An edited version of this essay was published in the Hindu’s Frontline Magazine, as part of the Queer Month specials, June 2022

Shelly Chopra’s 2019 film, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To Aisa Laga, starring Sonam Kapoor, Regina Cassandra, Rajkumar Rao, Anil Kapoor, Juhi Chawla and others is, on Wikipedia summaries and considered film reviews, about how a closeted lesbian woman, from a conservative Punjabi family, comes out to them. 

That this project requires the efforts of a puppy dog eyed, love-struck young man, an entire cast of an amateur theatre group and a bit of a meandering foray into a post-marriage adult relationship is telling however. 

90ml, written and directed by Anita Udeep and released also in 2019, stars Oviya, Monisha, Masoom, Shree Gopika, Bommu Lakshmi and others with a cameo by STR. This film also has a track about a lesbian woman who wishes to be with her lover but is worried about what society and people will say. Here too, non queer persons have to hatch conspiracies and plots, and unite the couple. Within this though, there’s a fair bit of fun and humour, mixed identities and confusion. 90ml itself deserves better appreciation and deeper, closer reading of what it puts on screen. But that perhaps is for another day. 

Kattumaram, another 2019 film, directed by Swarnavel Easwaran in his feature debut, also features a lesbian couple, or perhaps a lesbian couple in the making. Set in a coastal fishing hamlet barely recovering from the 2004 Asian Tsunami, Kattumaram tells the story of Ananthi, a teacher in a rural school and Kavita, someone who’s come to the village to escape some past trauma. A tentative friendship and camaraderie becomes love becomes politics as the village’s fury turns on them. 

What all these films have in common is a belief that somehow queer persons cannot make for themselves a life without the support of, or blessings of a non queer person. 

Or that queer love must either be a full on tragedy, or barely concealed farce. 

The first two films in the lockdown-anthology series Paava Kathaigal – ‘Thangam’ and ‘Love Panna Uttranum’, are examples. Sattar in Thangam, directed by Sudha Kongara, is the model of tragedy. She exists in the film as a general punching bag for the entire village. At no point do we know of Sattar’s private joys or moments of calm. In the end, Sattar dies to unite a straight couple. 

On the other hand, Love Panna Uttranum, directed by Vignesh Shivan, a potential lesbian pair is played up — first for pathos and tears, and later shown to be farce. A queer bait. The film perpetrates other crimes, including redeeming an evil father and instigator of caste-crimes while condemning his subordinates and thugs who were – casteist yes, but still following his rules.

The Malayalam film Njan Marykutty, starring Jayasurya and directed by Ranjith Sankar presents to us a slice of the life of Marykutty, a trans woman aspiring to be a police officer. Marykutty faces derision and hate for the most part. But she also gets – if not love, some empathy, some support, some joy. 

Meanwhile, Moothon, directed by Geethu Mohandas found some favourable review as a mainstream Malayalam film which still managed to portray some queer love in a respectful way. However, friends who did see Moothon were less than gushing. As my friend put it, “Was it queer bait, to show the sister of the lead as a perhaps boy for a considerable portion of the film? Is the trans character allowed to be who she is without being deadnamed by the protagonist?”

I am thinking of these films now because I am thinking of this idea of queerness – and because this is pride month (at least when I began writing this) – and its ability to offer models of tenderness and care, love and company, political belief and community action, to take an imperfect world and with it, make something approaching goodness. Queer people, the ones I know and love and are friends with (and if you are a queer person how do you draw a line between friendship and love, between friend and lover?) build for ourselves romance that is deeply rooted in the here and now. And, we build it ourselves. 

However, this survey of films – largely mainstream films, made in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, by directors and producers with a little heft behind them and some kind of popular appeal – tells us that cinema portrays queer persons, trans persons, as little more than plot devices. Vessels into which a director can place their current pet peeve or rehabilitation project. The idea that a queer person can exist on their own, to build or rebuild a life for themselves without it being anything more than a human pursuit, a human right, seems largely missing from our filmmakers. 

Peranbu by director Ram, wrote a romance for the ages. This is a film about a man – a battle-weary and beleaguered father of a disabled child – finding redemption. But it is also about a trans woman who rescues this flawed hero. Anjali Ameer, who plays Meera in the film, has very little screen time. That is immaterial. It’s her strength and love – great love – that redeems Amudhavan and Paappa and saves them from death. A trans woman sex worker played by a trans woman? In a film that advocates for agency for disabled people, trans people, queer people? 

All right, Peranbu was written and made for a perhaps ‘discerning art film critic’ audience. It did release first on the festival circuit before finding takers in theatres. So let’s take the film Motta Siva Ketta Siva, by Raghava Lawrence. Raghava took a brief break from making the nth installment of his Muni/Kanchana franchise to give us this masala blockbuster in which a disabled family – one that is a family built on choice – are the emotional core, and a group of trans women are the hero’s aides and informers. The trans woman is not a prop, not a shoehorned in character for a bit of titillation or an item song, as is usually the case, but an actual living breathing person. 

Let us go back to 90ml. I am a tiny bit partial to it. Women as friends. Women as co-conspirators. Women as simply human beings with likes and dislikes and things they want to do. The film talks a whole lot of feminist politics without once having to underline it for us. And within this, this idea of a young, queer couple pining to be together, separated by family and society and conventions, is said without any pretense that this is revolutionary. For most parts, we don’t realise (unless your gaydar is strong) that the said couple are even queer. We just know that a young woman is unable to spend time with her lover, and the rest of the film’s characters – and by extension us – understand it to be because of religion. 

And so when the twist unfolds for us, we are – I was – doubly happy. 

What Ek Ladki Ko… took a lot of heavy handed fumbling to achieve, 90ml did with ease, almost a magic trick. 

Or, Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s Super Deluxe. Much was made, in the run up to film release, of the trans character Shilpa’s casting. Vijay Sethupathi was to play a trans woman and, we were all told, this was wrong. 

I said so myself. I still say so. Be it Kalidas Jayaram as Sattar in Thangam, Jayasurya as Marykutty, or Vijay Sethupathi as Shilpa, presenting a man as a trans woman perpetuates age old stereotypes of trans women as men in women’s clothing, men playacting at being women. 

However, Super Deluxe gave us a Shilpa who was not a cardboard cutout. Shilpa was a complex, dynamic woman. A difficult woman. One who could perform a bad deed because it helped her in her journey, but repent for it ages later. One who must have faced years of abuse and hate and go through it stoically but crumble because a group of young schoolboys called her names. In Shilpa’s story, we find something approaching the narrative arc of the hero of a Tamil Masala film. 

The masala film – that very Indian genre – is very very giving. It pardons filmmaking mistakes, it doesn’t care much for syntactical perfection or strict adherence to genre norms. The genre, and the audience that grew up with that genre, are more than happy to allow the filmmaker enough slack if at the end of it there’s a film that transports them briefly out of the contexts in which they arrive to view the film.  A filial attachment, a romantic interest, a flawed hero, a powerful villain, a few songs, a few action pieces and bam! film ready. How one plays around with these blocks, what to make of these archetypes is entirely up to the director. 

Which is why perhaps I feel disappointment that our directors and writers, actors and actresses, do not exploit this to give us queer romance and queer lives that do not require the grudgingly given grace of the straight folks.