Queer men’s iconising of female superstars is a global phenomenon and India too has had its share of female superstars who have been worshipped widely by queer men, irrespective of class, caste, or location.
A still from Mr India‘s infamous song Kaate Nahi Kat Te. The queerness of the roles Sridevi essayed is manifested in temporary rupture of normativity, primarily in dance and dream sequences. Credit: YouTube
Sridevi’s sudden demise saw an outpouring of collective mourning not just from the film industry and her countless fans, but also from the queer community, online and offline. We were struck by the messages many wrote to Sridevi on their walls, treating her demise as a personal loss.
One of our Facebook posts – Sridevi was undoubtedly India’s Bette Davis in the 80s and 90s. How? Both were widely worshipped queer icons – elicited comments from other users. One recalled how the gay protagonist of Karan Johar’s short in Bombay Talkies tutored his boss, Rani Mukherjee, about how to identify gay men instantly – he suggested if someone was a Sridevi fan he was most certainly gay. While this was obviously a gross generalisation, it had some truth in it.
Queer men’s iconising of female superstars is a global phenomenon. Just as Bette Davis or Marilyn Monroe have been queer icons in the United States, India too has had its share of female superstars who have been worshipped widely by queer men, irrespective of class, caste, or location. Growing up in India in the 1980s and 1990s, with no positive discourses on homosexuality to fall back on, queer men projected their desires and fantasies on to the image of the female star, strong yet vulnerable, sensuous yet coy, sober yet quirky.
Sridevi, who was at the top of her act in that era, was one such. It was not only her on-screen performances that sealed her queer iconic status, but, her phenomenal stardom attributed to her a power, seldom available to female actors in Bombay cinema. Her predecessors like Meena Kumari and Rekha too have been widely worshipped by queer men, but for different reasons; and Madhuri Dixit, whose entry into the film industry overlapped with Sridevi’s triumphant stardom, also quickly became a parallel figure of a sensuous dancing star for the queer community. However, Madhuri’s queer iconism gradually got diluted in the neo-liberal environment of a new mediascape, facilitated by the revolution in information technology, where queer imaginaries found unforeseen possibilities and outlets of representations and projections.
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Sridevi’s stardom, which has been widely analysed in the media, was emblematic of a collapsing of the power-structure of a largely sexist, misogynist, and male-dominated industry, which rarely ever treated female actors as equal to their male counterparts. She was the first to command equal and sometimes higher pay than the ruling male stars of those times. Her films, in which she sufficiently overshadowed the male protagonists, repeatedly set the box-office bells ringing. Sridevi’s star biography worked as an inspirational text which resonated with several Indian queer men, victims of hetero-patriarchal injustice.
On-screen Sridevi subverted several norms, even though none of her films could be justifiably called queer-feminist. But, the queerness of the roles Sridevi essayed is manifested in temporary rupture of normativity, primarily in dance and dream sequences. While these sequences were conceived with the intention of catering to voyeuristic pleasures of a predominantly heterosexual male audience, the very same sequences produced and enabled a queer gaze, by opening up spaces in which suppressed fantasies found free rein.
Decoding a few of Sridevi’s song-dance sequences, which hugely popular in Bollywood-themed gay parties, in terms of their queer reception helps us understand her appeal. One such iconic song is Kaate Nahi Kat Te from Mr India which changed forever the template of fetishising female leads in Bombay Cinema. Set in an outlandish locale, the sequence stages a no-holds-barred sensuality which is otherwise not allowable to the ‘good’ heroine in ‘real’ situations within the narrative.
This song, which emancipates female sexual fantasies challenges the hetero-patriarchal censorship of female sexuality; in so doing, it also aligns itself with a desiring queer gaze in an intriguing way. Ending in an orgasmic climax, Sridevi passionately dances and gives herself up to a ‘fantastical’ lover who remains invisible to her till the end. This resonates well with queer desires the object of which is always legitimately unavailable, and therefore, remains a fantasy which rarely ever materialises.
The tandav and Na Jane Kahan Se in Chalbaaz, in which Sridevi clearly sidelined her male leads, spawn a queer identification with both the female characters, each the other’s look-alike. The tandav in which a demure Anju inadvertently breaks into becomes an exaggerated expression of her resentment against her ruthless uncle and aunt who torment her endlessly. She dances as if possessed and ends it with a resounding slap on the uncle’s face, an unintentional one nonetheless, which marks a dramatic moment of triumph against an invincible oppressor.
The kitschy Na Jane Kahan Se, on the other hand, establishes the street-savvy Manju’s bindaas quirkiness, which confirms her declaration prior to the song – ‘In this male-dominated world I live on my own terms’. Anju’s sudden revolt in the tandav, and Manju’s self-assured exhibition of her sexuality while controlling undue male attention, both have a queer currency. The first fulfils the queer fantasy of articulating anger against a system that coerces them; the second satisfies the desire of a sexual free play in public, without caring for societal reproach.
The queerest of Sridevi’s films is Lamhe. She falls in love with a father-figure, thereby venturing into the zone of ‘forbidden love’. She pursues him frantically, and when he reacts violently to her feelings for him, she breaks into ‘a dance of rage’, protesting social diktats on legitimate and illegitimate love. Her eventual triumph in winning her love did not go down well with the traditional Indian audience, but it still appeals to a majority of queer Indians, who see in it a symbolic realisation of their ‘unlawful’ desires.
The iconic song from Chandni, Mere Haathon Mein, that became an anthem song-dance for almost all North Indian weddings also has strong queer implications. The song, full of sexual innuendoes, is performed in a strictly demarcated women’s space, in which Sridevi dances locked in an all-female gaze, thereby spawning a homoerotic energy. Rishi Kapoor, the male lead, tries to sneak in to get a glimpse of the performance, but is denied entry. Finally, he positions himself on a distant balcony and watches her.
Without any legal acknowledgement of a union culminating into marriage, queer men identified with this song as the denial of participating in erotic spaces socially. The cinematic camera allows an entry, nonetheless. Queer men perform to this song till date, fulfilling the dream of an imagined wedding, which has no social sanction but could be realized cinematically and performatively. Sridevi’s unabashed performance of her sexuality in the song provides a language to numerous queer men to erotically enact and articulate their desire of being gazed at by other men.
It is interesting to note that Sridevi often impersonated the Apsara figure, which again had tremendous queer currency. Whether Sridevi made conscious sartorial choices or not, the Apsara look was oft-repeated (in no less than 11 films) and it suited her most emphatically. In Chandni, Sridevi appears in a dream sequence as a dancing Apsara, descending from the idyllic heavenly mountains to the lush green meadows, meticulously choreographed by her long time dance instructor, Saroj Khan. Dressed in dazzling white, a celestial nymph gets awakened by the drumbeats, animating each part of her body with a rhythmic movement. She effortlessly combines in that Apsara image the pristine beauty of an angel and the seductiveness of a siren.
The Mahabharata, ancient Hindu and Buddhist scriptures and the Natyashastra describe the Apsara as the celestial and mystical female spirit of the clouds and waters. Apsaras with their angelic personalities, slim wastes, curved hips and voluptuous bosoms could entice and seduce the most austere of the sages, take any shape and form and marry kings and Gandharvas several times. These attributes when embodied sartorially and performatively by Sridevi, became a trope through which queer men iconized her both as a dreamlike unattainable mystical figure and a star persona who dabbled between this figure of the laukika (worldly) and the daivika (divine).
Sridevi’s dancing proficiency was one major reason behind her phenomenal stardom. Her lissom body, slender long arms and lotus-shaped eyes lit up the screen as she spilled over from the celluloid to the numerous bodies of queer men who did not limit themselves to mute-stiff-spectators but repeatedly attempted to embody that sexual excess. In fact, dancing is an important vehicle of protest within queer communities. Since dance allows rage to find expression in furious motion, queer people often dance to resist and assert themselves. For Indian queer men, Sridevi provided that language, which allowed them to protest as well as enact their deep erotic desires.
While discussing with queer men about Sridevi’s dances, we were amazed how many remembered the songs and even dance moves by heart. We also realized there are and will be very few female stars who could lip-sync such bawdy lines as, Darzi se aj meri jung ho gayee/Kal choli silwai aj tang ho gayi, with a graceful innocence without offending. That was her charm, her power as a star and as a queer icon, who could confidently assert her sexuality and enter transgressive zones of desire, within a hetero-patriarchal space without inviting criticism.
Kaustav Bakshi teaches at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. Anugyan Nag teaches at the AJK-Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia.