The politics of cinematic visibility

Popular Hindi cinema is pervasively heterosexual and heterosexist. ‘Queer’ critics like Gayatri Gopinath and Raj Rao in an anthology like Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, Shohini Ghosh in an anthology like The Phobic and the Erotic or Queering India or Ruth Vanita in her collection Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile offer what they see as a ‘queering’ of Hindi cinema’s heterosexuality. 

This work relies too heavily on an imagined malleability of the Hindi filmic text and use extra-filmic (based on interventionist and imagined same-sex spectatorship which projects same-sex desire onto the heterosexual scene) analysis to read the Hindi film which are not readings against the grain but ones based on a lazy identitarian set of identifications.

More recently, of course, there have been a slew of films from Masti to Kya Cool Hai Hum, from Kal Ho Na Ho to the truly reprehensible Dostana which apparently mark the visibilisation of the homosexual subject.  While certain sections of what fancifully calls itself the LGBT and queer “movements” in India have heralded this as a historic turning point, one needs to be more sceptical of such claims, especially given the texture and nature of these so-called gay representations.

Ranging from the comic and caricaturedly homophobic (Masti, Kya Cool Hai Hum) to the pathologised and the virulently homophobic (Girlfriend and Ghaav) from the sensationalist and pseudo-cool foil (Fashion, Page 3, Metro) to the sensationalist subplot (I Am), representations of the homosexual are classic commodified appropriations of the ‘cool,’ symptomatic of the neoliberal marketplace of desires and do offer no real engagement with the subjectivities of same-sex subjects.

These characterisations are both spectacular and spectral. This is no more evident than in the Dostana where though the pivot of the film is the staging of the two heterosexual heroes as a homosexual couple, actual homosexuality is simply not the concern of the film and is subordinated to the heterosexual plot gone wrong, though homosexuality haunts the film spectrally. Indeed, the film can be read as a cautionary tale for heterosexuals not to mess with the homosexual for the result is sure to be disaster.

We even had what was billed as a full-fledged gay film, perhaps the century’s worst film yet Dunno Y… Na Jaane Kyon? which thankfully sank without a trace. With two cookie cutter, plastic-bodied metrosexual guys ‘boldly’ playing a gay couple in the larger context of a heterosexual framing, it was too embarrassing for even the pathetic ‘queer movement’ which usually laps up even the scraps thrown at them in terms of representation.

When will the ‘queer movement’ learn not to bask in any sort of representation, however hideous, or plead for an inclusiveness that they foolishly believe would solve the problem. We need to ask the more fundamental question of what would the homosexual Hindi filmic image look like?

This is not just a matter of having a same-sex couple in the lead roles. We have had that in Fire and My Brother Nikhil and Dunno Y and we know that it does not automatically lead to a dislocation of heterosexism or the general Hindi film image regime. It merely reads same-sex desire in heterosexual terms (Fire) or out of the narrative altogether, (displaced as it is onto the figural representation of a disease, HIV/AIDS in My Brother Nikhil a la Philadelphia or onto politics as in the hijra from Welcome to Sajjanpur). Even frontal negotiations of same-sex subjectivity as in the figure gazing into the camera and speaking of gay subjectivity of Rules: Pyar Ka Superhit Formula seem contrived.

The ‘queerest’ stuff in Hindi cinema is coming from straight actors who are breaking the mould of hegemonic masculinity in Hindi cinema. Purab Kohli’s camp (and clearly borrowing from the gay) stunning performance of Gloria Gaynor’s gay anthem ‘I Will Survive’ in the film Rock On, his clearly homoerotic and deep attachment with his buddy played by Luke Kenny in the film (he does get especially maudlin and concerned about him when he is drunk but his warmth for him is uninhibitedly expressed even otherwise), and his generally pliant and deeply reassured masculinity (Kohli also plays the figure of Nikhil’s lover in My Brother Nikhil with equally disarming un-selfconscioueness); Pratiek Patil ‘s playing of the heroine’s brother in Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na); Abhay Deol before the bathroom mirror in Manorama Six Feet Under.

Abhay’s character is narcissistically preening himself before the mirror, half-naked, examining his nostril hair and his sagging chest. There was a generosity of image in that scene where the male performer was not just being unselfconsciously and non-spectacularly naked (no shirtless Salman), but showing the production of a soft masculine image: vulnerable, embarrassing in its narcissism, but also subjective, not in a depth-model way but keeping in line with its film-noir tone of stylised subjective isolation. Holding on to that image, we wait for Hindi cinema’s gay equivalent of it.