stigma within Indian culture, there are signs — such as Zorabian’s open acknowledgement of her own homophobia — that things are changing. Since Fire, Mehta said,”Indian society has become far more liberal and open about homosexual/lesbian relationships. I have personally seen articles in mainstream magazines about young same-sex couples and their lives together.”
Pullappally agrees that India is gradually becoming a society that might welcome a mainstream film depicting a positive relationship between lesbians. “India is working its way toward that point very slowly,” she said. “It’s so entrenched in ancient cultural mandates.” However, the progress that has been made in the 11 years since Fire was released show that acceptance is relative.
Though Girlfriend may have been homophobic, there were also public protests about its homophobia. Though a Bollywood actress refused to play a lesbian role, she acknowledged her own homophobia in that decision.
For diasporic South Asian lesbians, the opportunity to see themselves positively reflected in cinema has increased significantly within the last few years, paralleling developments in films about other minorities that increasingly address issues beyond coming-out.
And the fact that lesbianism can be situated within a world beyond mainstream, white society is a positive development indeed.
