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Quick Take | Bollywood makes a song and dance about a lesbian romance – at last

  • The country decriminalised gay sex six months ago, but its film industry has only taken hesitant steps in the direction of equality.
  • What does this say about attitudes towards homosexuality, and about Indians themselves?

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India decriminalised gay sex six months ago, but its film industry has only taken hesitant steps in the direction of equality. A still from the film Dostana. Photo: Handout
It takes a little more than an hour of its 121-minute running time for February release Ek Ladki ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (“When I saw a girl, a I felt that way”) to come to the point: this is not a typical boy-meets-girl romance, this is a lesbian love story. In fact, it’s the first time that Bollywood, the second largest film industry in the world and a distinct cultural form, has made a full-fledged film about romance between two women – replete with song-and-dance and well-known stars.
The film comes six months after the Supreme Court decriminalised “sex against the order of nature”, referring to homosexuality, in Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Despite the legal boost, the makers of Ek Ladki seem conscious of their first-mover status, approaching the subject gently and cautiously, which is why it takes so long to articulate the premise. When the protagonist comes out of the closet to her friend, he bursts out laughing and slips down to the floor. In the theatre where I saw the film, there was a echo of nervous laughter around the room.
Bollywood film Ek Ladki ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga is a lesbian love story. Photo: Handout
Bollywood film Ek Ladki ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga is a lesbian love story. Photo: Handout

Perhaps this caution is understandable. In 1998, when the film Fire was released, widely considered to be the first depiction of homosexual relations in a Hindi film, theatres were vandalised in cities and towns across India, including the celebrated cosmopolitan city of Bombay.

The filmmaker had to approach the Supreme Court for reinforced protection for screenings of her film. Fire is more frank than Ek Ladki in depicting physical intimacy between the two female leads. In the film, two sisters-in-law named Radha and Sita, both denied sex by their husbands, find sexual fulfilment with each other. Radha is the name of the partner of Lord Krishna, the hero of the epic Mahabharata, and Sita, the wife of Ramayana protagonist Lord Rama. This may have incensed the easily offended Indian viewer even further.

In 2014, there was a Hindi-English film called Margarita with a Straw, about a young woman with cerebral palsy falling for her blind batch-mate at a New York university. It was not as shy about its content as Ek Ladki, but the arthouse project’s release came a decade and a half after Fire – at a time Section 377 was being debated in the Supreme Court, and the conversation about homosexuality in the country was already a public and political one.

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