how to see what you can’t
by Douglas Messerli
Deepa Mehta (screenwriter and director) Fire
/ 1996
Put simply, Deepa Mehta’s 1996 film Fire is
arguably the most profound cinematic representation of Indian lesbianism to
date. Unquestionably it has had the most profound effect on the subcontinent’s
LGBTQ community of its day, particularly when one recalls that India did not
fully embrace lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender rights until 2018.
As
Dipanita Nath wrote in The Indian Express in 2016 “Nearly 20 years ago,
unaided by Twitter and Facebook, a film went viral in India. Fire was
the first in mainstream Indian cinema to explore homosexual love. It introduced
a taboo subject to the audience of the world’s largest film-producing and
film-viewing nation. Off screen, it was the target of vandals, spawned a civil
society movement, led to adjournments in Parliament and exposed men’s underwear
as agitprop. In the year of its 20th anniversary, Fire retains its
position as a relevant reference for films on gender relationships in India.
Last year, the British Film Institute selected Fire as one of its top 10
feminist films.”
The
plot of Mehta’s movie is quite straightforward, expressed clearly so that no
one watching it might confuse its sympathies. The work begins with the
marriage, by arrangement, of the beautiful woman Sita (Nandita Das) to Jatin
(Javed Jaffrey). Already on the third day of their honeymoon, on a visit to the
Taj Mahal in Agra, Jatin makes it quite apparent that he does not love his
bride.
Soon after he takes her to his family home where, in the traditional
marital arrangement, she will reside with his elder brother Ashok (Kulbhushan
Kharbanda), his wife Radha (Shabana Azmi), their paralyzed mother Biji (Kushal
Rekhi), and their servant Mundu (Ranjit Chowdhry). From her downstairs kitchen,
Radha runs a street-side food service, while in an adjacent space Ashok and
Jatin operate a business that rents videotapes, many of them, apparently
without Ashok’s knowledge, pornographic in nature. Indeed, Ashok, having come
under the influence of Swamiji (Ram Gopal Bajaj), who preaches celibacy and
related abstentions, spends most of his nights away listening to the
pronouncements of this cult-like leader which last long into the night.
Although little is outwardly expressed about their relationship, Mehta
makes it clear that it is parallel to Jatin’s obsession with his Chinese lover
Julie (Alice Poon), who has refused to marry him because of his demand that she
live in the traditional marital situation in which Sita now finds herself.
Jatin too spends most of his nights with Julie, and the director makes the
connection between the two brothers’ objects of affection by pausing over the
kiss of respect that Ashok places on Swamiji’s foot before quickly shifting to
a scene in which Jatin continues to kiss Julie’s feet. Ashok also provides his
Swamiji with regular payments to help cover expenses for his medicine to ease
the mentor’s hydrocele condition resulting in the swelling and enlargement of
the testicles, while Jatin pays regularly for Julie’s expenses. In short, both
these brothers prefer the company of others than the two women with whom they
have wedded.
Is
it any wonder that, even without even knowing all of these facts, Sita, after
meeting the family, rushes into her bedroom to remove her sari and put on a
pair of blue jeans to dance in celebratory memory of her youthful modernity?
She has been suddenly dropped into a paternalistic world which is almost
utterly foreign to her. Biji rings her bell in anger when she sees Sita out of
her traditional dress. And throughout Mehta’s subtle interweaving of images and
sound that reveal a far greater profundity than the plot, bells are used to
remind the characters that they have stepped beyond the traditional values.
Radha, we soon discover, has long been living in a situation quite
similar to the one with Sita is now suddenly faced, for it was when she
discovered that she was infertile that her husband took up with the religious
prophet who insists sexual contact should be permitted only as a means of
procreation. Accordingly, Ashok, in his attempts to qualm desire, has not slept
with his wife for 13 years, putting his commitment to celibacy to the test by
lying next to Radha for long hours while completely motionless. For Radha
marriage if not just symbolically a living death, but represents an actual
stasis, a paralysis that has stricken her as surely as it has her
mother-in-law.
Similarly, while Ashok and Jatin almost passively adore the embodiments
of their loves, Mandu sees his own body as something to be pleasured, sneaking
Jatin’s porno tapes into the family apartment and, while pretending to watch
Biji’s favorite Bollywood renditions of Hindu myths, jacking off, while the old
woman endlessly rings her bell in frustrated disdain.
It is no accident that Radha and Sita, particularly given their desolate
estate with regard to their connubial lives, begin to take notice of one
another. If their relationship starts with a simple admiration of each other’s
fortitude and honesty, it quickly transforms into their recognition of each
other as a beautiful being, moving quickly to gentle touches, momentary
episodes of hand-holding, and with the younger girl’s lead, to
kisses—transporting the two women soon after into each other’s empty bed.
Some US critics complained that the love scenes between the women were hidden in the shadows or, to quote San Francisco Chronicle critic Peter Stack, that the movie “is lacking a sense of fire.” Roger Ebert, who has long been diffident about LGBTQ movies, even felt the film “is all but stolen by Chowdry, as the servant who lurks constantly in the background providing, with his very body language, a comic running commentary detailing the situations....” I have no comprehension of how the villain of this work might be seen as more important than the love of these two beautiful women—who Mehta does show kissing, stroking one another’s breasts, and embracing in bed—might be of lesser interest than the sculking masturbator who, again out of paternalistic concern, reveals the lovemaking of Radha and Sita to Ashok. Perhaps men simply want a clearer picture of lesbian lovemaking so that, as Mandu seeks, it might sexually excite them. But then Mehta’s film is not really about “lesbianism” as much it is about two women coming to love one another enough to determine to leave their husbands and live the rest of their lives together, willing to forever leave behind the walking dead. I might remind those who wanted to see more hot action, moreover, that Radha’s mother long ago successfully taught her: “You just have see what you can’t see.”
The fact that in order to accomplish this Radha actually has to endure a
real fire like the ancient goddess Sita of myth—which her husband once
again passively observes as her headdress bursts into flames—speaks of the
literalness of his gender. If in that act she symbolically proves the
sacredness of her love for the contemporary Sita, it hardly matters since she
has already long ago proven it in her actions, like Nora of A Doll’s House
opening the door and slamming it behind her.
Although Fire passed the Indian censor board, predictably it
immediately created a storm in the press, popular politics, and parliament. It
first screened to full houses in November 1998.*
On
December 2nd, however, over 200 Shiv Sena members (India’s right-wing Marathi
regional political party, which grew out of a Mumbai support of nativist
movements) attacked a Cinemax theater in the Mumbai suburbs, smashing its
windows, burning theater posters, and shouting slogans. A day later a Regal
theater in Delhi was also stormed, one of their spokesmen arguing “"If
women's physical needs get fulfilled through lesbian acts, the institution of
marriage will collapse, reproduction of human beings will stop."
In
Rajpalace and Rajmahal crowds scared off audiences, setting some theaters
screening the film on fire. Theaters elsewhere soon closed down. But in
Calcutta, when attackers appeared, the audience and theater ushers fought back
keeping the film rolling. But Chief Minister of Maharashtra Manohar Joshi, a
Shiv Sena supporter announced, “I congratulate them for what they have done.
The film’s theme is alien to our culture.” Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray
compared lesbianism to "a sort of a social AIDS" which might
"spread like an epidemic."
By
December 5th a coalition of free speech activists, including Mehta, Indian
movie star Dilip Kumar, and director Mahesh Bhatt, submitted a 17-page petition
to the Indian Supreme Court, demanding that “a sense of security” needed to be
provided to movie-goers as well as basic protection for the screening of the
film. Mehta herself led a candlelit protest in New Delhi two days later, with
the support of 32 different organizations including CALERI (The Campaign for
Lesbian Rights) against theater withdrawals of the movie.
In
reaction, approximately 60 Shiv Sena supporters stripped down to their
underwear, squatting outside of actor Kumar’s house in protest of his support
of Fire. 22 of the protestors were arrested and Kumar and others
involved with the film were put under police security. Cinemax reopened
screenings of Mehta’s film on December 18th, but despite the assurance of
protection, some theater posters were destroyed. Although the film had been
sent back to the Censor Board, in February 1999, Fire was re-released
with no cuts, and openings proceeded without incident.
Rather perversely several Feminists also wrote out against Fire’s
portrayal of women and gender relations as being too simplistic. Noted Indian
feminists, Mary E. John and Tejaswini Niranjana, wrote that the movie reduced
patriarchy to the denial and control of female sexuality, continuing, [in
summary]:
“Control of female sexuality is surely one of
the ideological planks on which patriarchy rests. But by taking this idea
literally, the film imprisons itself in the very ideology it seeks to fight,
its own version of authentic reality being nothing but a mirror image of
patriarchal discourse. Fire ends up arguing that the successful
assertion of sexual choice is not only a necessary but also a sufficient
condition—indeed, the sole criterion—for the emancipation of women. Thus the
patriarchal ideology of ‘control’ is first reduced to pure denial—as though
such control did not also involve the production and amplification of
sexuality—and is later simply inverted to produce the film's own vision of
women's liberation as free sexual ‘choice.’
Whatever subversive potential Fire might have had (as a film that
makes visible the ‘naturalised’ hegemony of heterosexuality in contemporary
culture, for example) is nullified by its largely masculinist assumption that
men should not neglect the sexual needs of their wives, lest they turn
lesbian.”
I
see no assertion in this film whatsoever that sexual choice is the sole and
certainly the only condition of the emancipation of women. Indeed, these two
women were emancipated long before they met one another, only giving into the
traditions and rituals of their married lives, as Shita puts it quite early in
the film, because they have been so conditioned to obey them. “Someone just has
to press my button and I start acting like a trained monkey,” she laments as
the women suffer without food or water a day of religious significance.
And,
most importantly, they did not leave their husbands because they had found love
with another, but strengthened by one another through their love, determined
they could finally make the break from the binding traditions that had held
them in patriarchal obedience. Radha, in particular, stayed behind for
precisely the opportunity of expressing to her husband not just the fact that
he had ignored and maltreated her, but to force him perhaps to face up to the fact
that in his obsession with Swamiji, he himself had a queer, possibly even
chaste homosexual relationship with his so-called teacher, just as Sita might
have helped her husband realize, had she known his full history, that his
relationship with Julie was based on a kind of self-hatred and attraction to
the other, an exotic outsider whom he might also desire to be. These women
liberated themselves not just out of their displeasure with the way their
husbands had treated them, but out of their recognition that almost all
patriarchal notions were based on a sham, including a failure to recognize the
essence of one’s own sexual desires.
Sita and Radha did not slam the door out of their newfound love for one
other, but out of their recognition that the system in which they had defined
their lives no longer had any meaning, surely at the heart of all feminist
assertions. Like the mythical Sita, Radha had long before come to know herself
well enough that she felt she was safe from any male demand of a trial by fire.
And surely the contemporary Sita would have eventually left her husband even if
she had never met her sister-in-law.
Mightn’t a lesbian, I would finally ask, find female liberation in her
variant sexual choice? In finally recognizing myself as a gay man I equally
came to perceive just how ridiculous all the paternalistic values of the
normative society in which I had been raised had been. Sex can often be a
window that reveals alternate views of religion, culture, and society in
general. It’s never been an issue of one or the other. Just as a shift in
sexual orientation does not necessarily mean that one has abandoned
paternalistic values, so too does the fact the shifting the focus of one’s
sexual desires does not preclude the recognition that paternalistic values are
a danger for oneself and the society. Clearly, these women are not at all
simplistic but have come to recognize both who they are sexually and how the
values they previously subscribed to helped to delimit their lives.
Ultimately, it’s not Mehta’s film or her characters which are
simplistic, but the arguments against her powerful character’s simultaneous
discoveries of themselves and each other. Radha learned from her mother how to
see the ocean by looking through her fingers.
*The information was gleaned from Wikipedia
and several Indian newspapers.
Los Angeles, January 9, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (January 2021).
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