The new Indian mutiny - Indian lesbians

Interview, Sept, 1997 by Graham Fuller

India may have thrown off the British yoke fifty years ago, but if you're an untouchable, a woman, a lesbian, or a gay, then independence is as mythical a state as it must have seemed at the height of the Raj. By all accounts, though, the bastions of patriarchy and Brahmanism are crumbling, and the desire to chip away at their foundations is currently exemplified by Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things (in which a Christian businesswoman sleeps with an outcast Hindu handyman) and director Deepa Mehta's film Fire.

The first Indian movie about a lesbian relationship, Fire, unsurprisingly, wasn't financed by "Bollywood" (India's film industry), but by private interests in Canada, where there's a prospering Hindu film community. It has yet to arrive in the subcontinent; when it does, it's sure-to be controversial. Here in America, where the movie opened a week after the August 15 anniversary of national emancipation, it may barely pass muster as Queer cinema, since its protagonists embrace lesbianism primarily because they are sexually rejected by their husbands. But if Fire isn't militant, or even that energized, it quivers with subtleties and makes a potent statement about the quest for freedom in a transitional society.

Mehta begins the film with an idyll - a little girl sitting in a field of yellow flowers with her parents - that encodes freedom as something elusive but not quite out of reach, "A long time ago," says the mother, "there were people living high up in the mountains, They had never seen the sea. They had heard about it, but had never seen it. And this made them feel very sad. And then an old woman in the village said, 'Don't be sad. What you can't see, you can see. You just have to see without looking.' Sita, do you understand?" "No," says the child, and nor do we until much later in the movie.

Sita is an anagram for sati, which in Hindi means both "chaste wife" and the ritual of death by immolation for widows in India, which flourished to a horrendous extent among the Brahmans of Bengal between 1680 and 1830 and still has its goddesses and advocates in India today, In Mehta's story, Sita (Nandita Das) will play with another kind of fire: the fire of resistance. We meet her again as a radiant grown-up woman on her honeymoon. She's dressed traditionally, in a sari, and enthusing about the spectacle of the Tai Mahal, which stands before her a few hundred yards away. However, her husband, Jatin (Jaaved Jaaferi), who's dressed in Western-style casuals, couldn't be more bored by this monument to feminine amplitude, or by Sita and her taste for old-fashioned movies; he tells her he prefers Hong Kong action flicks. We learn that theirs is an arranged marriage, and that Jatin is in love with his Chinese mistress (Alice Poon) - a hairdresser who smugly aspires to become an actress, the next Maggie Cheung, perhaps - whom he's not about to relinquish.

Jatin symbolizes the modern, entrepreneurial, eminently corruptible, materialist India. Beneath the family apartment, he runs a video store alongside his brother Ashok's restaurant and hawks porno tapes to kids. Ashok (Kulbushan Kharbanda), meanwhile, is in what we Westerners call denial: Fifteen years into his own arranged marriage, he has given up having sex with his infertile wife, Radha (the great Shabana Azmi), and become a religious cultist. The menage - an embattled cross section of spiritually challenged Indian society - is completed by Jatin and Ashok's deaf, bedridden mother. Biji (Kushal Rekhi), as cantankerous a crone as the ancient aunt in Pather Panchali (1955), and the fawning servant Mundu (Ranjit Chowdhry), who jerks off to Jatin's videos in front of the old lady while the rest of the family is out. The heterosexual nirvana promised in the Kama Sutra, and in Mira Nair's glossy 1997 film version, doesn't obtain in this household.

Sita tries to make a go of her marriage. Jatin has sex with her occasionally, but he might as well not bother. She frequently retreats to the roof of the house and looks out over New Delhi at night. Radha sometimes joins her there to sympathize with her plight. The two women draw close and eventually become lovers; watching the movie, it's what you want for them. Their lovemaking is tender and passionate - like that of, say, the Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke characters in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) - and, mercifully, it's not dramatized for our titillation (it isn't the kind of alienatingly stylized spectacle that would get Mundu off). The climax of the film comes not when these women decide to run off together, thereby outlawing themselves from society (like the homo. sexual lovers who disappear into the greenwood at the end of E.M. Forster's Maurice), but at the moment when, condemned by the furious Ashok, Radha's sari catches light and threatens to engulf her in flame. Old india might want to burn the very celluloid that Fire is printed on when the film opens there, as Mehta well knows; but then, old In dia, like Biji, left lying on the floor by the flare-up, is slowly dying.