Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit in the 90s defined queer. As someone recently told me, the best definition of being queer is ‘when you can be your absolute authentic self without having to fit the prescribed morals of society’. A lot of the cinema of the 90s saw women celebrating their bodies and their sexuality, without ever giving away their agency.
Madhuri and Sridevi were the closest I came to seeing desire being celebrated. Sridevi in Mr. India I’m always asked the question: ‘Is your next story a queer story?’ I feel it’s an unfair and unimaginative question.
It can be a cishet (cisgender heterosexual) love story and still be a queer film because I look at life, desire and relationships outside of society’s binaries. The minute you try to box people, you are doing them a disservice. The reductionist label undermines my other identities — I’m also a Bengali filmmaker, a Mumbai-based filmmaker.
I’ve made Nayantara’s Necklace , which is about two women bonding over many idle afternoons and talking about their desire for the men in their lives. It is the politics of desire, whether queer or straight, that interests me the most. Konkona Sen and Tillotama Shome in Nayantara’s Necklace Realities of a hyper-capitalist world I hate the word ‘representation’ because it reeks of charity.
It suggests that in a largely straight world a few stray mentions should be enough to acknowledge our existence. You see a lot of token queer characters in mainstream shows an.
