Out of the box

At a film screening earlier this week, an auditorium full of people settled down to watch a short and a documentary about courtship and marriage. The short film, featured two kisses that had stuck in the maw of the censor board (who finally gave it an A certificate) and some discussion ensued about whether this made sense to the audience or not -- were the kisses prurient? Should U certified films not contain such intimacies for fear of corrupting families (why ask how families are produced in the first place, baba, what indecency!)?



Suddenly a perky young man plaintively asked "But how come there was there no homosexual kissing?" A minute of perplexed silence -- it was a film about a man proposing to a woman two weeks before her wedding to another man. Even two years ago people would have been uncomfortable at best, censorious at worst -- not saying the question was "bad" but that it was "silly" -- which is so often liberal people's pompous way of avoiding talk of sex. However, very quickly the audience understood that the unfortunate chap had perhaps thought he was attending a queer film festival that was to kickstart at the same venue two days later and he was helpfully and kindly enlightened. He lapsed into his seat resigned and watched the next film with dark glasses on, maybe to ensure that none of his cooler friends recognised him in this primarily heterosexual audience -- which is perfectly understandable.

Within one month the city has hosted two queer film festivals -- Queer Nazariya in early April and the ongoing Kashish Queer Film Fest. Kashish is a tempting array of the political, the romantic, the issue-based and the whimsical from around the world -- putting on an equal footing, unlike most film festivals in the country, documentaries, shorts, features, campaigns and music videos. The programming messes with both, the strict political categories of how sexuality is understood, and the way the market and the government divide art forms into creative hierarchies.

If only this form-free continuum could enter our public and personal understanding of sexuality too. In a superb interview,u00a0 Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh while discussing his acting turn in a film as a transgender performer said: Section 377 has created a polarity between homosexuals and heterosexuals. It doesn't deal with the entire matrix of sexualities in between these two polars -- that's where androgyny lies."

This is a vital thought that touches everyone's intimate selves. While years of activism have finally made it possible to talk about gay-ness and bisexuality, there is a fear it may remain in a separated, though vocal discussion space. But right now, heterosexuality is perhaps the most unthinkingly boxed up of all. Between the moral police and a fake sense of freedom that comes from belonging to a "normal" or mainstream identity, we hardly raise questions about the sexual and erotic nature of heterosexual experience; Couple-dom and monogamy, single only till married, seem to be the only sexual choices we discuss -- we hardly talk about the many ways of being straight sexual beings that are actually practised by people. We allow a censor board to tell us we cannot watch a kiss, that wonderful open quotation mark of desire, for fear of obscenity corrupting us. As if the market dictated ideas of plastic love, conformist gym-made bodies and the salacious eye of reality television had not corrupted and distorted our relationship with a most human part of ourselves.

Hopefully the Cinematograph Act will take off its dark glasses soon. Meanwhile, we must keep searching for a more fluid art, more porous definitions through which to celebrate our many ways of living and desiring in this world.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer, teacher and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. She runs Devi Pictures production company. Reach her at www.parodevi.com