Pride month just ended. That means social media is still awash in rainbow emojis galore. In India even biscuit companies are doing competing rainbow ads to advertise their own inclusivity.
And web series in India seem to be the new place to show Pride. LGBTQIA+ characters are all over these series. Sridhar Rangayan, filmmaker and director of the Kashish Pride Film Festival in Mumbai is a little wary.
SR1: All the people are just putting in a lesbian cop. I'm the lesbian cops are that trope now.
Novelist Santanu Bhattacharya, author most recently of The Deviants, a novel following three generations of gay men in a family, agrees.
SB1: There’s a gay cop in Arya. And then there's a lesbian cop in some other show. And then recently I started watching cartel, where there's also this, like budding love story between two women, and I'm like, guys, it's just too fast, you know?
If Indian series like Aarya and Paataal Lok gave us the gay cops, the lesbians are popping up in series such as Inspector Rishi and Dabba Cartel.
DC1:
The lesbian cop might just be the new “gay best friend”.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
Sure, it’s better than the old days when Bollywood actor Anupam Kher put on an orange-pink mohawk and camped it up as the villainous simpering handsy Pinku in the film Mast Kalandar (1991).
MK1: Daddy. Good morning daddy. Good morning Pinku. How are u this morning daddy?
It was one of the first representations of queerness Rangayan had seen on Indian screen.
SR2: That was horrible. I didn’t dress like him. I didn’t make a fool of myself like him.
Lesbian cops undoubtedly make for better representation than Pinkus. Representation is certainly important but is it the end goal? Santanu Bhattacharya thinks that time is past.
SB2A: There was a time when just visibility was a struggle .
SB2B: Now I need a deeper understanding. I don’t want that lesbian cop.
Years ago, I used to edit a South Asian LGBTQIA+ magazine called Trikone from San Francisco. As we put one issue to bed, I would worry whether we’d find enough material that was both queer and South Asian to fill the next issue. At that time, I would have been grateful for Indian lesbian cops.
In the 90s, Trikone did an issue on new South Asian queer titles. Short of models, the board members lay on the carpet holding copies of the few books around — like Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, a gay coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the civil war in Sri Lanka and Rakesh Ratti’s anthology, A Lotus of Another Colour. We called it a “blossoming of South Asian gay and lesbian voices in literature” but in reality the options were pretty sparse.
The list even included Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy thanks to a “tantalizing whiff of homosexual romance buried deep” in the magnum opus. All in all, it covered barely two pages. Nevertheless, the article optimistically hoped readers would flood the magazine with letters saying “How could you leave out…?” No flood happened.
That visibility remains important. But now we must also understand that there is a difference between being visible and being seen. As Rangayan puts it the lesbian cop isn’t so much the issue. Rather the problem is
SR3: They don't have a backstory. They don't have any relationship story.
The cop should be there because she matters to the story says Bhattacharya.
SB3: We can have these characters without really engaging with the interiority of these characters.
Otherwise it just makes some studio feel woke.
SB4: Representation is actually not to me. It's not the motivation because I feel like, you know, if it were representation that was driving storytelling, then you end up with a lesbian cop and you can have a lesbian cop in every single story and say I’ve done it right.
Meanwhile Rangayan who has been making films since 2003. finds it no easier to raise funds for a film that has queer lives in the spotlight.
SR4: it's a huge struggle because like, I mean, you need to invest so much of money into making a film so much of time, and you need to have some returns
Rangayan still crowd-funds and has to fight with censors every time. Just because it has gay characters, he says.
SR5:But why can't everybody watch it? There's nothing in the film. It's a completely sanctified love story. Completely be sure of any lovemaking, sex, violence.
But hey, at least we have lots of lesbian cops
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW