Not a straight line

My Mirror column:

Rima Das’s lovely film Bulbul Can Sing offers an empathetic portrait of a queer Indian teenager: a figure who has finally begun to make an appearance on our screens.

I recently wrote about a Netflix show called Sex Education, a raunchy dramedy about British teenagers. The show's most endearing turn is by Ncuti Gatwa as Eric, black and gay best friend of the white and straight protagonist Otis (Asa Butterfield). Apart from the ups and downs of that central friendship, Gatwa's animated performance brings to life Eric's gradual path to self-discovery: his changing relationship to his father, his conflicted connection with his large, deeply religious family, the fact that his queerness makes him a constant target for bullies at school and in the world beyond, and the complex interplay between fear and defiance with which he responds to that threat of violence.

Through the many wonderful scenes in which Eric starts to come into his own – when he confesses he's gay to a girl who really wants to sleep with him, when he and Otis dress up in long-haired wigs and glorious eyeshadow for Eric's birthday outing, when he admires the “fierce” nailpolish on an older man who stops to ask him for directions – I wondered when and if we might see an Indian character making the journey into queerness.

Watching Rima Das's lyrical, perceptive Bulbul Can Sing at the Habitat Film Festival in Delhi on Saturday, I was glad to find the beginnings of an answer. Das's previous film, Village Rockstars, was about a ten-year-old girl in an Assamese village who longs for a guitar. This film's eponymous Bulbul is also a young girl in rural Assam with musical ambitions, but this time Das is interested in a deeper portrait of teenage friendship and the slow dawning of sexual discovery.

Fifteen-year-old Bulbul lives with her father, mother and little brother in a village home that feels very basic, the lack of televisions and phones, even electricity, making for several lovely lamplit scenes, including a particularly beautiful Diwali sequence. Bulbul doesn’t spend much time at home, though, because most of her day is spent at school or wandering around the fields and rivers with her two close friends and classmates, Bonnie and Suman. 

Bonnie is a girl her own age, but Suman is a boy. For an instant, we feel a jolt of surprise at this fact: a close, unstilted friendship between two adolescent girls and an adolescent boy being allowed to exist, unsupervised, in the sexually restrictive milieu that is the norm in India. Our surprise evaporates quickly, as we realise what everyone in the film already knows, that Suman isn’t a threat: because Suman isn’t interested in girls, not like that.

But he is utterly comfortable with Bonnie and Bulbul, and they with him. Das successfully shows rather than tells us this, through the physical closeness the three share. They can lie about on a mat side by side, one elbowing the other out of the way, or go swimming in the river together, with Bulbul letting Suman scrub her back just as casually as she scrubs Bonnie’s. The lack of sexual tension is part of what makes these scenes so intimate. Its unforced, giggly quality contrasts rather beautifully with the sort of intimacy we get a glimpse of later: the hesitant, hushed moments Das crafts when both the girls meet boys that they are attracted to.

Outside of his easy, loving camaraderie with Bulbul and Bonnie, though, Suman finds it difficult to live comfortably in his own skin. He is mocked nonstop for his effeminate manner, and often harassed with the appellation “Ladies”, even by boys younger than himself. “Ladies, ladies, the ladies toilet is over there,” yells one, while another tries to assemble a group by saying, “Hey, pull his pants down!” “Will you be a bride or a groom?” sniggers yet another.

The one moment when Suman shows any sign of moving towards the self-actualisation of an Eric is when he responds to Bulbul's affectionate teasing with a quiet “Can't I have someone?” The rest of the time, he tries his hardest to ignore the jeering, except when he breaks down.

The figure of the queer child mocked at school appears in another recent Indian film, one that could not be more unlike Bulbul Can Sing in aesthetic terms. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga begins as a standard-issue Bollywood Punjabi family wedding scenario, but a quarter of the way through to be a plea for letting queer love live. Sonam Kapur's Sweety is an adult, but the film draws its emotional appeal from recreating her adolescence: the loneliness of the lesbian teenager who realises she's not like her straight classmates, made worse by the invasion of her privacy when they read her diary. Where Suman befriends two straight girls, and Eric finds a friend in the nerdy Otis, Bollywood's penchant for obviousness is revealed in Sweety's only school friend being an effeminate boy who is mocked even more than her.

Sonam Kapur as Sweety in Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019), now on Netflix.

Perhaps the most devastating such recent Indian portrayal, though, came as a crucial flashback in the Prime series Made in Heaven, where the teenaged version of Arjun Mathur's Karan chooses to keep his 'straight cred' intact by joining in the public savaging of the boy he is himself secretly having an affair with. The series also has Vinay Pathak as the nosy landlord, who owes something to the homophobic neighbour of American Beauty (1999). 

When it's clear you can't beat them, it seems easier to join them. But that only turns the violence upon the self.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 May 2019.