Description

Bombay cinema (or ‘Bollywood’) has always enjoyed an iconic status among queer subcultures even though explicit references to queer sexuality have been largely absent. The first two decades of the new millennium witnessed dramatic changes in the Indian mediascape following the liberalization of the economy, the ‘opening of the skies’ and the rise of the Hindu Right. Caught in the grip of rapid cultural transformations, Bollywood films become a site of competing discourses around sexuality, providing perceptive, even controversial insights into the articulation of desire. As queer sexuality is rendered visible, cinephiles find themselves engaging with not just the ‘story’ but the ‘telling’ of it.

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Shohini Ghosh is Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia, a Central University in New Delhi, India. She is the director of Tales of the Nightfairies (2002) a film about sex workers’ struggle for rights in Calcutta. She is also the author of the book on Deepa Mehta’s Fire for the Queer Classics series published by Arsenalpulp Press, Canada.