Bollywood is filled with love stories about going against the norms of society or family expectations but few Hindi films have dealt with LGBTQ characters.
But in the past few years have seen a shift. Shelly Chopra Dhar and Gazal Dhaliwal‘s 2019 comedy-drama Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga showed a queer woman’s attempt to come out to her family. It starred a Bollywood legend Anil Kapoor and his daughter Sonam Kapoor.
Since then, a slate Bollywood rom-coms have put LGBTQ relationships at he center of the storyline. Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020), Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021) and Badhaai Do (2022) each feature gay or trans characters in relationships who eventually come up against disapproving family members. In true Bollywood style, they have song and dance numbers and happy endings.
Ulka Anjaria, a professor at Brandeis University who teaches South Asian literature and film says,
They get you emotionally involved and caring about this love story. They make the parents the enemies of love and make them have to change their mind. It just shows the complete beauty of queer romance.”
"We're taught at a young age that what matters to you is "What do people think?", and by the end, the father just wants to do what makes his daughter happy." —Amita Handa on @AnilKapoor's character in EK LADKI. #Pride pic.twitter.com/0VNARSUHuP
— TIFF (@TIFF_NET) June 13, 2019
LGBTQ-focused plotlines might seem radical for the Hindi film industry and they are, but what has changed is how overtly the relationships and love is portrayed onscreen.
As Harmeet Kaur of CNN writes,
It was more common, however, for Indian films to reduce LGBTQ characters to stereotypes or to invoke homosexuality for comedic purposes. The 2003 blockbuster “Kal Ho Naa Ho” includes a gag in which a maid mistakes the two leading men for a couple and subsequently reacts in horror.
The 2004 film “Girlfriend” features a lesbian character who is jealous and vindictive and ultimately meets a tragic end — a textbook example of the “bury your gays” trope. And the 2008 smash hit “Dostana,” about two men who pretend to be a couple so they can share an apartment with a woman, is rife with caricatured notions of gay men.
Now these films are understood to be homophobic and they’ve aged pretty badly. But many Hindi films from the past show intense male friendships that can be interpreted as gay, like Dosti (1964), Anand (1971) and Sholay (1975).
The Indian LGBTQ rom-coms today pay homage those earlier films. Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, a story about a gay couple struggling to be accepted by their families, alludes to the iconic motorbike scene in Sholay and includes a nod to the movie Dosti as well.
In 2018, India’s main court overturned a colonial era law criminalizing homosexuality. Since then with this shift in film depiction for LGBTQ characters in films, maybe LGBTQ representation in the Indian media is helping to move the dial in social norms overall.
Meheli Sen, an associate professor at Rutgers University who studies Bollywood says,
I don’t think it’s inconsequential that you can see queer people as regular people in media texts — they’re not these freaks of nature, they’re not dressed weirdly.
Just normalizing certain kinds of sexual subjectivities is a big, big part of the job, and that is happening.”
