Is 2008 India’s year of the queer? We’ve seen defiant and exuberant LGBT pride marches across Indian cities, we’ve witnessed some determined legal siege warfare and public debate against Section 377, and now we can cap the year with that ultimate imprimatur of mainstream belonging — a Karan Johar movie.But don’t bring out your rainbow flags just yet. It’s a category mistake, like looking for Mona Lisa’s smile in a yellow emoticon, to expect any kind of grand gay glasnost from Dostana. First, it’s not a gay movie in any sense — even the lead characters are only pretending, at great pains; no member of the cast or crew is openly gay, and the couple of gay characters in the movie are flaming stereotypes. All Dostana does is verbalise and extend the jokey Kal Ho Na Ho shtick and throw in a few smutty asides to audiences which collapse in nervous giggles at the very mention of the word “gay”.Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham claim they’re in love with each other, to weasel their way into Priyanka Chopra’s apartment, and later, to speed up a US residency application as a same-sex couple. ‘Lekin-main-gay-nahin-hoon’ Abraham shudders at the idea, while Bachchan throws himself into the role with some gusto (and great mincing exaggeration). They make lame jokes, get inadvertently caught in compromising positions, and are even (spoiler alert) forced into a passionate lip-lock, though their revulsion is writ large. Kirron Kher’s admittedly funny turn as the horrified Punjabi mom mines the theme for more laughs.But the fascination of Dostana is the way it reassures the hetero-normative in and among us, while simultaneously straining against its own limits, holding out disturbing thought-trails. “Gabbar was definitely gay,” announces Abhishek Bachchan. “And come on, Munna and Circuit?” Abraham snorts in disbelief, as do many viewers doubtless, but the movie succeeds in hinting at the long buried history of the homoerotic in Hindi film.If you watch Bollywood with a queer eye, the subtext practically leaps out at you; in the decades of yaari-dosti films that prize male bonds over everything, in the chemistry and complicity between, say, Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor (check out the shower scene in Silsila for some unexpected gender bending). Many of these films were love triangles on the face of it, but we knew that the girl was ultimately incapable of rupturing the great friendship. As Eve Sedgwick has perceptively pointed out in Epistemology of the Closet, in a love triangle the desire between the rivals is just as strong if not stronger than the desire between each rival and the beloved — male-male desire becomes widely intelligible by being routed through triangular desire involving a woman.Obviously, this is not to suggest that Dharmendra just wanted to get it on with Amitabh Bachchan and that Hema Malini was just a stand-in. Just like our dreamlife taps into deep wells of anxiety and longing, our cinema is strewn with counter-reading possibilities. Between the straight telling you can occasionally glimpse the red thread of sexual subversion that loops through popular culture. But if such a reading seems scandalous or utterly at odds with the innocent intention of its makers, later films were much more openly suggestive. In the early ’90s, as film scholar Thomas Waugh notes, Akshay Kumar and Saif Khan pairings set a whole new standard for wink-wink nudge-nudge semiotic play. Kumar was all testosterone to Khan’s effete appeal, yang to his yin.Interestingly, in the aftermath of the film, Akshay Kumar gamely vamped it out for Bombay Dost, reaching out to his queer fans; while Saif Khan punched the daylights out of the gay critic who questioned his sexual leanings. If there are any gay people in the movie industry, we don’t know about it. It’s still a prickly subject — notice how anyone who plays a gay character in a Bollywood (or Hollywood) movie immediately puts a mile between themselves and the character, stressing the great discomfort of kissing an actor of the same sex. Philip Hensher of The Guardian quotes Jake Gyllenhaal, star of Brokeback Mountain, “Heath and I were both saying, ‘Let’s get the love scenes over as fast as we can — all right, cool. Let’s get to the important stuff’”, though really, Hensher notes, “as jobs go, being asked to snog Heath Ledger is not among the world’s more demanding professional tasks”. Of course, it must help that in real life, Abraham and Bachchan have the perfect sexual alibis in Bipasha Basu and Aishwarya Rai — there’s no danger of anything icky attaching to them.Which is not to claim that Dostana is an entirely wasted effort from a queer perspective. Through the adolescent joking and gross caricatures, it slips in a few sideway jabs. The ‘Ma ka laadla bigad gaya’ song is a crowing, triumphant announcement of alternative sexuality, as Abhishek Baccchan and John Abraham touch and cuddle, much to Kirron Kher’s horror. And unlike Kal Ho Na Ho’s silent, aghast Kantaben, Kirron Kher wails and beats her chest, but comes around to theatrically accepting her son’s “choice”.Instead of the culturally mandated “it’s all about loving your family” ethos of Hindi movies, the film suggests a different kind of kinship, an improvised, less conventional but rock-solid companionship. The lead characters are as healthily homophobic as the next Indian guy, but the end of the film manages to shake the surety of their sexual preferences. And the most enormous change is that Dostana names the unsaid, replaces ambiguities and evasions with the power of public utterance — it confronts wide and various audiences with ostensibly gay characters. And who knows, perhaps laughter and cheesy uplift can subtly wedge the door open in ways that a serious, p.c., full frontal take in non-mainstream movies like My Brother Nikhil may not manage. Dostana might not be the great leap forward for gay mainstreaming, but perhaps, picture abhi baaki hai.amulya.gopalakrishnan@expressindia.com
