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Gaylords of Bollywood: Politics of Desire in Hindi Cinema

Rama Srinivasan

Two mainstream Hindi films in 2008, Dostana and Straight, had a gay main plot which was quite unprecedented in Bollywood. Through a close analysis of the way these two films engage with homosexuality and its representations, and by a discussion of the history of gay themes in Hindi popular cinema, this article tries to argue that while mainstream films are now able to foreground homosexual desire, they do this through an erasure of the female. This then lends itself to a patriarchal coding and leaves little space for a feminist engagement.

The Bold New Bollywood

Rama Srinivasan (ramasriniv@gmail.com) is a doctoral student at the anthropology department of Brown University, United States.
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n November 2008, Dostana (Friendship) became the first commercial (big budget, widely distributed) Bollywood movie to have a gay main plot. There was, however, nothing radical about this. Two young men pretend to be gay in order to live with a young woman reluctant to let out rooms to men. They carry the farce up until the very end, even becoming officially gay to get residency permits in the US State of Florida. In contrast, Straight: Pinu Patel ki Tedhi Medhi Love Story (Pinu Patels Crooked Love Story, 2009), which came just a few months later, seriously considers the possibility (complete with sexual arousal and bitter jealousy). Dostana marks a cynical appropriation of an increasingly public discourse on sexuality for the purpose of comedy while Straight is a brave exploration of what it means to be gay, who is really gay or more accurately who is not? And yet Pinu Patels journey towards self-realisation ends in an overwhelming validation of heterosexuality, which does justice neither to the idea of homosexual love nor the woman who ultimately wins the race. Pinu, owner of a successful Indian restaurant he names Gaylord with possibly the most innocent of motives, hires Renu and Kamlesh at the same time. Zealous, hardworking and over-friendly they take over his restaurant and unknown to themselves become rivals to his affections. For a brief period, Kamlesh seems to overtake the woman in the race as Pinu bitterly resents the growing friendship between the two and even fires Renu so that he can have Kamlesh all for himself. Straight hence goes further than any mainstream Bollywood movie with the theme of homosexuality. And it is this brave treatment of
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the subject that makes the climax so bewildering. Having finally received the validation for his feelings for another man with his oh-so-cool cousin revealing his own gay identity, the stage seemed set for Pinu to track down Kamlesh and confess his love. But unfortunately he meets Renu on the way and she deftly brings him back to the heterosexual fold. Kamlesh, for his part, receives a gracious acknowledgement for all the confusion he caused. The films overarching, ambiguous message is: It is not only about sex but love. The ideological coding is clearly Freudian: A womans body, which is marked by its lack, is hardly capable of invoking sexual pleasure. Straight flips the ideas of gay theorists, who believe that Bollywood celebrates homosocial love even if homosexual desire is (at least before Straight happened) as yet below the surface. Even as she provides a completely new perspective about homoeroticism in Bollywood, director Parvati Balagopalan disappoints the queer audience and degrades the womens body. In contrast, Dostana draws on a rich Bollywood tradition of homosocial and homoerotic love that some scholars trace back to as early as the 1960s. According to R Raj Rao, one of the most recognisable tropes for homoeroticism in Hindi movies (including one that is called Dostana, 1981) is the tale of two inseparable buddies, who sing songs of undying friendship and love, only to be torn apart by their love for the same woman (Rao 2000). A woman comes between two men. Sam and Kunal (Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham) declare early on in Dostana that they are not gay but will pretend to be as such if that is what it takes to get a swanky Miami apartment. Yet, the fact of their heterosexuality is put into crisis even before the film begins. As the credits roll, flamboyantly nude Kunal takes scarce notice of a gyrating Shilpa Shetty, a ritual followed by Sam, who enters the screen space, already occupied and mastered by Kunal, in an outrageously pink car sporting an almost identical shirt. The fetishised image of Shetty seems to provide no pleasure to either of them (indeed she seems no match to

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Kunals fetishised image). The film continues to coax the spectator away from the women to find pleasure (ostensibly comic pleasure) in Sam and Kunals togetherness. They are for textual purposes heterosexual but the images speak a different language throughout the movie. Straight leaves nothing to imagination while Dostana is tongue-in-cheek and ambivalent, letting the readers make their own meanings. Claire Johnston, while critiquing womens cinema, sees the dangers of doing away with myths. Bereft of the stereotypes, Straight lays its ideology threadbare affirmation of heterosexual alliances no matter how strong the temptation of homosexual desire is. Dostana, on the other hand, evolves an internal mechanism to simultaneously pursue the other desire. Director Tarun Mansukhani does not do away with the traditional icons of men, women, gays. He instead uses the signs and referents of the heteronormative ideologys language for his ends, constantly destabilising them, ridiculing their inherent meanings. He does what Johnston, quoting Roland Barthes work on myths, calls emptying the sign of its original denotative meaning in place of which a new meaning is superimposed (Johnston 1979). The most hilarious sequence in the film, involving Sams melodramatic mother, supports the idea that the film not only allows but even invites alternate reading of every frame. She suddenly sees Sam and Kunal in every non-sexual pair she chances upon on the street including a pair of kids on a stroller. The intra-diegetic look is put to full use as the mothers look constantly problematises the bonding between the men. In one telling scene during the song Maa da laadla (Apple of mothers eye), the men are lifting weights together, voyeuristically gazing at heroine Nehas lithe frame. But the mom, whose gaze we follow, can only see two men exercising together in a suggestively eroticised moment. Mansukhani seems to be asking us to think about what we choose to see and what we choose to ignore and/ or hide when we watch a movie. Sams mother also subverts the traditional signs and their coded meanings, as she alternately imagines the two men in bride and groom costumes, unable to come to a

conclusion. She finally decides to welcome Kunal into her family as a bride complete with Hindu rituals, apologising for not knowing what to do with him. In this bittersweet moment lies real possibilities of negotiations and subversion of meanings, something Straight in all its seriousness foreclosed. The ultimate affirmation of Dostanas progressive potential came from news reports of people who identified with the mother or those who were able to come out with their family by speaking the formerly unspeakable (White 2008).

friendship/Not even death can separate us. If anyone asks us where we live/We tell them we live in each others hearts/That is the only address we have (Rao 2000).

When Bollywood Was Closeted

The industry has travelled a long distance to make these two films possible. Even as late as 2001, a real mainstream gay theme film was a wistful dream for gay rights activist Ashok Row Kavi
There are gay scripts floating around in Bollywood. Gay themes have already been attempted in a series of TV programmes, and homosexuality and lesbianism have become central themes on talk shows. Still, a real mainstream gay theme film will be an unforgettable landmark in Hindi cinema (Kavi 2000).

But in a tragic turn of events, they both fall in love with the same woman, played by Zeenat Aman. A languid character, she can never hope to work up the kind of chemistry these two share and what is worse, she exercises the break in a friendship that was supposedly impossible. The stage is then set for another heartwrenching yaari song, in which the emphasis on the term bewaffa (unfaithful) baffles Rao. The filming of this song where Bachchan is literally red-eyed, also drew Kavis attention:
The camera very obviously traces the triangulated desire among Amitabh, his male partner, and Zeenat; what is striking in this scene is that while both men appear somewhat animated and active in different ways, Zeenat remains curiously inert, and simply stares blankly into the camera.

How did Kavis anticipation translate into Dostana and Straight? And what still holds them back? According to Rao, there is a cultural sanction for intimate same-sex relationships in India. He explores the widespread use of the word yaar, which could mean friend and/or lover, in Hindi films. Yaar, Rao says, provides a convenient alibi in India, both for the external world and for the practitioners of yaari (Rao 2000). The term legitimised strong homoerotic tendencies of the kind Bollywood indulged in the 1970s and 1980s, the traditions to which Dostana liberally helped itself to. The film works with the twin agenda of evoking nostalgia and winking at us by exposing the hidden agenda of these buddy movies for all of us to see. Rao explores many buddy films of yesteryears, especially of the most heterosexual star Amitabh Bachchan, which had explicit songs of friendship and love between two men. In the first Dostana (1981), Bachchan and Shatrugan Sinha exchange emotionallycharged looks before turning defiantly to their audience within the film as they sing:
Even if the whole world turns an enemy/Let our friendship prosper. We swear by this

What Rao and Kavi both fail to mention is that the film might not even consider Zeenat capable of coming between two men. During this celebrated song, Bachchans image is reflected in a huge mirror which has the backs of Sinha and quintessential villain Prem Chopra reflected on it. The image captured by the mirror then might be the real thrust of the movie Bachchan torn apart from his yaar, who in the company of another man turns his back on a cherished mate. While the movie itself follows a misogynist discourse where the woman is literally traded off between the two men, first breaking and then cementing the friendship, the real negotiations might be happening elsewhere. Throughout his career as a hero, Bachchan seemed to always need the company of another man. Anand (1971) had him play a brooding doctor-friend passionately attached to the then superstar Rajesh Khanna. He edged Khanna out of the topslot with a series of films where the conventional heroine was replaced by a male best friend (Kavi 2000). There is still a heroine but the real romance is between Bachchan and his inseparable buddy (brother in some films). These wild, untamed passions find expression in songs such as the ones quoted above.
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Rao goes further he even claims that Bachchan feels awkward in heterosexual romantic films like Kasme Vaade (Promises 1978) and Silsila (Chain of Events 1981), which did not gain widespread acceptance with the audience (Rao 2000). Rao inadvertently reveals the problems with a gay oppositional reading that is selective and discriminatory. He is discounting their homoerotic undertones simply because the women in the film occupy a lot of screen space and are legitimate characters in the text. Both the films he mentions do have a strong gay subtext with Bachchan playing a passionate brother to Randhir Kapoor and Shashi Kapoor respectively. As Kavi puts it:
The gay construct in Silsila is of gay men as we recognise gay constructions in the West. There is no playing around with gender; it is a straightforward, clearcut sexual bonding held above the usual male-bonding revealed in Hindi cinema through the decades. However, this construction has required a slow and steady evolution through numerous years of groping in the jungles of male-bonding themes (Kavi 2000).

not exist either because they were not required, the onscreen images did not talk to them and, in fact, marginalised and delegitimised their agency wherever it had appeared deviously. Kavi notes, not without a hint of glee, this phenomenon of the disappearing woman. With women not being required as the spectacle of desire, the stage was cleared for the growth of gay subtext. He almost seems to rejoice in the death of the Bollywood women.
...the high-camp gay subtext of the film Pakeezah (1971) took Indias subterranean gay world by storm, a film in which the heroines stature as the films erotic focus was effectively destroyed. There is an incredible exchange of dialogue in the film, in which the heroine Meena Kumari actually tells a tongawalla (carriage driver) to take her to the graveyard when she is asked about her destination it marks the death of her female eroticisation as well (Kavi 2000).

contribution to explain this new cinematic language:

In (Tamil film) Kaadalan (Loverboy) ...the mode of narrative construction, emphasising the episodic, discontinuous and fragmentary, focuses attention on the screen as a surface rather than one inducting our view into narrative/character depth; and this forms one among the array of commodity surfaces that surround us in the liberalised Indian economy of the 1990s (Vasudevan 2000).

What Do We Do With the Women?

Kavis thesis is crucial in theorising male to male desire in Bollywood. It was conceived and gradually evolved as a celebration of masculinity, constructed in the deliberate exclusion of women. Where the women (as women) were present, readers like Rao outrightly rejected them because they distorted Bachchans homosocial reputation. He never put into crisis the idea of masculinity. In fact he projected, with his buddy action movies, a kind of hypermasculinity that was reassuring for young men. After the initial euphoria of nation-building project which tried to include women in its utopian endeavor, the 1970s were marked by increasing restlessness and anger. Bachchans star image creators (writer duo Salim-Javed) responded to the situation by making him the angry young man of India (Virdi 2003), who needed not women but other men who could support his project of change or provide an alternate solution. In the hypermasculine world of saving the nation from the deep abyss that the idealistic post-independence era had lead it to, Bollywood did not conceive a legitimate role for women. Women as spectators did
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By the end of the 1980s, an ageing Bachchan lost ground to younger (and hence, more masculine) men, who also incidentally worked better in pairs. Anil Kapoor-Jackie Shroff, Sanjay Dutt-Kumar Gaurav and later Akshay Kumar-Saif Ali Khan were the new homosocial couples with excellent onscreen chemistry. They told stories of companionship and loss of love and longing where women again disappeared discreetly for large portions of films. And yet something had changed. Bachchans retreat also coincided with the return of the romances. The larger ideological project was to tell India that every thing was going to be fine and this was evoked through the focus of our attention on lesser concerns like romantic interludes. The first few attempts were awkward and self-conscious it was not until 1994 with Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1994) that the romantic genre came into its own. The global Indian (either non-resident Indian or globetrotting resident) became the new Bollywood hero. Shah Rukh Khans Raj/Rahul was representative of a very specific minority a yuppie global-local Indian who invoked aspirations among masses. He was to provoke narcissist desire among men. In his introduction to Making Meaning of Indian Cinema, Ravi Vasudevan cites Vivek Dhareshwar and Tejaswini Niranjanas
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As Virdi puts it poetically, there was commodification of romance as well as a romanticisation of commodities. If the camera invested itself with the look of the action hero in the past, the camera now distanced itself to look at the hero. The seemingly impersonal attitude made inclusion of women spectators possible. It was actually Akshay Kumar, who belonged to the old school of raw masculinity, who provided the bridge for the Bollywoods homoerotic subculture to wade through the crisis in format. Reprising roles familiar to the Bachchan days (for example, cops), he caught attention of scholars like Thomas Waugh, who called his beefcake image a proof of Bollywoods hospitability to phallic coding and fan culture (Waugh 2003). The phallic coding predated Kumar but what had changed was articulation of homosexual desire in public discourse. When Kavis gay magazine Bombay Dost claimed Main Khiladi, Tu Anari (Im the Player, you are the Naive One, 1994) for Indias gay population he introduced, perhaps for the first time,1 in the Indian spectator an extra-textual knowledge of the existence of queer spaces in puritan Bollywood. According to Waugh, the film became a site for three-way desire with Kavi (and through him the queer spectator) entering the picture. Bombay Dost interviewed Kumar and got him to acknowledge his gay fans. This was a new phase of Bollywoods queer audience, exciting in the articulation and acknowledgement of previously forbidden desires and yet once outted gay desire was guarded and circumscribed. Bombay Dosts activism also marked the beginning of the end of the rich homosocial love and desire. According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, this happened in the western world at the turn of the 20th century when same-sex desire came to be articulated

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increasingly in sexual terms only. Bollywood had till now been a creatively rich site for homoerotic desire. There was what Sedgwick quotes Allan Bloom as calling the defiance of the closet (Sedgwick 1990). According to Bloom, the prolific literature that develops around the glamorisation of male-male desire and the denial of the same is sacrificed at the altar of rights movement. He even makes a case for the closet for the sake of literature.

The Contest
Judwaa (Twins 1997) was for Kavi a landmark film in making a spectacle of the male body. Salman became the icon of the perfectly shaped male body inspiring many of the generation-next actors to follow his example till it became almost a norm for any aspiring actor to possess a Greek god-like figure. It also significantly pressured the old-timers to create bulky bodies that were not, according to me, for the pleasure of the female spectator. When an old-timer like Shahrukh Khan (SRK) responded to the pressure of possessing the perfect body, the stage was set for a contest over the sensitive, castrated men between female and male desire. In Om Shanti Om, he bared his newly acquired six-pack abs for just one song, a stunt that confused more than delighted his women fans (radio and TV presenters uncertainly talked about the new hot SRK). It was clear, though, that he did not need to do anything as drastic as grow a six-pack to bring women to the theatres. In one report (Bollywood Zone 2007) SRK accepts that the new look was indeed a male fantasy. Immediately after the shooting of the film, SRK went back to a less masculine image with television show Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hain. Here he was carefully draped in full-sleeve shirts and waistcoats, an image several women were more comfortable with, without exactly knowing why. The hypermasculine image was created in contempt of the women and also in discomfort of SRKs own castrated image. His deliberate cultivation and maintenance of the image of the sensitive hero, ready to shed copious tears for something as trivial as lost love, are deeply problematic to the male spectator

especially since it seems incompatible with SRKs superstar status. Kal Ho Na Ho (If Tomorrow Comes 2003) lays threadbare this very contest. Saif, who was terribly insecure with the gay reading of his role in Main Khiladi (Waugh 2003), is comfortable in this film with an explicit gay subtext. If in the older film, as stated by Waugh, Saif was the effeminate man continuously distracted from Kumar by a group of girls dancing around the duo, here his gender is no longer in crisis. Manhattan-based Rohit (Saif) is now all buffed up like many of his contemporaries. He is joined by SRK, who is equally comfortable but in his nonhypermasculine image, in a film that replays the age-old trope of two friends falling for the same woman. When I saw it in 2003, I construed it as a somewhat dreary heterosexual romance where the woman is exchanged around with as much callousness as Zeenat Aman was in Dostana (1981). There was comic relief in the form of Saifs sheltered Indian maid who misunderstands the two men to be a couple. I took guilty pleasure in this parody before I learnt that the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in India actually acknowledged the subtext as positive. Bangalore-based Alternate Law Forum has released a shortened version of the movie with select scenes (chopped up to serve the purpose of queer reading), which showed that the gay subtext was little more than comic relief. The alternate reading was invited. If Waugh had indeed imagined the wink in Main Khiladi he could not have doubted it in the case of Kal Ho Na Ho the confusion on which of the three are really the pair was deliberate. It is SRK who comes in between two friends Saif and Preity (the heroine), posing a challenge to heterosexuality that can only be resolved by his death. Emboldened by the success of the film, producer Karan Johar ventured on the more ambitious Dostana, which does away with the ambiguity completely. The subtextual joke is now the main text. The two men carry the joke forward not only in the company of the girl but while they are alone as well. Their body language, their modes of addressing each other and the exchange of looks all affirm what the dialogues refrain from. Sam and Kunals

first meeting is an extended affair that lays down the rules pretty clearly. Kunal is almost naked and totally comfortable with the fact. Sam looks on appreciatively, not with narcissistic pleasure but with an air of someone who scrutinises a work of art, and Kunal returns the gaze with equanimity. When Kunal introduces himself, Sam answers slowly, still turning the idea of Kunal in his mind. Sam is privileged as the bearer of the look from their first meeting, in contrast to Neha who hardly ever gets to gaze at Kunal (or Sam). In the last scene, Neha, who is literally sitting between the two men, vacates her symbolic place. She does so after asking them if they ever really had feelings for each other. The film ends with the two gazing fiercely at each other, uncertain of the presumed heterosexuality.

The Closure
Unlike Balagopalan, Johar probably has a stake in an ending that is at least ambiguous. Johar has not taken any trouble to deny rumours about his sexuality. His most candid admission has been: About my sexuality I dont feel the need to clarify that because it is no ones business (Chaudhury 2007). In less political correct spaces like his TV talk show Koffee with Karan, he has invited jokes about very obliging aspiring actors vying for the much-needed breaks and also significantly, SRKs opportunistic use of the rumours that they are partners when asked what he would do if he woke up one morning to find that he is Karan Johar, SRK audaciously replied that the chances of waking up with Karan were more likely (Star India Network, 2004-Present). Andrea Weiss article is very useful in contextualising the role of rumour in star images. According to her, whether these actresses (Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich) were actually lesbian or bisexual is less relevant than how their star personae were perceived by lesbian audiences (Weiss 1992). She quotes Jump Cuts 1981 lesbian and film issue as saying: If oral history is the history of those denied control of the printed record, then gossip is the history of those who cannot even speak in their own first-person voice. When Johars debut directorial venture Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something is
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Happening, 1998) released this public discourse did not exist. It infuriated many women with its overarching ideological message that women should be more feminine if they want men to take any notice of them. And yet, the extra-textual knowledge of Johars perceived sexual identity made an alternate reading of this film possible. Johar probably vicariously lived through tomboy Anjali, who does not even want to be called a girl, locked in an unrequited love story. Her best friend Rahul (SRK) falls for ultra-feminine Tina, for whom the director has nothing but contempt he literally shoots her body in a series of chopped up images. Seen in this light, Kuch Kuch seems to be a frustrating negotiation of sexual identities. Johar continued to keep SRK in the centre of his universe in his subsequent films. The heroines in films are hysterical (Anjali, Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham, Happiness and Tears), caricatured Barbie dolls (Pooh, Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham) or bespectacled and drab (Naina, Kal Ho Na Ho). Even if there is charm in some of these women despite Johars indifference (Kajol gave a perky performance as Anjali), the cameras gaze would not allow us this pleasure. Johars camera is too busy flirting with SRK to take any notice of them. In the title song of Kal Ho Na Ho, both the friends are forgotten as the camera exclusively focuses on SRK gazing adoringly. The image is not fetishised but in fact a worshipping of SRKs body. In Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (Never say Goodbye, 2006), which is Johars most defiant assault on heteronormativity it questions compliance to marriages that do not make sense anymore the addictive song Mitwa (loved one) is shot with barely concealed eroticism. A low angle shot literally envelops SRK, starting from his legs and moving upwards there is again no fetishising here. In contrast, Rani Mukherjee gets a linear shot with the camera keeping a respectful distance. In Johars movies, SRK is looking at the women but the camera does not follow his gaze, it resolutely focuses on SRK at times grudgingly including the women in the frame. Womens body even in a heterosexual romance is rendered invisible in this way. But at the moment of reception these images are still contested. SRK continues
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to be a favourite among many women spectators, who see him as the sensitive lover while for Johars camera he remains the ultimate male body. While not directly admitting to his love for SRK, he says as much in the above-mentioned interview:
... I just couldnt see this film (My Name Is Khan) without him. Im sure therell be a time when Ill work without him, but I dont think any experience will match what Ive been through with him. Hes almost like a habit you dont want to break. When hes on your set, with you, he makes things happen. When he is not on the set with me, I feel I do lesser work. Hes addictive; hes addictive. I mean, I know when I dont work with him, there will not be a single day of my existence on that film that I wont think back. I dont want to go through that feeling Im scared to go through that feeling of regret that I dont have Shahrukh with me on set.

In Bollywood, gay male desire and female desire seem to be at odds. This might be one possible explanation for Balagopalans Straight. If it is a fight for the articulation and validation of desire, Balagopalan probably made her choice. Her first outing Rules: Pyaar ka Hit Formula (2003) was a charming fairy-tale of a young photographer who would stop at nothing to win over a top model. She had a subplot involving a gay couple managing the happily ever after dream. One would think that in the intervening six years she would have managed to bring the subplot to main plot but it was not the question of courage (she did venture into unchartered territory with Straight) but intent. Between 2003 and 2009, the battle lines were drawn. Actor Konkona SenSharma at one point seemed to have made a habit, in different films, of walking into her boyfriends in bed with another man (Page 3, Life in a Metro). Her characters acknowledged the right to be gay but it also came at the expense of her loneliness.

A Queer Feminist Subject Position

It is now clear to me that the euphoria surrounding the outing of gay desire in Bolly wood misses (or wilfully ignores) the exclusion of women. The reason why the articulation of gay desire in Bollywood has meant little, if at all anything, to women is that there is no playing around with gender roles the dominant patriarchal ideology is left untouched. In fact, the unabashed display of male bodies has
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served patriarchy in some ways. For a brief period in the 1990s, the whore/wife dichotomy collapsed with women stars (like Madhuri Dixit and Karisma Kapoor) wearing skimpy outfits with grace for the pleasure of their male co-stars but also expressing desire in veiled references. This prompted a middle-aged fan to regret to Jyotika Virdi the loss of romances in the age of half-clad heroines (Virdi 2003). Half-clad (or not clad at all) heroes pose no threat to patriarchy especially when the legitimate bearer of the look is a man. Sisterhood films have been very few and far between compared to the buddy movies. Probably the only two Hindi films with lead characters as lesbians (Fire and Girlfriend) have invited huge protests and physical attacks on theatres by right wing activists. In a lesbian film, the expression of female desire and the existence of an agency that realises the same are explicit and hence, resisted most vehemently. It is true that Girlfriend was misogynistic and detrimental to the lesbian cause and Fire is now more than a decade-old. But at a time when women, though saved to a large extent from the misogyny of the camera, are increasingly finding themselves invisible from a site where cultural meanings are produced and identities find expression, the possibility of another Fire, let alone a less belligerent reception, is an open question. The fact that the response to the recent Delhi High Court judgment regarding the criminalisation of homosexuality in Section 377 of the criminal procedure code has been largely muted as far as political, especially right wing, groups are concerned is intriguing. The incessant referring to the ruling as the Gay Ruling in news media is also not marginal. Though gay is a gender neutral term, it is associated more easily with men. As this article seeks to highlight, the earlier cultural sanction to homosocial bonds is fast being replaced by a veiled cultural sanction to male-male desire. Though the ruling speaks to women as well as sexual identities other than gays, these struggles are far from over because not only have their individual desires and agencies been denied cultural validation, their bodies are increasingly been erased from the screen.

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When visible, the films refrain from showing women as women because there seems to be no spectator. Madhuri Dixit was at the centre of the universe of the two hours that Aaja Nachle (Come and Dance 2007) played out. There was a voyeuristic audience within the film that was mocked and discredited as Dixit, an image of flawless/ageless beauty, glided through the film. She and her co-star Konkona were independent and sexually liberated, seen without kinship and family bonds seen for who she really is. She was not marked by any lack but the film did not do well. Bollywood today both at the production and reception front tries to ignore the reality of at least urban Indian women. If it can no longer ignore the question of womens agency, the genre seems to have evolved a way to erase their bodies. A gay male desire conceived in a hypermasculine world that is not just silent about transgressions of gender roles but actually supportive of a larger ideological project of ignoring the shifting gender roles is of little use to the feminist agenda. Feminists can no longer afford to rejoice in a Kal Ho Na Ho or Dostana or the nonBollywood, restrictively distributed films like Mango Souffl and Bombay Boys, which have at least been honest about the sexuality of their characters. Gender transgressions and images of hope for change seem more possible within the heterosexual romances than any other genre. Producer-director Pooja Bhatt has made films that show womens bodies aesthetically (they are not marked by the lack) and also shows women as active agents in narrative, who desire and sometimes even realise their desires. But the best articulation of female desires in recent times has ironically come from male directors. Director Onir, who started out with a small film My Brother Nikhil, made Sorry Bhai last year. It is again a saga of two men in love with one woman but with a crucial difference far from being traded off, she sets out to pursue her highflying fiancs timid brother and eventually succeeds. The privileging of Aaliyas gaze and the vindication of her desire marks a brand new phase for Bollywood (hopefully!). It is perhaps because of the papers excessive focus on homosocial bonds that I want to end with Dor (String 2006). A

sensitive and understated film, it truly belongs to Richs lesbian continuum idea (Rich 2001). The link between two women separated by geography and religion is very tenacious. As the wife of a man killed in Saudi Arabia, Meera has to officially forgive Zeenats husband to save him from the gallows. Their growing love for each other clings on the apology which would effectively reunite Zeenat to her husband and leave Meera alone (not to mention negotiate the perils of being a Hindu widow). Unlike many of the buddy movies, the resolution does not lie in death or loneliness. The climax shows openness to negotiation. Their strong bonds, sealed by a Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge-like dash to catch a train and be with a lover, has to always contend with the husband who is looming large though absent from the frame. Dor offers exciting viewership by neither essentialising homosocial love nor underplaying it. It is not conceived in exclusion or contempt of any body, it talks about real women and real negotiations of gender. And unlike the closeted buddy movies of yesteryears, it was made in an era when public discourse about sexuality is already present, making alternate reading possible.
Notes
1 Rao does mention a reviewer of 1973 film Namak Haram commenting on the touch of homo in it.

References
Chaudhury, Shoma (2007): I Wish I Could Call Myself Karan Saxena, Not Karan Johar, 6 October, Tehelka, viewed on 12 August 2009 (http://www. tehelka.com/story_main34.asp?filename=hub 061007IWish.asp) Johnston, Claire (1979): Womens Cinema as Counter Cinema in Patricia Erens (ed.), Sexual Strategems: The World of Women in Film (New York: Horizon Press), 133-43. Kavi, Ashok Row (2000): The Changing Image of the Hero in Hindi Films, Journal of Homosexuality, 39, 3: 307. Kwarteng, Kwasi (1999): Was Plato the only Greek Gay? 23 August, New Statesman 1913-2009, viewed on 11 August 2009 (http://www.newstatesman.com/199908230009). Raj, R Rao (2000): Memories Pierce the Heart: Homoeroticism, Bollywood-Style, Journal of Homosexuality, 39, 3-4. Rich, Adrienne (2001): Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: WW Norton), 1762-80. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1990): Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press). Shahrukh Khan develops six-pack abs for son Aryan, Bollywood Zone: Blogs, Movies, Celebs, 11 September 2007, viewed on 12 August 2009 (http://thebollywoodzone.com/shah-rukh-khan-developssix-pack-abs-for-son-aryan/) Vasudevan, R, ed. (2000): Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Virdi, Jyotika (2003): The Cinematic Imagination [Sic]: Indian Popular Films As Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). Waugh, Thomas (2003): Im the Player, Youre the Naive One: Patterns of Sexual Subversion in Recent Indian Popular Cinema in Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo (ed.), Keyframes Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies (London: New York). Weiss, Andrea (1992): A Queer Feeling When I Look at You: Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s in Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film (New York: Penguin), 30-50. White, Beverly (2008): Dostanas Special Screening for Gays, 18 November, NDTV Movies, Viewed on 11 August 2009 (http://movies.ndtv.com/newstory. asp?id=ENTEN20080073016).

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