Gay dosti

MARQUEE

The past, as the saying goes, is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Watching Bollywood films from the 1970s and 1980s on TV, I marvel at how our perceptions of them have changed "" how different some of their assumptions seem when filtered through present-day sensibilities.

Take the big-budget multi-starrers that were built on male bonding. The leading ladies in most of these films were always cosmetic and ill-defined anyway, and the stars were the men.

A typical plot trajectory would involve an undying friendship between the heroes, a misunderstanding that would lead to an evenly matched dhishum-dhishum halfway through the movie, and finally a grand reconciliation before they teamed up to deal with the bad guys.

Back then, doubtless, all this was meant to be very macho, to provide vicarious thrills to a largely male audience. Today it seems so...gay.

The Dharmendra-Jeetendra starrer Dharam Veer is a delightful case in point. In this classic of unintended homo-eroticism, our two heroes (Dharam paaji in a fetching mini-skirt, jumping Jeetu in princely tights) gambol over hill and dale looking deep into each other's eyes, clasping hands and singing about how their love "is the eighth wonder of the world". (When Zeenat Aman shows up midway through the song, they are pointedly nasty to her.)

There are many other examples, including Yaarana, in which Amitabh and Amjad Khan repeatedly swear undying love for each other and weep whenever a separation is required; and even a scene in Yash Chopra's Silsila, where Amitabh and Shashi Kapoor bathe together as adults.

I'm not suggesting that the homosexual undertones in these films were intentional "" though it's wholly possible that some of the more sophisticated scriptwriters, like Salim-Javed, might have slipped in little double entendres as a private joke.

To the contrary, most of them stemmed from the peculiar notions of masculinity that are still prevalent in sections of Indian society "" remember Mithun and his streetwise male buddies repeatedly asserting their "machismo" by refusing to have anything to do with women ("Eesh! Laundi se baat karta hai saala?").

If you dare suggest to Dharam paaji today that one of his characters might have been anything other than a hot-blooded All-Man, he'd flatten you with his mighty fist, all the while bellowing "What you are shaying is an inshult to Indian culshur!"

The seemingly queer buddy-buddy relationships on screen also derived from the nature of many real-life male friendships in the Indian middle/lower class "" where even if a relationship doesn't become sexual, there's often an extreme emotional dependence that goes beyond the usual platonic friendship (even today, it's common to see heterosexual men in India holding hands).

Many of these men never get to interact with the opposite sex in a meaningful way while growing up and consequently think of women as objects of either veneration or lust (again something that's reflected in commercial Hindi cinema's treatment of female characters).

Of course, not every onscreen male friendship seems queer today. The most famous of them all, the Veeru-Jai relationship in Sholay, was defined in sardonic, wisecracking terms and remains completely believable as what it was meant to be "" it helps too that the female characters in the film are extremely well delineated.

But then Sholay is, in this and other ways, an exception to many peculiarities of Bolly-land.

(jaiarjun@gmail.com )