Movie Review of ‘Ek Ladki ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga’
Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga is a 2019 Bollywood movie which narrates the coming of age story of Sweety, a queer woman in a small town. The star cast revealed in the trailer sparked a lot of excitement as this movie is one of the few mainstream Bollywood productions with close to an accurate representation of the LGBTQ+ community in India. The movie was directed by Shelly Chopra and co-written by Gazal Dhaliwal, an LGBTQ+ activist, a trans woman popularly known for writing dialogues for Lipstick Under My Burkha. The movie has received a lot of appreciation as well as criticism. It becomes important to analyse the significance of the movie for its representation of a marginalised and misrepresented community which struggles with violence and discrimination to achieve equal rights and acceptance by private and public spheres.
We chose to review this movie because it talks of queer love focused on two womxn, which is very rarely found in mainstream media. To fully understand and analyse the movie, one first needs to understand its historical context.
A brief history of queer representation in Bollywood
In a society that runs on the structures of patriarchy, one sees that its ideas get reflected and recreated even in the media like television, newspaper, magazines, etc. One such idea of patriarchy has been ‘heterosexuality’. The patriarchal structure that socializes one to see the world in binaries of ‘male’ and ‘female’ and overburdens one to stick to the gender norms sees ‘homosexuality’ as one of the biggest curses of the humankind.
When one tries to navigate the existence of the oldest queer novels in India, a very famous novel, ‘Lihaaf’ by Ismat Chungtai published in the year 1942, is never missed upon. In a country with 287 million illiterate adults (a report by UNESCO), such media is not accessible and available to the majority of the people. In such a scenario, movies, radios, songs, poems, etc. becomes a medium through which a message can be delivered to a larger number of audience. Bollywood movies have been one such medium but for the longest time these movies didn’t talk about homosexuality. In the year 1996, ‘Bomgay’ a short documentary on gay-love came up after which in 1998 came the movie ‘Fire’ which was a lesbian love story. ‘Fire’ getting released on big screen received backlash from right wing political parties,who halted the screening of the movie in the theatres of Mumbai. It was said that such a movie would corrupt Indian womxn. In a culture, where womxn are not even allowed to enjoy and participate in sex let alone explore their sexuality, this movie received a major backlash.
In the 21st century, we also see how movies like ‘Dostana’, ‘I’ etc tried to mock queerness and always used it to add an element of humour to the narrative by showing queers as over sexual beings who are always in search of ‘sex’. Bollywood in that way has misled all of us in our childhoods and even now. The question which then becomes important to think about is, has this technology backed modernity made any real difference?
Analysing the movie
What does the movie do well?
Tracing the history of representation, it becomes clear that queer people have been actively deprived of healthy representation of their identities and experiences. Hence, the excitement about the movie from the community and allies were alike who have been relying on movies, shows, books and music from western countries. However, such representation is not always relatable to experiences of south Asian queer people who have different cultural norms, relationships, and history of being queer. This experience can prove to be quite alienating. Hence, a movie which addresses the audience the way Sweety does, through her experience of growing up queer, is likely to strike a chord with people who have not seen themselves being represented in this way. The movie starred mainstream and popular stars like Sonam Kapoor, Rajkumar Rao and Anil Kapoor. These actors hold a great amount of influence on their audience. People aspire to be like them when these stars accept and normalise queer identities. At at the very least, it creates space for conversations and inches towards more acceptability.
Another prominent feature of the movie is the fact that it is set in a small town. This is an intentional decision by the director who wanted her primary audience to be people away from the urban areas and their pace. She wanted to introduce the fundamentals of identities in the most simple and humble way to nudge the normalisation of such identities in small cities and towns. Hence, while some people criticise the lack of romance and chemistry between the couple, the decision was made to gently introduce the idea than have a shock value of being queer. The couple was shown in the most normal, subtle, non-hypersexualised way to normalise their existence and at the same time to slowly gain acceptability from the audience.
The fact that a womxn made this film hence becomes important. Womxn and the queer community become constant targets of the male gaze. The male gaze is a concept which states that through this lens, the world is seen in a masculine, heteronormative way and women are seen as an object of desire. Imagine, an item song in a movie where the woman is singing lyrics which compare her to objects, she is surrounded by men who see only view her sexually, and the focus of the camera is only on her scantily clad body.She is hardly seen as a whole person with a voice, a personality and an identity. The male gaze is hardly observable in this movie as the makers are a transwoman and a cisgender ally. The characters are hence full people themselves, not ladders for the character development of male characters, not side characters but people with their own quirks, flaws, dreams, expressions, and their independent gender and sexual identities. Their relationship is not hypersexualised or made into a fetish as it has been in the past. This way it moves in the direction of normalising and not stigmatising this relationship, as it has been for decades.
Where did it lag behind?
While we were reading some articles about the movie, we came across some very interesting ones. Majority of these articles, that we read, said that the movie is about a ‘lesbian’ love story. One of these even critiqued the movie that nowhere does it use the term ‘lesbian’ in it. We were then curious to know what term the director used when she talked about the movie in her interviews. After searching for it, we got to know that in all her interviews nowhere does she say ‘lesbian’ instead uses the term ‘same-sex’ love story and that was the whole point! Often when people see two womxn holding hands,they assume that they are lesbians but is it fair to assume when we talk of sexuality as a spectrum? What if one of them does not identify as one? It takes one to the whole discourse of why do people always want to know the sexuality of the other person because at the end, it just reduces one to their sexuality and ignores everything else about the person.
The movie tries to give a message that ‘Love is Love’ but the question is, does it really reach the people? In theatres, one could easily see people leaving after the interval ,when the movie reveals that the story is about a same-sex couple by giving a different angle to the song ‘Ek Ladki ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga’ featuring two womxn who are romantically expressing their love to each other. Some said that the couple do not look like a ‘real couple’, some said that the whole movie is a waste of time and money, some said it is not good for our culture and some just made fun out of it (all of these are the anecdotes of personal encounter).
All of these encounters made it very evident that a movie which talks about a same-sex couple being womxn are not accepted too well in our society. The patriarchal society does not want to give any independence and freedom to a womxn to explore their sexuality because queer womxn give a message to this patriarchal structure that it does not need a ‘man’ then the whole foundation of patriarchy is shaken.
This then brings one to another important point of how a movie about same sex couple being men and the one having womxn are perceived by the society. Recently, ‘Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhaan’ hit the big screen. It was praised by a lot of people,even though some reacted in a homophobic way, but it was still a huge success. The movie made 57.99 crores in 13 days whereas ’Ek Ladki ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga’ made 22.01 crores in 10 days . These box office collections 4 again tells us why movies like ‘Fire’ and ’Ek Ladki ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga’ receive such backlash by the society. Here also patriarchy plays a role as when a mxn falls in love with another mxn it is still more acceptable but when it comes to womxn, their sexuality is never acknowledged. The actors casted for these movies were all cis-heterosexual artists, one of whom didn’t even know that same-sex marriage is still illegal in India. The question of representation then arises before us. Movies are made on queer lives but still there are no real queer actors in it. All this, at the end, makes it mere tokenism in the name of inclusion. These strong voices though talk about queer lives but they still do not give them a platform which is again problematic.
Conclusion
When one tries to trace the history of queer representation in bollywood it comes out very significantly that some change has happened but there is a long way to for the community to be accurately represented and to be active stakeholders in their own representation. Recent instances have shown how the Indian society, important influencers and decision makers still need to be sensitised towards understanding and respecting the queer community. For example, in a recent controversy, CarryMinati, an Indian youtuber made a problematic statement “mithai ki dukaan par le jao, 200 mein bik jayega”, since queer mxn are often called “meetha” as an insult. Anyone who spoke up against this was flooded by a plethora of homophobic and transphobic comments and abuses. Another one is the awaited movie of Akshay Kumar called ‘Laxmi Bomb’ which again gives rise to a lot of misconceptions about the trans community. Similarly, the decision to name a Noida metro station “she-man” dedicated to the trans community shows that actual trans people who consider this a derogatory term were not consulted. Though afterwards, when the allies and the LGBTQ+ activists raised their voice, the name of the metro station was changed but the story still remains the same with the Transgender persons (protection of rights) Act, 2019 which doesn’t take into account the feedback and consultation from the concerned community.
Written by Zayan and Nipunika under the Gender,Sexuality and Violence course rolled out by Rangeen Khidki.
Zayan is a transman studying M.A Education from Ambedkar University,Delhi.His interest areas include reading about caste,feminism,queer history and education,apart from music and travelling.
Nipunika is a writer and spoken word poet,currently pursuing M.A Education from Ambedkar University,Delhi.They’ve worked with platforms like Slam Out Loud,Kommune Delhi and Feminism in India,and believe in creating safe spaces.
