“Just like everyone else:” queer representation in postmillennial Bollywood

Abstract

On 6 September 2018, after decades of queer activism, the Supreme Court of India declared unconstitutional the centuries-old law against sodomy, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Shelly Chopra Dhar’s Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (How I felt when I saw that Girl, 2019) and Hitesh Kewalya’s Shubh Mangal Zyaada Saavdhan (Be Extra Wary of Marriage, 2020) were the first two popular Hindi-language films, on same-sex love and desire, to be released after the scrapping of 377. We note the significance of Ek Ladki and Shubh Mangal to destigmatizing non-normative sexualities as well as the identitarian impulse of these films to name, illuminate, and mainstream queer love. We examine these films as they intervene in the broader field of representation and make complex maneuvers to normalize same-sex love and coax the consent of mainstream audiences. They do so by incorporating queer identity and same-sex love in ways that render it non-threatening to the heteronormative status quo. The intertextual allusions to popular Hindi cinema, however, carry queer transgressive potential as they allow for a claiming of a genealogy of queer desire in Hindi cinema.

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