Pain is universal. All of us know it, feel it and live it. Pain connects humanity and evokes feelings of empathy, compassion, sympathy and love in us, emotions that make our hearts expand, filling it with the rush of a swell.
Consequently, pain also makes us feel grief, pity, shame and sorrow, feelings that can overwhelm or drown us under the enormous sound of their howling. Whatever the source of the pain may be, it makes us feel it always has in its thrall, because pain is so relatable. It is a shared experience. It is a unifier. It is a leveler. It is the truth. And all of the pain is rooted in some kind of trauma. There is not a single living animal or person who has not been touched or assaulted by it. Pain and trauma are the stripes we earn, though some wear them as medals and some as scars.
Some of the best queer stories depicted on Hindi celluloid thus far have been embedded in pain and trauma. There is Deepa Mehta’s Fire, a seminal film about forbidden lesbian love and the inferno of its culmination. There is Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh, a heart wrenching story about loneliness and shame that crush the life of a brilliant man. There is Onir’s My Brother Nikhil which poignantly delineates the stigma of HIV/AIDS and the poisonous sting of being ostracised and cancelled because of it. There is Sonali Bose’s Margarita With A Straw where a queer disabled woman very affectingly attempts to disentangle the complicated meaning of her sexuality, while she also navigates the ever-shifting vagaries of life as a woman living with cerebral palsy. There is Neeraj Ghaywan’s Geeli Puuchi, one of the short films from the Ajeeb Daastaans anthology that portrays the challenges of same-sex love through the burdensome, oppressive and divisive prism of class. These are some of the films that instantly come to mind when one thinks of LGBTQIA+ representation in Hindi cinema. What they share in common is that they are really great films and all of their amazing stories having emerged from a wellspring of pain and trauma, an emotion that connects us all.
As a writer and a filmmaker, I too have delved into my own reservoir of pain and trauma when I created the series Human. Kirti Kulhari’s character in Human is that of a closeted lesbian. She is also a bright and gifted heart surgeon who should have scaled big heights in her career, but her own deceptions, secrets and shame come in the way of her destiny and turn her into a compulsive liar, the consequences of which make her life spiral out of control and explode into complete ruination. To be deceitful becomes her leitmotif because that is how she lives her life. Her lies destroy her, leading to the violent deaths of her husband and herself, and even though she eventually comes out, the damage is done, and it is irreversible, because that’s death’s absolute power over us all.
Kirti performed the role superbly and it was a joy to write her character and to direct her, but after the shows release and success and once I had had some distance from the world of Human, I realised that I also am limiting the LGBTQIA+ experience to the realms of pain and trauma. There is so much more to being queer. There is all of life. There have been countless Hindi films and series where the queer character is either shoved into the plot for the sake of tokenism or then for some kind of absurdist comical relief. These efforts amount to feeling incomplete or embarrassingly humiliating, as though the queer experience is limited to swinging between only two realities- deep pain or a silly farce. This also constrains queer stories into airless boxes of being ‘different’, eventually making the proposition of creating a queer film a box office risk, as these films are considered too arthouse or indie to get the largest swath of audiences into cinemas. India’s $61 billion screen industry reflects South Asia’s creative boom and yet, queer stories remain on the fringes, only sometimes making the odd leap into the lucrative and vast ocean of commercial cinema, where all other stories exist.
The time has come to turn the page. Queer stories are universal stories. Pain, trauma, happiness, elation and everything else that comes with the human experience—all the agonies and the ecstasies—are emotions felt by every living person. Nothing is singularly felt by only heterosexual people, and everything that queer people feel is not exclusively relegated to the LGBTQIA+ world. There have been some great examples like Tiger Baby’s Made In Heaven, Harshvardhan Kulkarni’s Badhaai Do and Hitesh Kewalya’s Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan that have equally balanced the enmeshing of heterosexual and queer stories, never making one feel more different or more other than each other. We need to have more of these so that the level-playing field for everyone becomes the same.
Everyone is relevant. We all matter.
Would it really be such an abomination to have a queer character play an action hero, a spy, a president, a megastar, a sports icon, a soldier, or a superhero? Would the film or the series really become unrelatable if the central figures in them were queer or is all this ‘othering’ only reflective of a conditioned mindset that is afraid to bend the rules beyond a point, because it would decimate a centuries old societal construct that would upend the balance of power in our world?
In Human, we ensured that both Shefali Shah and Kirti’s characters had equal and parallel tracks and they were both the leads of the show, but if I had to do it all over again, I would do things differently by not rooting the crux of Kirti’s character in pain and trauma. This time, I would root it in joy. Because just like pain, joy is also inherent to the queer experience, and all of it is ultimately inherent to the human experience. And just like pain, joy too is infectious; joy too is universal. I personally feel that an emotion like joy has an even bigger chance to connect with a larger audience, because rapture is a benevolent feeling, while agony only gnaws.
And that is what I will do next. As a filmmaker, the power to tell a story in a big, beautiful and bombastic film, which is an ode to exhilaration and where the lead character is queer, is in my hands. The moot point of this film will be the sexual preference of the lead character, because whether he loves or hates, kills or saves, or has his heart burst open like a hot air balloon that blows up as it can no longer contain the wonder it feels as it touches the sky...what he feels is not because he is queer or straight, but only because he is human, like the rest of us.
We are all connected. And the sooner we realise this, we will have more stories to tell, more films and series to make, more ways to entertain each other, and more ways to spread the joy.
