June 30, 2004
“Hurray for Bollywood!?”
Is Bollywood going gay? Maybe not as quickly as Hollywood, but they’re moving in a big way. Two movies, Girlfriend and Men Not Allowed, are taking on the L Word a big way.
Well, it’s not exactly all good. Girlfriend is about a closeted Lesbian turned psycho killer when her best friend starts dating a guy, what this article calls a Hindi version of Single White Female The movie is causing an uproar among conservatives in India calling it evil, and feminist and lesbian groups that rightfully claim it preys on old stereotypes.
- Conservative Hindus protest both the inclusion of a love scene between the women and the lesbian theme in general. "This film is evil and it will be stopped," said Jai Bhagwan Goel, the Delhi chief of Hindu conservative group Shiv Sena. "It pollutes our society and moral culture." Only a few hundred people protested, but their actions (tearing posters down, breaking windows, and even ingesting poison) were enough to shut down future screenings of the films in many Indian cities.
Lesbian Hindus and progressive Hindu women's organizations protest the film as well, calling it "pornographic" and "highly regressive" (at the same time finding it "disconcerting to be on the same side as these right wing organizations," as women's activist Prabha Nagaraja told the India Times). Besides lesbians as psycho-killers, Girlfriend also promotes stereotypes of lesbians as victims of sexual abuse and as effeminate caricatures of men, according to lesbian and women's groups in India.
‘‘Girlfriend follows the 1940s-50s Hollywood formula where films featured the murderous lesbian," Ruth Vanita, co-author of Same Sex Love in India, told ExpressIndia.com. "This is a harmful film," she asserts, but adds "it’s cinematically of such poor quality, it’s so boring, that I don’t think it’s even worth a protest.’’
Despite the stereotypes and underlying message of both – that same sex love ultimately leads to tragedy, to name just one – according to this analysis, it may be a sign that things in India are starting to open up.
- While the content of these films is clearly negative and stereotypical, it wasn't too long ago that the same could be said of most lesbian characters and storylines in Hollywood. In order for India to work through these stereotypes and finally provide a positive portrayal of lesbianism someday, the subject has to first become part of the national conversation in India--just as the protests in the U.S. at the premiere of Basic Instinct in 1992 forced a national discussion in America about the harmful stereotypes of lesbian and bisexual women that Hollywood routinely reinforced.
And while it has taken eight years since the debut of Fire for another Bollywood film to broach the taboo subject of lesbianism, it will only be another year or so until No Men Allowed debuts, and another one is likely to come along within a few years of that--until eventually, non-psycho-killer lesbians in India will finally see reflections of themselves on-screen, too.