Fire

Sixteen years after the release of Umbartha, another lesbian-themed film made its controversial appearance in India. The film was Fire, directed by Deepa Mehta, who, like the expatriate filmmaker Mira Nair, is a director of Indian origin who lives in Toronto, Canada.

Director Deepa Mehta (right) on the set of Fire with star Shabana Azmi.	Poster for Mehta’s final film in her “elements” trilogy Water (2005), banned from its planned shoot in the holy city of Varanasi by rightwing Hindu protesters and filmed in Sri Lanka.

Fire was the second film in Deepa Mehta’s trilogy concerning the elements. The first film in the trilogy was Earth (1998), based on Bapsy Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man that dealt with the Partition. The third film in the trilogy was Water (2005), which showed how young widows, abandoned by their families in Varanasi’s infamous Vrudhashrams, are lured into prostitution by unscrupulous politicians. Incidentally, the Hindu right was so offended by Water’s theme, that it forbade Mehta from shooting the film in Varanasi; the film was eventually shot in Buddhist Sri Lanka.

Fire, loosely based on Ismat Chughtai’s 1942 Urdu short story Lihaaf (English Translation The Quilt Penguin India, 1994), revolves around two sisters-in-law, Radha and Sita, in a middle-class Delhi household, whose husbands run a take-away in which they help. While Radha is married to the elder brother, Ashok, Sita is married to the younger brother, Jatin. Both Radha and Sita have unsatisfactory sexual relations with their husbands for different reasons. In Radha’s case, it is Ashok’s vow of celibacy that fails to consummate her marriage. The man responsible for Ashok’s vow is Swamiji, Ashok’s fraudulent guru, who preaches abstinence. In Sita’s case, conversely, it is Jatin’s affair with his Chinese girlfriend Julie that accounts for his lack of erotic interest in his wife.

Ostensibly, it is their husbands’ neglect that draws the two sisters-in-law to each other romantically, endorsing the heterosexist view that men and women turn to people of their own gender to satisfy their sexual needs only when they are denied the possibility of copulation with the opposite sex, as, for example, in single-sex dorms and prisons, or in institutions such as the Sangamwadi home in Umbartha. This is what has led to many women activists, lesbians, and director Deepa Mehta herself to claim that Fire isn’t a lesbian film per se. Instead, they see Fire as a film about women’s empowerment and freedom of choice, and argue that the lesbianism portrayed in the film is at best situational or circumstantial lesbianism. Thus, as Ashwini Sukthankar points out in her Editor’s Note to Facing the Mirror,

“We were accused...of having ‘hijacked’ the protests [against the banning of the film by the rightwing political party the Shiv Sena] by the mere act of being visible ...by being present. And a simple placard that declared its bearer to be ‘Indian and Lesbian’ earned an entire community much censure for alleged militancy and cultural anarchy.” (For a complimentary lesbian take on this film, see Shohini Ghosh’s Fire: A Queer Film Classic [Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010].)

To me, the term “situational” homosexuality or lesbianism is a myth. This is because, in a culture where virtually no enlightened sex education in schools and colleges exists, and where sex, by and large, remains a taboo subject, it is often situations in which people find themselves that serve as the catalyst that helps them realize their true sexual orientation. Several gay men have stated in various testimonies, as for example in my own book Whistling in the Dark: Twenty One Queer Interviews co-edited with Dibyajyoti Sarma (Sage, 2009), how the need to share a bed with other men in homes crowded with guests during events such as family weddings, have helped them discover their homosexuality, even when, erroneously, some of them have been previously married to women.

As far as Fire is concerned, however, it seems to me that it isn’t even as if Sita discovers her lesbianism as a result of the circumstances in which she finds herself. Instead, I am inclined to believe from her tomboyish ways, reflected in her dress and mannerisms, that she is lesbian from the start. Jatin’s lack of interest in her thus suits her and comes as a relief. It saves her from having to sleep with her husband for whom she feels little or no desire. It is a godsend that, again as testimonies and case histories show, few lesbians are fortunate enough to find coming their way. It is Sita who then initiates the sex with Radha, which is pleasurable to both of them.

In “tomboyish” drag, Sita dances with her sister-in-law Radha (DVD frame grabs).
Sita “grooms” Radha with a sensuous leg rub during a family picnic...and then initiates her in her bed, romantically framed by mosquito netting. (DVD frame grabs)

Fire cashes in on the cliché that to heterosexual men, it is lesbian sex, rather than sex between a man and a woman, that is the primary source of titillation. This is proved by the voyeurism of the family servant Mundu, who is the first to detect the illicit liaison between the two daughters-in-law of the house. Mundu first masturbates in the presence of the women’s old hapless mother-in-law Biji, as he watches porn videos filched from the store run by Ashok and Jatin. Later, however, he fantasises about Radha and Sita and even blackmails them, threatening to reveal all to their respective husbands. Biji is also made a witness to the “perverse” act of the two ladies, but being decrepit and bed-ridden, she cannot express her anguish.

Servant Mundu masturbates to porn borrowed from his bosses’ video shop while the  traumatized, incapacited matriarch Biji watches helplessly (DVD frame grab).	Mundu fantasizes himself as a mythological king romancing his boss Radha  (DVD frame grab).

Eventually, Mundu lives up to his threat and spills the beans to Ashok. His voyeurism is then transmitted to Ashok, whose so-called celibacy goes for a toss as he is overcome by desire, trying to imagine, in all probability, what two women can possibly do in bed.

The last scene in Fire, which gives the film its title, has been compared by critics to the original Sita’s “agni pariksha,” her ordeal or trial by fire in The Ramayana. It so happens that in the argument that ensues between Radha and Ashok upon his getting to know of her transgressions, Radha’s sari catches fire. However, she survives her ordeal and is saved. It is then that, following Sita’s example, Radha acquires the courage to walk out on her husband and join Sita, who has already left the house. Unlike Umbartha, Fire has a fairy-tale ending in which Radha and Sita decide to live together, happily ever after.

The Shiv Sena under Bal Thackeray’s leadership was a rabble-rousing political party that upheld violence as a means to achieving their goals. They first came into prominence in the late 1960s, when they began a campaign against Bombay’s Udipi restaurant owners and other South Indians to hound them out of the city, which they argued, belonged to the Marathi people, Bombay’s cosmopolitanism notwithstanding. Many years later, the Shiv Sena began targeting poor people from other Indian states as well, such as hawkers and street food vendors from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, whom they wanted out of the city because they allegedly did work that rightfully belonged to the Marathi manoos (people). They also directed their ire against illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. As far as Indian nationals were concerned, the Shiv Sena’s xenophobia was clearly unconstitutional, for the Constitution of India gave all citizens the fundamental right to live, work and settle down in any part of the country that they chose to. But the Shiv Sena thought they were above the law and could do as they pleased. Since most policemen in the lower echelons of the Bombay Police were Maharashtrian men with loyalties to the Shiv Sena, the latter’s vandalism went unchecked. No Shiv Sena men were ever arrested, and even if they were, they were released on bail within a short time. Even the courts seemed to be afraid of them.

As the Justice Sri Krishna Commission Report shows, the Shiv Sena had a major hand in the bloody riots that took place in Bombay in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6th December 1992. Their boys especially went after Muslims from Dharavi and other slum colonies of the metropolis, as well as from predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods like South Bombay’s Bhendi Bazaar and Mohammad Ali Road, killing many of them. Some people belonging to faiths other than Islam, such as Zoroastrianism, were also killed, for the illiterate rank-and-file in the Sena were unable to distinguish between one minority non-Hindu community and another.

Fire was released over five years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and the riots and March 1993 bomb blasts that ensued. The film ran into problems from the word go. I went to a late night screening of the film at a cinema in downtown Pune with a male friend and a female student. There were lewd catcalls from the men in the audience the moment the lesbian scenes, performed by progressive Muslim art cinema star Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das who played Radha and Sita respectively, came on.

Lovemaking episode in Fire led to “lewd catcalls” in Pune first run (DVD frame grab).	Lovemaking episode, shot with stand-in for Sita, Fire (DVD frame grab).

Most of them hailed from the same lower middle class background as boys of the Shiv Sena. As a result, it was impossible for us to hear the dialogues that accompanied the scenes. This happened at other cinemas in other Indian cities as well, leading to a request by women’s groups to have special screenings of the film for an all-women audience made up entirely of women, except, perhaps, for the ushers of the cinema hall.

The Shiv Sena’s next move was to vandalize cinema theatres where the film was screened. They ripped seats, and smashed lights and fans. They shattered glass. They then called for a total ban on the film, with Bal Thackeray even sarcastically saying that he would allow the film to be screened provided the mythical Hindu names of the two women (Radha and Sita) were replaced by Muslim names. One of the names he is said to have suggested is that of Shabana Azmi herself. Some even thought that this was a throwback to the belief that it was the Muslims who brought homosexuality to India during medieval times, with lyric forms like the Persian ghazal, and practices like laundebaazi (roughly, boys’ sexual play)

Around the same time that Fire was released, a film called Bombay Boys, directed by Kaizad Gustad, also made its appearance in the theatres (1998). It had a male homosexual character, played by the actor Roshan Seth. But the Shiv Sena did not take exception to the film. Already, their double standards were becoming clear. What it implied was that in a patriarchal male-dominated set up, men, unlike women, could get away with anything, including homosexuality. The onus of guarding society’s morals was on women, not on men, who were its repositories. As such, there was a great degree of homosociality among lower middle class Indian men, and often this served as an alibi for homosexual activity by men who did not identify as gay, but were simply referred to as MSM (men who had sex with men). In the light of the AIDS pandemic, this community of MSMs, in fact, grew, with men finding it safer to make out with other men, rather than to visit prostitutes in the city’s red light areas.

Of course, it isn’t as if the Shiv Sena did not resort to gay-bashing and the blackmailing of gay men in places like parks and public urinals. I myself have been a victim of this on more than one occasion. But this wasn’t done for moral or ethical reasons. It was expressly done for the purpose of extortion.

In time, however, it is the Mahila Aghadi, the women’s wing of the Shiv Sena, which took over from their male colleagues the business of objecting to the screening of Fire. The men, for all I know, were quite content to let the film run, for, as pointed out above, lesbian sex is a great source of amorous excitement to straight men. But the women were so outraged by the film that they issued a public statement that said,

“If women turn to each other to satisfy their needs, what happens to the institution of the family?”

The statement implied two things: (1) the Mahila Aghadi was aware that women could pleasure each other by, say, the rubbing of vulvas, and so on; (2) ironically, the Mahila Aghadi saw themselves as guardians of that most patriarchal institution, the family.

It is the second implication that here intrigues me. This is because in the value system upheld by members of the Shiv Sena, and indeed by all right wing political outfits, women are accorded a low status in the family. They have little or no agency, even over their own bodies. They are regularly subject to wife-beating, marital rape, and other forms of domestic violence. And yet, exactly like the destitute women inmates of the Sangamwadi home in Umbartha, the Shiv Sena women, who were anything but destitute, were nonetheless totally unable to see the liberating possibilities of lesbian love. Co-optation by the patriarchy had thoroughly blinded them. They were thus speaking out in defence of an institution that was responsible for their own enslavement.

It is this self-inflicted homophobia among women that serves as a common theme that binds two otherwise very different films, Umbartha and Fire. Ashwini Sukthankar points out how many Indian women reject the word “lesbian” for its white Western connotations. I would add that they even see it as a “bad word,” like the words “slut” and “whore.” Yet, as Sukthankar says,

“...when we name ourselves we can see ourselves for who we are: a group of women utterly diverse in terms of region, class, community, age, marital status, but with this one thing in common. Our love for women—that which marks us as different from the rest of the world, which brings us together, and which must be voiced if it is not to be lost.”

And though Sukthankar uses the term “love” in the above quote in a specifically sexual sense, I am inclined to go beyond the mere sexual denotations of the word to see what it connotes—the militant bonding of women as a weapon of resistance.