The Film “Fire” and Queer Activism in India

KAKALI DAS

In India, according to Vishwa Hindu Parishad “homosexuality is an ‘imported disease’ which needs treatment, by putting a ban on liquor and making moral education mandatory.”

Subramaniam Swamy claims fighting for LGBTQIA+ rights an ‘American game.’

The strongest opposition to decriminalising homosexuality in India was on these grounds of it being ‘against our Indian culture.’ Really?

Kamasutra in the 4^th century A.D. mentions the physical pleasure in male-male unions in vivid detail. 14^th century Bengal folklore tells the story of a sexual relationship between two widows. Bhakti saints in medieval India would effeminise themselves to worship Krishna and Shiva. Scholars point out that while these queer practises might not have been the widely practised norms, they were never derided or looked down upon.

They coexisted side by side for centuries without necessarily being named as such and such. In fact, till the early 1800s, Indian poets like Insha and Rangin were openly writing about male-male and female-female relationships in the same tones as heterosexual relationships.

Homosexuality began to be viewed as a crime against the order of nature only in 1860 when Thomas Macaulay introduced section 377 into the Indian Penal Code of 1860, modelled after the English Buggery Act, 1533 which made homosexuality a punishable offense. Victorian sensibilities were aghast at times like the Kamasutra. In fact, India’s openness towards sex and sexuality ironically became one of the reasons the British classified it as a ‘backward civilisation.’

In response, Indian nationalists asserted the ‘respectability of Indian culture,’ in turn adopting conservative Victorian attitudes towards our own non-heteronormative traditions.

By the 1920s, when the Hindi writer “Ugra” published a short story collection, ‘Chocolate,’ it caused an uproar. Even though the book denounced homosexuality, journalists, writers and reformers criticised the author for writing about homosexual desire, a subject they felt was not to be mentioned. By 1967, Britain passed a law legalising same-sex relations, but the Victorian idea that homosexuality was ‘unnatural’ had become entrenched as an integral part of Indian values.

In 1998, when Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s lesbian love story Fire was released in Indian theatres, it led to large-scale protests by Indian political parties from Bajrang Dal to BJP who attacked theatres and burnt effigies of the actors, accusing the film of being alien to Indian tradition and culture. Fire is an absolutely incredible film; what’s interesting is the way it was released – like a normal mainstream film.

There were posters across the city, where two women were occupying the diegetic space that were meant for the heterosexual couple, and that the posters were out there in the open, I think was incredible.

Besides, the film was passed without any cuts by the censor Board, and ran peacefully for 2 weeks. Later, there were these groups which started vandalising the halls, attacking it. Thereafter, the film was framed as an insult to marriage, Hinduism etc., and all hell broke loose.

There was a demand, rather an unprecedented demand to send the film back for a censor certificate, and admirably the censor board stood its ground and sent it back without any editing. But LGBTQIA+ activists fought back against these negative perceptions. They held counter-protests during the release of Fire.

It erupted the first public debate, with queer groups and people who stood for freedom of speech and expression participating in it.

This coming together of these different forces, I think, heralded an era for queer activism in India. Furthermore, Gayatri Gopinath in her book Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures penned beautifully how Fire, actually, allowed for a slide between the homosocial and homosexual relationships.

The women, in the film, were engaged in ordinary, routine household chores, like cooking, hanging clothes out to dry, which somehow became erotic, thereby inviting the viewers to observe every other film of that genre with the same sense of eroticism. Moreover, the way both Hema Malini and Parveen Babi disappeared behind a feather in a beautiful song in Kamal Amrohi’s Razia Sultan (1983), that, to my mind, was the first homosexual scene on a mainstream film.

Of course, there were talks about it for years, but the confirmation came after the release of Hema Malini’s authorised biography Beyond the Dream Girl, where Kamal Amrohi’s son talked about how his father wanted to portray the character of Hema Malini as a bisexual in the film, and that scene, particularly, was meant to convey that idea. The awareness of homosexuality in the field of Indian cinema was brought in by Fire, and it is for that very reason, Fire is a significant film.

It was the legal and social work of the activists over the years that highlighted our rich history of queer traditions, and uniquely Indian experiences of queerness. This activism combined with the courage of prominent LGBTQ+ individuals paved the way for the long legal battle that led to the Supreme Court finally decriminalising homosexuality in 2018.

We, none the less, have miles to tread. There are still fewer people in India who are broadly supportive of homosexuality. The country’s ruling party maintained a pin-drop silence on the landmark 2018 judgement by the Supreme Court. Forced conversion therapy by families is still a common practice in many parts of India.

But queer activism is taking a range of different forms, speaking through cinema, politics, music, sports and many different mediums to challenge the heteronormative idea of what constitutes Indian ‘culture.’ Queerness is not against Indian culture, it’s at the very core of it.

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