Disability in Bollywood: Are all sexual choices discriminatory in nature?

In the 2005 movie Black, when a visually challenged and hearing impaired Rani Mukherjee, asks Amitabh Bachchan, her teacher, to kiss her, he says, “Shayad tumhe sharirik pyar kabhi na mile (You may never know sexual love)”. He then kisses her anyway, because she asks him to.

Those who are abreast with the criticism that followed this film (“Taking advantage” of a differently abled person, et al) must know that there were moral lines attached to the teacher-student relationship, now considered breached. One out of many examples, the sexuality of the differently abled, has been treated as a medical issue on the grounds of science, and a “lack” in terms of social science. What is also evident is an inability to grasp the complexity of sexual excesses, especially of the differently abled. A little more nuanced portrayal was Sridevi and Kamal Hassan’s infantile relationship in Sadma, where her growing sexual proximity to Kamal Hassan leads to the twist in the film — the recovery of Sridevi’s lost memory.

Much work has gone into the depiction of such characters as protoypes of destructive sexuality, revenge and family disgrace in India, especially on television and in cinema. Yet, sexual excess is a relatively unexplored theme, misunderstood when we talk about the differently abled. In the 1980s, the term “differently abled” was proposed, so it would carry a positive meaning. It is significant to locate how this “different ability” has been trapped within Indian mythology, a site where much inspiration comes from, for TV shows. For instance, Manthara and Shakuni, amongst other differently abled characters in epics like Mahabharat and Ramayana, have been portrayed as the leading pathways to evil — they manoeuvre their sexual jealousies so as to avenge all those who ridicule their deformity.

From disgruntled evil looks to caricatures, Bollywood has previously dealt with the subject of the sexuality of the differently abled, time and again, in films such as Black, Omkara, and Sadma. What is interesting in these three films is the rupture the plot is subjected to, from the moment a differently abled person expresses his/her sexual desires.

All of this came rushing to me with the release of Margarita, with a Straw, a heart wrenching film that expresses the desires of a differently abled woman in a way that doesn’t feel contrived or over the top. She is painted as a person whose own perception of sexuality undergoes self-reflection. The film’s greatest achievement, I feel, is the portrayal of three differently abled individuals — Laila, Dhruv and Khannum — in their unabashed articulation of their evolving sexual identities. In this process, they also struggle with the difficulty of making up their minds about the category that the rest of the crowd has thrust them into — as disabled, asexual creatures.

The idea of sexual privacy is incomprehensible to Laila’s Aai, someone who has washed her private organs right from her childhood. This is particularly interesting — a differently abled woman, it is assumed has nothing as a private space. Aai is repulsed at the thought of her daughter watching porn and doubly disgusted when she discovers about Khannum’s sexual orientation. She is unable to fathom a relationship involving two “crippled” women who are exercising their sexual agency.

Another factor comes to mind when we think of Laila’s sexual agency — the focus of the film. This concerns Dhruv, her differently abled friend who says “It sucked”, referring to their little make-out session in college. As Laila falls for Nima — a “normal” guy here, who clearly doesn’t have any romantic feelings for her, Dhruv angrily says, “Normal logo ke saath dosti karne se tum normal nehi ban jaogi”. Contrast this with Khannum’s assertion after Laila shares her afternoon of heterosexual love making with her assistant “So by fucking you, he made you feel normal!”.

While Dhruv speaks from a perspective that’s more gloomy towards the “normal” world (in a way, he has made peace with his self-classification as a disabled person), Khannum speaks from experience. Her disgust hints at biased treatment in the past, she seems to have suffered at the hands of those “tackling” disabled people in a move to “normalise” them. Laila, is of course, ambiguous about her sexual act, which makes her character very complex. Even though she says "sorry", as viewers we know that she is not quite apologetic.

Are all choices, sexual being one of them, discriminatory in nature? Is there a thin line between rejection of certain things we don’t end up choosing and the ones we do that constitute our identity?

Laila, too, discriminates against her girlfriend because she wants to have sex with someone who could “see” her. Even a woman who has faced discrimination in the past owing to her physical condition, is in a position to discriminate against others. This totally changes the way we have been accustomed to seeing the differently abled on screen — in two polar opposites — either as a pitiable asexual object exploited in some way or as a malevolent wicked harbinger of destruction.

All of us, knowingly or unknowingly, make choices that are irrational, arbitrary and entirely discriminatory in a way because this discrimination is part of our sexual identity, indeed our identity as a whole. Life is full of flaws, and it is the flaws that makes us, and Laila, Khannum and Dhruv, equally humane.

The beauty lies in finding meaning underneath those flaws and to keep sipping our own margaritas, with or without our straws.