Aligarh could be Manoj Bajpayee's most powerful performance

As news of the Supreme Court listing the curative petition on Section 377 for February 2 made the rounds on Thursday, another related event took place. The trailer of Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh, which is coming out in February, was released.

The story of Aligarh Muslim University professor, Ramchandra Siras, Aligarh chronicles the humiliation and subsequent suicide of a gay man who was hounded out of the campus for having sex with another man in his university-provided accommodation. 

There are many elements to Siras’ story and it is to the credit of Mehta and Apurva Asrani, the screenplay writer, that each of these is given enough play, so that the story becomes more than a plea to repeal a law that has discriminated against a beleaguered community. It is a fully rounded picture of a broken, haunted man.

Siras was a professor of Marathi whose story intersected with the series of social neuroses that criss-cross our society. He was a confirmed bachelor among a straight professorship in a system where education rarely means questioning the status quo.

He was a poet who lived in utterly prosaic times and paid the price for his indiscretions. He made love to a rickshaw-wallah, his yaar and dost, a man from another class and possibly caste, but one with whom Siras shared an almost spiritual connection.

Manoj Bajpayee plays Siras, and even for an actor who has given us such gems as Bhikhu Mhatre, Siras may be his most intense and realised performance yet.

He is Siras entirely, from the languid droop of the shoulders to the halting, cadenced speech of a renaissance man. His eyes convey the repressed agony of someone who cannot believe the world he is born into, and who will ultimately bid adieu.

The story is refracted through the eyes of Deepu Sebastian (played in Aligarh  by Rajkumar Rao), an Indian Express reporter who came in contact with Siras after a sting operation was conducted inside Siras’ house by some AMU students.

This was February 2010. The sting operation, which showed Siras having sex with the rickshaw-wallah, was followed by Siras’ suspension from the university.

Siras challenged his suspension in the Allahabad High Court which granted him reprieve in April of that year. Sebastian spent much time with Siras during these difficult days, as the latter battled public humiliation and private torments.

The film captures these moments with a lightness that is in sharp contrast to the incorrigibly approaching end. Siras' legal reprieve was not enough to right matters. On April 7, he committed suicide in his apartment.

Of the several strands to his story, the most chilling is the snuffing of a poet’s life who cannot countenance the debasement of his visions for himself.

Siras had often spoken about settling abroad so that he may live a more open life but his love for India, and AMU particularly, where he spent close to two decades, trumped his better sense.

Watching the trailer of Aligarh, it is impossible not to connect his story with that of Rohith Vemula, another dreamer who found the system too oppressive to continue.

In the 2001 movie The Hours, Virginia Woolf tells her husband Leonard: "Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It's contrast."

Later, as she contemplates how to take her then-in-development novel Mrs Dalloway forward, she gets the answer to her unasked question. Almost in staccato she adds: "The poet must die; the visionary."

Siras was a visionary. He lived in a time when the law was against him and the likes of him, and when social  hypocrisy ruled supreme. (The past tense is merely indicative; we continue to live in those times.)

Yet, he lived a full life. It may seem disingenuous to suggest so, given that he killed himself, but by not giving in to the rules and conventions of a straight world, by continuing to believe in himself and who and how he loved, he refused to submit.

His fierce independence was not sustainable in the face of rank bigotry but he chose to live and die with it rather than give in.

Siras will not be around to witness the victories that the LGBT movement will undoubtedly see in the coming years. Who knows, the Supreme Court, just this coming Tuesday, may opt to overrule its December 2013 judgement that kept Section 377 on the statute.

But these victories, while valuable, will be of little significance to the memory of Siras. He has already blazed a glorious trail. He is already each one of us, the silent suffering souls.

He looked life in the face and refused to lose trust in the life he imagined for himself, even if that life was extinguished too soon.