If you're a visitor to Mumbai, a walk down Marine Drive can bring you head to head with a few surprising behaviour patterns. The very first thing you spot is a male 'couple' walking past, hand in hand, oblivious to censure.
It is a typical sight, even if India is a rustic known to be conservative and cloistered, especially in relation to matters related to gay sexuality. So all this frequent hand-holding can sometimes make it seem that our social prejudices can have been over-stated.
Masculine Affinity In reality, these homo-social patterns are rife within the Indian subcontinent, and indeed, across Asia. At its most harmless form, it allows expression to the affinity that men share, especially in cultures where there's a measure of segregation between the sexes.
However, gay men sometimes camouflage romantic feelings with this very public licence to be bound on the hip, so that you could say, with their paramour, without anyone so much as batting an eyelid.
It isn't a stretch of imagination, therefore, that there may sometimes be a lot more than meets the attention to seemingly casual, but tactile, friendships.
Gay Audiences This is the parallel narrative that makes the sub-genre of the so-called 'buddy film' in Indian cinema so compelling for gay audiences. From Dosti to Sholay, these films provided a gay subtext that overpowered everything else on screen - a subtext that, although almost snatched from the proceedings, had become the inexorable parables for our lives.
What we were resulted in believe was that being embroiled in a strong self-sacrificing friendship generally is a viable stand-in for a love match-a tantalising prospect given how the closet manifests itself in India. The stray, mushy line or an adoring look or two, blown up on celluloid, suddenly acquired reserves of hidden meaning.
Romantic Love For instance, in Dosti, director Satyen Bose invests the friendship between two young men with as much tenderness, empathy, and happiness as romantic love.
The film resonates for gay audiences at many levels - from the alienation felt by the 2 disabled men (one is blind, the opposite a cripple) acting as a cipher for homosexual repression, to instances of love physically demonstrated, to the opposite hospice wherein they take refuge, that's replete with androgynous dancers and ladies wrestlers (which, for all purposes, generally is a gay ghetto).
Fantasy Stuff Whether it was Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan, newly minted gay icons of the '90s, getting all hot, sticky and wet doing a suggestive bump 'n' grind routine to the title track in Main Khiladi Tu Anari, or the lads in Saathi, who spend their time eager for each other and expressing their ostensibly brotherly feelings with essentially the most ludicrously poetic dialogue between two men ever, we lapped all of it up, almost believing whatever it was we were projecting upon the screen. After all, wish-fulfillment is the stuff of fantasies.
Male Bonding When Vishal Bhardwaj's Kaminey was released in 2009, the film's central relationship between petty swindlers Charlie (Shahid Kapoor) and Mikhail (Chandan Roy Sanyal) had caused much discuss it being essentially a 'gay film'.
In the film, as Charlie and Mikhail grow up together, they develop a kinship that plays out rather combustibly on screen. Once they greet each other, it's with whoops and kisses, head-butts and cuddles.
When Charlie chances upon his ticket to the massive time-a stash of high-grade cocaine-and breaks the inside track to Mikhail, then, after a skirmish involving fists and shoves, they wrestle at the floor in additional than genial fashion, as Mikhail transgresses Charlie's physical space.
Charlie seems awkward and guiltily acutely aware of the intimacy but doesn't pull away, as he revels in consorting with the individual he considers his soulmate, even if he'd probably never articulate it as such, even to himself.
This results in the film's only big production number Dhan te naan, where we're spared pole-dancing item girls and costume changes, but are instead treated to a party of male bonding.
If one were to see the unique video that was produced for Dhan te naan (for a TV special), replete with virile young men whose macho posturing finds expression in a chain of deftly executed pelvic thrusts timed to pistol shots, you'd be forgiven for believing that this was always intended to be a gay anthem that derives much of its energy from pulsating homoerotic overtones.
Forceful Return This year, the buddy film returned with a vengeance. Screened eventually month's Mumbai Film Festival, Valley of Saints is a languorously beautiful film on Kashmir. It links the survivalist zeal that continues to be a great deal alive in the valley, with Srinagar's lake culture.
Even when curfew has crippled life within the town, the Dal Lake teems with life and vitality, its denizens living out the confounding daily mysteries of an uncertain life. The filmmaker, Musa Syeed, spent much time in Kashmir, reconnecting together with his roots.
His father was Kashmiri but he had never been there. His host was the boatman Gulzar Bhat. They became close friends, had intense conversations, shared meals, and slept under the similar mosquito net.
Some of those homo-social patterns are faithfully reproduced within the film in its portrayal of a friendship between two men. When curfew was imposed within the valley in the course of the making of the film, the filmmakers needed to forgo much in their crew and kit.
Which is why the limpid-eyed Bhat needed to step in as lead actor. Bhat is gloriously unaffected in what's his first acting role. Another first-time actor, Afzal Sofi, plays his friend, and the film tenderly observes the yin and yang dynamic between the 2 men.
It is not any wonder that wherever it was screened, the film resonated closely with gay audiences, for whom, if the spectre of societal constraints were to be lifted, perhaps these men, so incandescently guaranteed to one another, could hunt down another destiny.
This reading isn't an intended one, and the director points this out when the question comes up in umpteen Q&As.
Yet, sometimes, there's a great impasse between what a filmmaker intends and what's ultimately taken home from a viewing, especially by an audience as hungry for representation as us, always desperate to interpret what we see with what we know.
Unkind stereotypes Where Valley of Saints was engaging and lyrical, Karan Johar's Student of the Year came as an entire contrast, chock-filled because it is with probably the most drippy gay subtext.
Johar supplies us with two very attractive young actors, bronzed to perfection, gift-wrapped in various stages of undress, whilst the film plays out as a love-hate romance between the 2 (Siddharth Malhotra and Varun Dhawan), but with the standard disclaimers.
When they reach to caress each other, they ought to first announce, 'I'm not gay, ok?' What was subtle and unsaid within the Kashmiri film, becomes explicit yet unstated in Student of the Year.
The pink demographic that Johar has cultivated over years of candy floss and six-hanky weepies, shouldn't have balked on the sight of such a lot eye-candy if he had stopped at that. Instead, desperate to create a counterbalance to the unfulfilled romance between straight dudes, he gives us the unfulfilled lifetime of a gay man, within the person of a flamboyant Rishi Kapoor because the school's principal.
Kapoor tones down the effeminacy (always a sore point for gay people desperate to be represented in 'regular' ways), and finally ends up suitably endearing, however the self-defeating message is apparent. Another student (played by Kayoze Irani) outs himself in a climactic scene and announces people like them finally end up alone-a death-wish that Kapoor readily embraces, and is promptly hospitalised.
Whatever the merits of Kapoor's performance, to categorise the role as an affirmative portrayal could be incorrect. And to have the baton pass directly to another loser-type (Irani) wallowing in self-pity, is an example of the double-edged influence wielded by the persona of Johar himself.
Nobody cares if he really is gay (most of the people appear to have made their minds up about it already) but through his films, and on his chat show, he offers enough clues of his own leanings which will sometimes be immensely progressive - an international wherein differences dissolve and coalesce right into a beautiful wholeness.
But he also plays on unkind stereotypes that reflect the type of self-loathing that such a lot of gay men are afflicted with, and that such a lot of find abhorrent.
As we grow increasingly wary of subtext, the buddy film was found out.
'Our' cinema had turned out to be the albatross around our necks that inhibited us from venturing into untested waters as gay men who wanted greater than just the speculation of another man as a heroic counterpart; but men within the flesh, who may well be losers or slimeballs; men who were the objects of our carnal desire and one of those adoration that wasn't quite the stuff of epic films; men who gave us love-bites and nothing else besides; things that we hadn't quite seen on celluloid.
The buddy films and our unflinching devotion to them became slowly anachronistic as we learned, with none help from popular culture, that love needed no surrogates. Gestures were more important than nuance and that stories of homosexual love needed not be seen as merely fine print, to be read only between the lines. The flicks haven't begun to catch up.
When Kaminey ends, we see Charlie naming his bookie-counter Mikhail & Co., after his deceased 'beau'. Although he has now acquired a trophy girlfriend with the anglicised name, a marker for the trimmings that good fortune brings you, his life force still stems from this other most vital relationship, and gay audiences wonder why this type of love must be called by another name.
In the sector of formula Hindi films, where once a triangle of 2 women and a person meant that one woman must take a bullet to her heart, maybe we've reached some degree where there will also be two men, but one among them will die.
Ultimately, it isn't important that these men will have been straight or gay or of unstated sexual preference. By flirting with something that they didn't fully comprehend, by allowing themselves a while in another dimension, they have got enriched their very own lives and ours.
Courtesy: Mid-Day.com
