On the Making of Bombay Longing: Queer Activism in Art and Cinema - Georgina Maddox

Forthcoming Art and Activism in India - Tulika Books, New Delhi Edited by Shivaji K Panikkar and Deeptha Achar

"…That visibility which makes us most vulnerable…is also the strength of our greatest strength" Audre Lorde, coloured American poet, writer and activist.I attempt, in this paper, to think through and situate some of the issues and questions that confronted me when I made, with Shalini Kantaya, the film Bombay Longing.[1] This paper is not shaped as a systematic and linear exposition of a well-worked out argument; rather, it carries marks of the fragmentary nature and episodic structure of the film itself. On one hand, I seek, in this paper, to locate the film in the arena of queer activism, I draw on concepts such as ‘outing’ and ‘closet’, ‘mainstream’ and ‘minority’, ‘self’ and ‘other’ to articulate the manner in which the logic of the film is implicated in the context of queer thought, queer issues. On the other hand, my paper seeks to reflect upon the implications of the entry of queer activism at the site of art. What happens to art when it becomes activist?
The film is a three minute DV (digital video) presentation that was jointly directed by the two of us. The film thematizes queer identity: Bombay Longing dovetails between the personal and public in a manner that most art and often, much of literature does. To say that it occupies a political space would in that sense, not be incorrect although its stance is more understated. Put simply, it is not openly propagandist in making a statement about queer identity in a metropolis like Mumbai, but rather, allows the viewer to decode the tensions, possibilities and contradictions of such a subject position from the three personal narratives strung together.
The central protagonist, the ‘artist’ herself, carries the narrative through public and private spaces negotiated by her, addressing what it means to travel these spaces as a queer person in a society which is largely heterosexist. Making visible her otherwise invisible identity she passes by Worli sea face in a taxi, looking at heterosexual couples who openly express their love and desire for each other sitting by the sea while a voiceover reminisces about her relationship with her lover, a woman, and how their expression of love was confined to furtive encounters within the heavily guarded world of the closeted queer. Traveling by the local train in a ladies compartment, she experiences a sense of other-ness as her fellow commuters question her gender and inadvertently her sexuality due to her short hair and slightly androgynous features. Clearly these passengers, who fit conventional description of what a woman should look like, see her as other and create barriers within spaces marked as female. Their open gazes question whether these spaces should be made accessible to her.
The last half of the film delves into the personal space of home and friends, where the protagonist revels in the company of women who like her, question compulsory heterosexuality and lead lives that border on the ‘alternative’. They share conversation, food and a homoerotic space that is fraught with playful sexual energy. The film ends on that positive note, however, none of the issues that are raised during the first two halves are really resolved. The film hinges on the recognition that there are no neat solutions that can be provided; the process of addressing these issues is one of continuous negotiation on roads as yet uncharted. At another level, the film engages with the implications and politics of the processes of outing. The outing of ones’ self and re-positioning of one’s identity that occurs on a day to day level and the negotiations of these spaces is a lived reality for the protagonist: at this juncture art becomes an excerpt of that reality. The autobiographical mode, suggested by the conflation of the ‘artist’ with the ‘actor’, problematizes the boundaries between ‘art' and the representation of experiential reality.
Though our film concentrates on identity through queerness, Kantaya, a full time documentary film-maker who practices in New York, Brooklyn and San Fransico, was also concerned to explore her Asian-ness, through choice of certain visuals that for her typified the city, in contrast to the predominant white culture that she encountered in the USA. These visuals, like a Bombay bumper sticker on the taxi, the garland of marigolds in the first sequence, the luscious mangos in the third sequence are an index of Kantaya’s attempt to reaffirm her own identity in and through Indian diaspora. In an important way, I found that this attempt to reclaim Indian-ness significant: with my mixed origin of Indian-Filipino, Irish, Dutch and Portuguese ancestry, my ethnically marked presence in the film textures the representation of the queer protagonist. If one were to look at the second sequence in the train, the film touches upon another aspect of otherness: that of the issue of class and ethnicity. Not only do I come across as upper class and queer; with my visibly mixed lineage I appear to most as someone from the North East, a space that has consistently been designated as marginal to the way India has been imagined.
The question of Eastern descent is not without consequence; it carries further demarcations of ‘difference’, a doubled otherness centered on racial identity. Though the city of Mumbai is known to be the melting pot for multiple ethnicities, under the thin foil of this popular belief, are the sharply delineated lakshman rekhas of class and ethnicity. North-Easterners usually travel in groups and on the rare occasion when they are found alone, they usually keep to themselves. This is because they anticipate hostility from the ‘mainstream’. With the rise of the Maratha brigade’s (VHP and Shiv Sena’s) ‘Me Mumbaikar’ drive that seeks to narrowly define Mumbaikar as Maharashtrian and Indian as an Aryan Hindu monolithic culture, there have been concerted efforts to marginalize and keep out elements that are un-Indian.[2] Cloaked in the garb of nationalism, these campaigns have promoted racial discrimination as a popular sentiment. Although the campaign has become less strident now that the BJP is not in power, the recent incident of Leichichon Shazia a Manipuri girl who was hacked to death in broad daylight at the Gateway of Indian while 50 bystanders passively watched, is an index of the apathy and indifference towards those from a minority community. Bombay Longing, through the ethnically marked body of the protagonist alludes to this racial minority who are navigating spaces in a city of commerce where, there is an active arm of governance that makes it part of their mission statement to keep communities, whether marked by religion or race to the margins.
Filmed in the second class compartment the protagonist encounters working class women who may look upon this urban, eastern, androgynous ‘woman’ as someone very different from them. There is a moment of negotiation and dialogue where nervous laughter masks this deeper undercurrent, of other-ness that is experienced by both the protagonist and her fellow travelers. The protagonist, coming from her racially different, upper middle class background is unable to bridge this gap: slipping into anonymity is a much easier option. In a sense, it appears that the film imply that it is easy to lose one self in the crowd and bustle in a big city, it is easy to bury identity and chose a more invisible existence. Yet it also suggests that such invisibility is indeed fragile; that one can be invisible only till the next moment of detection.
This is, however, not to say that androgynous, or queer women do not come from working class Maharashtrian backgrounds and that they don’t face being isolated in this so-called all woman’s space. To illustrate, I quote a few lines from Sunita’s poem Local Katha 1 ‘’. Sunita is a feminist activist who is also part of the queer movement and writes both in Marathi and Hindi.
….Naigaon station arrived, the train stopped, a crowd got in and she entered last.
All the women inside the compartment had their eyes on her. She had a smart boy-cut, lavender T shirt, black pant and a small purse in her hand. I too kept looking at her.
With a confident air, she was coming toward me, looking for a place to sit. Everybody was shuffling to make place for her.
She glanced around and tip-toed toward me.
I didn’t even come to know when I made place for her.
When she sat next to me I seemed to start to fly.
You could say that we exchanged smiles… [Translation mine][3]
In talking about being different and about finding someone who reflects a similar desire, this poem helps to validate my point about same sex love cutting though class, caste and culture.
But is this art? Can art be activist?
Issues often rise when activist art enters a bourgeois space like a gallery. It is in this space and system that art becomes a commodity to be bought and consumed. Most art that is shown in a gallery space is for commercial purposes. The work displayed bears a known signature and usually possess a certain amount of status, prestige and value and is bought for a high price.
With installations, video art and arte povera the emphasis is not on sales. The project is usually funded[4] and the raison de etre for the work of art is to communicate an idea and not to be consumed for pleasure. Many painters negotiate a cusp where their art has an activist content, but also work in the agenda of sales and aesthetic pleasure. The most empowering factor about video art is that a sale is usually not an agenda.
The work of art then alters the gallery space where the primary concern is not to view and possess but to view and create debate. In that sense Bombay Longing, and other video art that was show along with it the first showing at Gallery Chemould in 2001, transformed the space of the gallery. When I made Bombay Longing it was a personal journey, a cathartic cleansing to verbalize and make visible the kind of pain and alienation I felt when my lover left me for a man. It however took on the dimension of a public outing once it entered the gallery space and was available to people who did not know I was queer. The act of showing this film then became an act of empowerment where I was telling my own story on my own terms.
To say that Bombay Longing takes an activist stand throws up a whole lot of issues, pertaining to the very nomenclature of this term. I would like to address the two terms ‘art’ and ‘activism’ through a quote by Audre Lorde:
I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, "Why don't they?" And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably toward change. So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can't say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art's sake doesn't really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.[5]
I believe that Bombay Longing has to be understood in the context of Lorde’s setting up of the question of social protest; I think of it as an activist film that gestures at the conviction that “what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life.” Though one recognizes the political validity of the dictum ‘art for art’s sake’ in other contexts and milieus, and also contemporary theoretical initiatives that read socio-political intentions in art work that is abstract or non-narrative, this video and the subsequent works that I discuss briefly, are explicitly political and take an activist stand.
These themes are clearly discernable in the work of an artist who has worked on queer themes; Tejal Shah has been working in video art for over the last five years. One is made aware of her stand is very early; her practice has been defined by her choice to politicize her art. The first tentative video work, a three-minute film, shot in a subway deals with the kind of suffocation and invisibilization that Shah was dealing with at the time.[6] Her other work, more minimalist in nature, is a hazy image of the Chicago skyline, a view from her flat where she was staying during her training as a photographer. Shah recorded her phone conversations with her mother, who she had recently come out to. Here she addresses the separation and loss she experiences due to living away from home, while acknowledging that this process was inevitable for her to realize her identity and establish her independent life.[7] Shah's latest video work, Trans- ,[8] is a bolder step in this direction, in some ways it represents a break away from the more subtle and also personal work that she was doing prior to this.
Trans- jumps over the gender line, turning over preconceived notions of what is masculine or feminine. Shah made Trans-, a video work with Brazilian artist Marco Paulo Rolla, who she met at the performance artist residency at KHOJ (Delhi) in November-December 2004. The work had been selected at the show Present for Future, a young artists show at National Gallery of Modern Art. This was the films’ first screening at a public gallery. It is interesting to note that the piece did not evoke any kind of negative reaction and the moral police, who are known to censor everything pertaining to alternative gender and sexuality, did not make their customary appearance at the gallery.[9] Shah explains the genesis of her piece: "Living and interacting with Marco I ended up talking about the body as a site for performance and the projection of the self. We found we had a common interest to explore gender issues through this medium." Shah then shot the 12 minute piece on DV over a period of 4 weeks with Rolla. It was admittedly difficult. "Growing a fake beard, while Marco, a ‘biological’ man (in the adjacent screen) was growing his ‘real’ one, was quite a challenge,” says Shah who used glue and fake hair to construct her beard. After the growing, came the shave, where both Shah and her fellow artist pull the razor through their fuzz and slap on after-shave, once the shave is done. Shah's gamin looks are so deceptive, that if one were not to know the artist as a woman it would be difficult to discern who the ‘real’ man is. This is a question that she intentionally throws at the viewer. In the next sequence, Shah starts putting on make-up as does Rolla in the adjacent screen. The transformation is quite startling. Shah despite her short hair, suddenly becomes ‘feminine’, with pouting red lips and a come hither look in her eye-shadowed eyes. While her fellow artist resembles the pop start David Bowie, he doesn't pass as a woman. “For us both acts are drag. The transformation is to underline how simple external things like hair and make up, change how we're perceived and reacted to,” says Shah. The important thing to note is that while Shah is looking in the mirror there is a big audience in the gallery looking at her.



Issues of censorship:
While Shah’s work was showcased in the same gallery, the NGMA, where the late artist Bhupen Khakhar had his retrospective and did not encounter any censorship or controversy, this was not the case with Khakhar. Two years after his death, a tribute to artist Bhupen Khakhar was held at Gallery Chemould. It is perhaps pertinent to recall at this point, how the retrospective of Khakhar held in Spain a year before his demise was due to come to India. This was a retrospective that the artist more than deserved, on account of being one of India’s senior avant grade painters and not just because he was a queer artist claiming mainstream spaces. In spite of his stature in modern Indian painting, Khakhar did not escape certain invisible censorship guidelines. The Khakhar retrospective exhibition in 2003 was very well presented and encompassed works from the 1970s to the late 2000 sketch books, yet, it was considered difficult to exhibit the more overt works which addressed Khakhar’s sexuality. It is important to note that Khakhar's show had some of the explicitly homosexual works excluded from the show. Others, though not as provocative as these works, yet openly homosexual, were hidden away in some secluded corner of the gallery.
On one hand, Khakhar’s place in modern art of India was uncontested: “While Bhupen was very well known in art circles abroad be it Madrid or Germany, it was at home that he wanted to have his last retrospective,'' said Usha Mirchandani, who co-curated the show that was held at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in November. Nevertheless, even his stature in modern Indian art could not protect him from an invisible self-appointed censorship that governs gallery and museum space: Dr Saryu Doshi, honorary director of the NGMA has argued that “We wanted the show to go off without a hitch and by not showing his more explicit work the exhibition was open to all viewers, including children.” Khakhar's conscious decision to make his sexuality the subject of many of his works after the 1980s is often seen as avant garde and cutting edge. His position as India's first, out gay painter is seen as historically path breaking. Yet such important works like ‘You Can't Please All’, and ‘Two Men in Banaras’, just couldn't feature in a show as important as this one. The point I am trying to make here is that while art institutes like the NGMA are opening up to the idea of showcasing art which has an intentionally homosexual content, they are unable to go the whole way since, on the one hand, civil-social spaces of, for example, culture and education, operate with a hetero-patriarchal norm, and this norm is reflected in the decree of the State and the law that it inappropriate and immoral and.
Filmmaker Shridhar’s 40 minute film Gulabi Aaina is another example of censorship in the context of homosexuality. Its flamboyant depiction of two drag queens (‘kothis’ – Bibbo and Shabbo) living their middle class lives in urban India was enough to merit the Censor Board’s refusal to allow public screening. “It is of great concern that the Censor Board has so far blocked public screening of Gulabi Aaina. The film has already been widely screened and appreciated in the international film circuit. Efforts are on to persuade the Censor Board to repeal its original decision. This is indeed a good film to screen at health, sexuality and human rights workshops as well as educational courses.” writes Deepti Priya Mehrotra of Human Scape.[10] Shah’s other film, Chingari Chumma which is an explicit mutual fantasy that involves S&M, has, of course, never been shown in any public space in India. The artist has not even attempted to show it for she certainly anticipates hostile repercussions that it would cause, both on her private life and in the public space of the gallery.
However, we do need to recognize that one has come a long way from the time when Khakhar himself was not able to paint about his homosexuality and Amrita Sher Gil's letters to her female lover Marie Louise Channacy were destroyed. Galleries are slowly opening up to showing art that challenges mainstream norms on gender and sexuality.This opening up of gallery spaces is useful since it is easier to communicate ideas about alternative sexualities since the artist talks to a smaller audience and unless one is as mainstream as M F Hussain, moral police tend not to take notice.
Mainstream Cinema Censorship and the Appropriation of the Queer Voice:
Deepa Mehta’s 1988 film Fire was the first in the mainstream film to bring same sex love between two women on celluloid in the Indian context. Albeit the very premise of the film (that women turn to each other only when rejected by the men in their lives) was one that perpetuated a stereotype, it was a crucial event. The naming of actresses Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das as Sita and Radha raked up the ire of the Right Wing Sena; the queer community rose up to protest its subsequent ban.
Even though the Censor Board had passed it, the Shiv Sena set the screen aflame at New Excelsior in Mumbai.[11]
An excerpt from a leading daily will give a sense of the multiple issues involved; women are certainly cast as markers of the community, their sexual choices tied to a community’s honor, with same sex love associated with the sullying of that honor.
Hindu leader says lesbian film should be about Moslem family
NEW DELHI, Dec 14 (AFP) - A radical Hindu leader whose party has
vandalised cinema halls showing a lesbian love story has said the
attacks would cease if the two women were shown to be Moslem instead
of Hindu, a daily said Monday.

Bal Thackeray, whose party rules India's film capital Bombay, told the Pioneer newspaper that contrary to the story of the film "Fire," lesbianism did not exist in Hindu families. Thackeray said he was enraged because the two women, unhappily married sisters-in-law who desert their unfeeling spouses, were named Sita and Radha, leading Hindu goddesses worshipped all over
the country. “Why does the story revolve around a Hindu family?” he said.
“Why has the filmmaker named the main characters Sita and Radha?”

He said his party would stop the attacks if the two women were given Moslem names. Fire's Canada-based director Deepa Mehta and leading Indian film personalities including actor Dilip Kumar and director Mahesh Bhatt, filed a 17-page petition in the Supreme Court last week seeking protection for the film. The court was urged “to take all steps as are necessary to provide a sense of security, apart from mere protection so that the film can be exhibited.” Hindu fundamentalists have attacked theatres showing the film in New Delhi, Bombay and other cities, causing it to be sent back to India's Censor Board for review.
"Fire", however, is currently being shown in movie halls. Activists from Thackeray's party on Sunday stripped down to their underwear during a protest outside the Bombay home of actor Dilip Kumar, who filed the petition against the protests, along with Deepa Mehta.
Things haven’t changed that much since the last seven years. When Karan Razdan’s Girlfriend[12] opened at theatres in Mumbai, the Shiv Sena attacked it and had theatres screening it, shut down. This time there was no Muslim Hindu issue raised but it was demanded that the explicitly sexual lesbian scenes be cut failing which the film should be removed from theatres. It might be noted at this point that several ‘raunchy’ films like Julie, Hawas and Ab Bas[13] have not faced the same kind of objection from the Shiv Sena.
The queer community was left in a dilemma while responding to this call for a ban. While Fire was a film that could still be reclaimed by them, Girlfriend was a homophobic travesty that posed as “a bold film that talked about the lesbian issue,” to use the directors words. A low grade soft porn flick that served to titillate male audiences, who harbor fantasies about two women posing for the male gaze, and performing sexual acts it had no real interest in projecting the issues faced by the lesbian community. The male viewer’s desire was in fact made paramount throughout the film that resorted to cheap clichés. The film also builds its wafer thin plot on a host of stereotypes; that women who ‘become’ lesbian are sexually abused in childhood and their rejection of men stems from fear. The character played by Isha Koppikar narrates a story to Amrita Arora of how she was sexually abused as a child; it is this, she says, which has caused her ‘deviant’ behavior, for which she is deeply apologetic. The ‘feminine’ protagonist, played by Arora has no accountability for her involvement with the ‘butch’ lesbian character, Koppikar, she puts all the onus on the latter for their sexual encounter claiming that she was drunk at the time and in the other instances ‘asleep.’ She wants to escape into a hetero (read normal) relationship with a man and her possessive, half-mad ‘girlfriend’ will not allow it. In the end the psycho maniacal lesbian falls off the top floor to her death, thus ending the mania. The subtext is one of deep seated homophobia that advocates yet another popular sentiment: lesbians who threaten patriarchy should in fact be bumped off. However, while the queer community in Mumbai was against the largely hetero-patriarchal logic that drove the film and the essentially homophobic representation of queer lives and choices, they did not support the Shiv Sena call to ban the film. Their stand was to support the freedom of speech within a democratic space, even if the film spoke ill of their community. Such a double-pronged stand was felt to be important since it was markedly distinguished from the stand taken by the Shiv Sena.
Side by side, one marks the growing maturity of the media in its in handling and coverage of such issues: a film premised on a queer relationship like My Brother Nikhil[14] could run successfully, this could perhaps be so because it thematized the issue of AIDS rather than the queer relationship per se. Still, it will be a long time before we can hope to go to theatres and watch a lesbian love story. While the two controversial films Fire and Girlfriend were in a way turned into a platform for queer visibility and public debate on the issue, it is still a long way before a film like Ligy Pullappally’s Sancharam will get a distributor.[15]
The film deals with the suppression of a female sexuality that cannot be consumed by men, that lead to a spate of lesbian suicides, where the women shunned by family and friends are forced to take the last option available to them: death. The film is centred around Kiran and Delilah, two young women living in rural Kerala. Despite their differences—Kiran is a reserved intellectual while Delilah is outgoing and playful—the girls’ childhood friendship deepens and continues into adulthood. The relationship changes as Kiran realizes she is physically attracted to Delilah. Delilah discovers Kiran’s feelings for her and their romance blossoms. The eventual discovery of the girls’ secret relationship culminates in the tragic yet triumphant denouement. The Chicago based Pullappally’s feature length film Sancharam (The Journey) addresses this issue through a lesbian love story that can be said to accurately reflect the concerns of such a repressed segment of society, carving a space for its viewers and telling women they have an option. Manjula Kumar, in her account of the film says that in The Journey, a controversial subject is handled with stark simplicity, sensitivity, and subtlety.

Pullappally comments that she has received varied reactions to the film: she says “When it screened before outside of the state that I shot the film in, the reactions have been great and the critics have loved the film and it won awards and things like that. However, within the State I shot it--I had one public screening in the state of Kerala and there there was a lot of very vocal opposition to the subject matter of the film. Not necessarily whether it was a good film or not but just heckling along the lines of ‘You’re trying to turn our kids gay.’” Though Pullappally has won accolades in the West and has even picked up the John Abraham jury award for her film, her film has faced rejection. The question of public distribution still remains a dream.
The code of silence needs to be broken: Legal Issues.
“Liberation is not the private province of any one particular group”[16] says Arvind Narrain, legal activist and lawyer from Bangalore who's recently published book, Queer, Despised Sexuality, Law and Social Change brings up a very important aspect of the invisible lives that queer people are forced to lead due to the kind of intolerance the privileged hetero-normative segment of society: “The power of the codes governing the social intolerance of queer sexualities can be seen in the fact that invisibility spans an array of social discourse in India. Right from media coverage to academic disciplines such as sociology, law and politics, queer lives are absent as non-pathological, non-criminal subjects.”[17] The second point that Narrain makes is that queer culture and people are produced as hyper-visible subjects of the criminal law, figures worthy of derision in the media or as pathological subjects in medicine. What Narrain means by the term hyper-visible is that the outings that take place are marked as acts of public shaming and criminalization: “In the media, within the State and on a daily level in family circles, colleges and schools the queer person is made visible as a spectacle and an object of derision. It has become commonplace to see screaming headlines in the media which are loaded with homophobic content, to hear of and witness public floggings by the police (especially of the hijra and kothi community), and in some cases where family publicly disowns the queer person, thus reclaiming so-called respectability in the eyes of society that deems it right to inflict such discriminatory practices on queer people.”[18] Thus right from section 377 of the India Penal Code, which defines homosexuality to the ubiquitous presence of the hijra in Hindi cinema, the invisibility of the normal queer citizen gets transfigured into the hyper-visibility of the queer deviant. There is also the subtle, pervasive pressure that operates within family— one of the most oppressive units that often supersedes the state and the law, in suppressing and silencing the queer. Disguised in the form of goodwill and well wishes, families marry off their lesbian daughters. The results can vary from women living dual lives, where they have secret ‘affairs’ with same sex partners to dire straits where lesbian couples have taken their lives. The growing lesbian suicides in Kerala are instances of what this kind of suppression can lead to, a phenomenon that is troubling and needs attention. Reclaiming spaces of outing and taking power into one's own hands is one way of countering this dual form of oppression. "What queer activists have proposed as a method of combating both invisibility and hyper-visibility is the method of `coming out,' wherein queer people make their sexuality known. Thus there is the development of activism centering on the politics of visibilization.” says Narrain.[19]

Coming out in other spaces
Every lesbian who claws her way into self-awareness in a society that insists upon heterosexuality has surely experienced the horror of that complete alienation from herself, the perilous feeling of being the only one. 'Maybe she is like me,' we've all thought, looking with longing and fear across a room, a bus, a street. 'But what could I possibly say to her? What if she's not?'" Ashwini Sukthankar Facing the Mirror
The risk required for outing one’s self is tremendous and one often asks oneself, must one? There is no single answer to this question since there are several homosexuals (lesbian, gay and bisexual) living in the closet, lives that they are comfortable living. They take an apolitical stand and working out their issues of being visible or not from the very private confines of the home and in some cases come out only to close family members and select friends. However, for a movement to be powerful, for rights to be enforced and for change to come about one has to stand up and be counted. The underground queer movement has helped many to cope with homophobia on a personal level (which is also sexually important) but is it not akin to stepping into a bigger closet? One where there are more people like oneself but a closet nonetheless. The movement has to have faces, voices and people who are willing to come forward and claim their rights.
However, the act of coming out is hardly easy, it often requires great courage not to acquiesce to the normative hetero-patriarchal values that structure one’s everyday life, even one’s sense of self To give just one example of the trauma and despair associated with outing, I quote Ilana Elimelech, an Israeli woman. She writes about her experience of coming out:
…It was for the first time that someone addressed me as a lesbian. And it was obvious: being a lesbian seemed to be very negative – an illness, a disease, a terrible flaw of nature…I denied everything that I felt deep inside me. I couldn't deal with the fact that other people saw it before I was able to see it at all.[20]
From Ilana's statement one is made aware of how internalized homophobia can become. Once she did come out, she found that even her family over the years made a space for her in their lives (though their initial reaction was avoidance) and she as an out and proud citizen was able to empower other women like herself by telling her story in the simply written, yet touching book Coming Out.
While public demonstration is a very powerful tool that the left and feminist movements have used, art can also be an empowering tool for the purpose of visibility. Then the act of outing is no longer an act of shame. Poetry, for example, can be fashioned into a form of protest: Ashwini Sukthankar’s anthology of lesbian writing Facing the Mirror is the first such collection from India and has been hailed as a milestone in the context of the queer movement in India. Despite all the moral policing, censure and silencing, that a book like this can be found, though no doubt at limited books stalls, stands as a testimony of queer love. On a smaller scale, the group, Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action (LABIA) once known as Stree Sangam, comes out with a magazine called Scripts. It is a small self-funded production that has articles, poetry, drawings, photographs and cartoons that centre around issues pertinent to lesbian, bisexual and transgender women (both male to female and female to male.) The latter category is a recent inclusion since Lebia felt that its politics needs to become more inclusive and the group should not look only at biological women who identify as lesbian and bisexual, but also those who choose to alter their gender via a sex change.
Film festivals are a venue where many alternative, queer films get a chance of screening. Larzish in Mumbai and the Siddharth Gautam festival in Kolkata are two instances. The requirement of a censor board certificate for public screening is often bypassed by not charging ticket money for the screening. That however means that the organizations are incumbent to raise their own funding for the venue, equipment and other expenses of hosting such a festival. They often have to turn to organizations in the US, UK, Amsterdam and Eastern Europe for funding. There is very little support that may be garnered for a project like this within the country.
The gay ghetto, the closet, the immigrant dyke or homo, are among a range of options available to queer people. The time, however, is at hand where there is a revolution in our own back yard. Using art as a tool, there are film-screenings in colleges, there are festivals. There are posters and handbills that we people on the street have been given at public demonstrations. There is drag and body art, there is performance and site-specific installation. The tools of a revolution that is neither violent nor bloody are being sharpened everyday and one day we will walk as free beings. Am I being an idealist? I hope I am since idealism is what we have. Our weapons to fight this battle, to use a few ballistic terms, are words, ideas and images. If these can be termed as art then we are artists. If art can be seen as activism then we are activists.







[1] Bombay Longing 2001 3 minute Digital film shot in Mumbai by Georgina Maddox and Shalini Kantaya.
[2] Times of India August 2005. For details visit www.timesofindia.com
[3] Scripts Issue 7 June 2005, page 52,
[4] Of course there is much debate about funding for video and new media art. Questions have been raised by artists like Navjot Altaf, Shilpa Gupta, Sharmila Samant and Tushar Joag, regarding the funding of such projects and how philanthropy toward such projects is needed. It’s difficult for artists to constantly self fund. This debate is however not raised specifically in the context of queer art and is indeed a larger issue that requires a separate forum for discussion. To check Open Circle’s view on the issue of funding one can visit www.opencirclearts.org
[5] Black Women Writers at Work. Ed. Claudia Tate. (New York: Continuum, 1983) 100-16
[6] Untitled 1, 1999, 3 minutes, Digital (DV) film
[7] Untitled 2000, 10 minutes, Digital (DV) film
[8] Trans, 2005, 12, Digital (DV) film

[9] For details, see Georgina Maddox “Hair Raising Experience” Mumbai Mirror, June 12, 2005, p 42 To check online for the article: www.mumbaimirror.com]
[10] www.humanscape.org/Humanscape/2004/Nov/filmreview.
[11] The Pioneer , December 14 , 1998
[12] Girlfriend, (2004) Director Karan Razdan. Cast: Isha Koppikar, Amrita Arora, Ashish Choudhary) For more information check ndtv.com and indnianexpress.com]
[13] Julie, (2004) Director: Deepak Shivdasani. Cast: Sanjay Kapoor and Neha Dupia
Ab Bas, (2004) Director Rajesh Singh, Cast: Diana Hayden, Shawar Ali, Nisha Harale
Hawas (2003) Director Karan Razdan, Cast; Meghna Naidu, Tarun Arora and Shawar Ali
[14] My Brother Nikhil, (2005) Director: Onir. Cast: Sanjay Suri, Juhi Chawla,
[15] Sancharam (2004) Director: Ligy Pullapally. Cast: Shruiti Menon; Suhasini Nair, PAC Lalitha;

[16] Queer Despised Sexuality: Law and Social Change New Delhi: Books for Change, 2004, p. 8
[17] Narrain, p.9
[18] Narrain, p.72
[19] Narrain, p. 72
[20] Lutz Van Dijk's Coming Out (1998).