Stupidity of banning Aligarh in Aligarh

News that the movie Aligarh has been banned from being showcased in the city after which it is named due to the orders of the city’s BJP mayor should rightly evoke outrage. But after weeks of ideological pant-and-thrust occasioned by the Rohith Vemula and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), I found myself unable to muster the required energy.

That the BJP has a problem with homosexuality is well known. But repeating that in the aftermath of every such incident is like banging your head against a wall in hopes of crushing it. It can be great for the hurting soul but does not serve any purpose.

Due to the high level of political polarisation on almost every issue, it is unlikely that a sane debate will be held over gay rights and Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in the foreseeable future. The LGBT community, meanwhile, looks to the Supreme Court which has constituted a five-judge bench to decide on the constitutionality of the section.

Some leaders, to be sure, have broken party lines to express support for the cause. The most notable is Union finance minister Arun Jaitley who came out against Section 377 last year. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor introduced a private member’s bill to discuss the section in Parliament but we know what came of that.

Also read: Being gay is not just who you love and sleep with

Meanwhile, on the ground, casual bigotry continues to raise its head. The Aligarh mayor’s action is the latest iteration of how homophobia is used as a stick to inculcate transcendental values, ones that apparently won’t do without some deft indoctrination. She said: “The film is based on same-sex love and that is not Aligarh. We can’t encourage defamation of the city.”

How do you even respond to someone who thinks a cinematic representation of homosexuality defames a city? I could ask the mayor to actually watch the film, which is so much more than the images of horror that homosexual love conjures in her mind. It is really a paean to a way of life, a willingness to live in the shadows as if they were a natural habitat, an instinct for love so immense it does not seek place or time to obtain fruition.

Also read - What's wrong with being gay: When it comes to sex, we're all perverts

But my pleas would undoubtedly fall on deaf years. Politics, such is its business, is a den of compromise, and this in turn throws up candidates and officials who represent the most average among us. Their politics is average, as is their imagination. To expect them to step down from their pedestals and dip into the unspoken, the merely felt, is to undertake some version of a Sisyphean impossibility.

When Hindu Mahasabha leader Kamlesh Tiwari called Prophet Muhammad a homosexual, sending scores of people in western Uttar Pradesh on a spiral of violent outrage, the issue quickly became one of freedom of expression. Had Tiwari crossed a line? He was immediately dispatched to jail, where he remains, even as his utterance led to the subsequent rioting in Malda in West Bengal as well.

Also read: Why is censor okay with sex comedies and not 'love' in Aligarh?

Did I say I was getting tired of boarding the outrage bus? Well, I should not. It is so easy to be outraged in a country where every issue is like a balloon that grows more and more massive as hot air is blown into it until it pops and we forget what it was we were debating in the first place.

Tiwari’s statement and the subsequent backlash played into a symbiotic cycle that has nothing to do with homosexuality and everything to do with politics. It is that stick, again. Use it any time and the outrage machine will be set in motion.

Meanwhile, the gay man lives his life. If he is in Aligarh, he waits to travel to another city to watch the tragedy of someone like him. If he is in Meerut and Malda, he watches in horror as lakhs of people congregate to demand the head of someone who had called a deity homosexual. He fears for his life and he lives in perpetual fear of when the next political crisis will be brought about by some loony element somewhere, evoking his sexuality to score points.

This, when what the homosexual should really be doing is basking in the pained glory of, say, a scene from Aligarh, in which Manoj Bajpai returns to his room and listens to Lata Mangeshkar’s mellifluous voice. He is all by himself, enveloped by melodies the viewer recognises intimately, but which, at that moment, acquire a strange halo. The man at their centre, with his special humanity, his unconquerable difference and his surreal existence, has become one with them.

The scene reminded me of another homosexual, Andrew Beckett, who too listens to opera in the privacy of his room. That film, Philadelphia, changed the national discourse on gay rights in the US. Aligarh may not reach that far but, by itself, it is sufficient. It takes you to the heights of elation and the depths of despair as you watch, with a mix of pride and slowly rising menace, what transpires on the screen. It is that rare cinematic beast, leaving you feeling both wretched and, paradoxically, at peace.

That alone is enough. What if it cannot open the eyes of an unseeing mayor? What if its riches are available only to the broken, blessed few?