Lesbian romance on Indian TV is a good start, but disappointing
MTV's relationships show The Big F ran its sixth episode this Sunday. Called "I Kissed a Girl", the episode explores a lesbian relationship. When I read about the episode, which seems to have become a sensation on social media, I was chary of watching it. Representations of gay identity on Indian screen, big or small, are laden with the most despicable stereotypes. The men are nearly always promiscuous sidekicks who have no role except to make the straight protagonist look good.
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| A still from "I Kissed A Girl". |
While that is bad enough, the representation of lesbians is worse. There is too much focus on the physical, in scenes that elaborate on the women's budding homosexuality with no attention paid to the emotional arc of the characters. The danger in such representation is that it does not educate but titillate, aimed as it is at heterosexual men eager to lap up images of women making out. An egregious film that comes to mind is 2004's Girlfriend, which had Isha Koppikar and Amrita Arora play lesbians. The movie was so devoid of any sensitivity in portrayal and so vicious in its branding of alternative sexuality it put me off representation of the homosexual in Indian film forever.
But things have gotten better over time. The Anouk ad from earlier this year showcased a lesbian couple who are due to meet the parents of one. It was a beautifully executed ad that made an emotionally fulfilling statement on such relationships. There have been other well-done LGBT representations on film in the recent past, such as the National Award-winning performance of Sanchari Vijay as a transgender in the Kannada film Naanu Avanalla Avalu.
So it was with optimism-flecked trepidation that I watched The Big F episode. And while the show can certainly do with better production values and finer acting, I think it did okay overall. It was tacky, yes, and it was not as politically correct as I would have liked. But I speak as a gay man so my expectations are different. To a receptive straight audience, it would work because it was not burdened with unnecessary drama and stereotypes.
One issue with the episode, and the show in general, is the host Gautam Gulati. When presenting a show on a sensitive topic such as this, the host is expected to do away with badassery. Gulati is not the person for the job; his body language is too I-know-better to handle the narration of a lesbian romance. At several points in the story, his words, which carried calls for greater acceptance of LGBT, were matched by a flick of the eyebrow or a tightening of the jaw that indicated something less noble, even satirical. So yes, Gulati was a definite no.
The story revolves around a fashion designer Sharmishtha, a regular kid whose best pal Ritesh often ribs her over her single status. "Are you not into boys?" he teases her, and Sharmishtha smiles. Maybe she is indeed not into boys, but she, and we, don't know this yet. It is her reaction, though - the calm, composed way in which she can joke about something so intimate, something that includes the possibility that she is into women - that marks a change in how gayness is portrayed on the Indian screen.
When she meets Madhurima, who will model her dresses, her eyes soften and she displays all the crazed markings of first love. They have a conversation about how Shamishtha wants to design clothes that are not intended for the male gaze, but which celebrate womanhood. It is a rather evolved conversation, held in the backdrop of the viewer's growing realisation of Sharmishtha's gayness. When she tells Madhurima that she wants to make designs that bring out a woman's sexuality without objectifying her, we laud not just her feminism but the slow-dripping erotica of her statement.
The story proceeds as a love triangle between the three, with Madhurima the object of affection of both Ritesh and Sharmishtha. Madhurima, on her part, discovers she too is attracted to both (a rather neat nod to bisexuality). Following this, there is some avoidable drama in which everyone looks hurt and mouths platitudes about how friendship is more important than love, etc. Finally, there is the mandatory reconciliation scene in which the girls choose one another while the boy walks into the sunset.
Sure, "I Kissed a Girl" is not great television. It retains a regrettable superficiality in that its characters do not plumb real depths of love, tension or heartbreak. Even so, in flipping the script of the traditional Indian TV trope of the gay dude or gal sacrificing their happiness for the straight friend, it breaks new ground. My LGBT friends may pooh-pooh a drama that seems ages behind some of the groundbreaking stuff beaming into our homes on Netflix and Amazon TV, but if "I Kissed a Girl" is a start, it is a welcome one.