Friends In Need

In her seminal essay Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema academic Gayatri Gopinath largely devotes her attention to Hindi films between 1960 and 1994 that feature typical spaces of female homosociality such as “brothels, women’s prisons, girl’s schools, the middle class home, and the zenana”. Indeed, such examples abound in popular Hindi cinema.

For instance, Paakezah (1972) outlines female relationships in the life of a courtesan, while Akeli Mat Jaiyo (1963) briefly sketches a portrait of female fraternity – or lack thereof – in a women’s hostel.

In Karigar (1958), the relationship between Parvati (Nirupa Roy) and her female employer is situated in an upper-class home, where Gopinath locates most homosocial relationships between women.

However, the relationship crosses class barriers. Although it is embedded in an obvious hegemony and defined by the politics of charity, the richer woman demonstrates genuine concern for Paro: she offers her a glass of milk when a pregnant Paro faints on the job.

She also calls her husband to insist that Parvati’s unemployed husband Shanker be given a job by the family’s firm.

Their relationship remains friendly and cordial despite the disapproval of the domineering male cook in the household.

Juhi and Raja Beti masquerade as men, acquiring the permission and blessing of the king to infiltrate Sultanpur with the goal of bringing back a detailed map of the palace.

They are involved in several adventures, sometimes disguised as male ascetics, and other times as a couple with Juhi impersonating a man.

Buoyed by each other’s support, the two women stake their claim to several spaces- material and ideological- in which Hindi film heroines were seldom seen.

The friendship between Juhi and Raja Beti in Raj Hath can also be read as homoerotic, particularly when the women are in their private space, or when they impersonate a couple.

This implication is never overt, and any hints of homoeroticism are thoroughly expunged when Raja Beti meets the prince to whom she was initially betrothed, and falls in love with him despite herself.

Her friendship with Juhi then becomes the space in which Raja Beti sorts through the clutter of her conflicting emotions for the man.

Despite ambivalence of their attires, the women's distinctly feminine voices anchor them in their gendered identity. This play with gendered identity is rendered socially acceptable since it is emplaced it within the situation of a stage performance.

These performances were not perceived as threats to heteronormativity also since they were invested in depicting a relationship that was, by all appearances, heterosexual.

Meanwhile, this form of 'heterosexual' romance, which is enacted solely by women and meant for female audiences, is rescued from the charges of vulgarity or indecency that are normally associated with the depiction of sexuality and romance between a male and a female.

Spaces of female homosociality and confraternity in Dahej (1950) exemplify and resolve this precariousness.

Dahej is meant to be a critique of the practice of dowry, seen as the product of a regressive and uneducated society.

After she is married, domains conventionally regarded as feminine and populated by women, represent the most severe threat to her mental and physical health.

Dahej regards female homosociality as a tool that must be adopted insofar as it enables women to be educated into the practices of heterosexual conjugality,

and discarded as soon as the woman sets foot into her married home lest it allow her to build solidarity against patriarchy.