From Fire to Sabar Bonda: Dhrubo Jyoti writes on the quiet revolution in queer cinema
In 2016, Rohan Kanawade lost his father. As the extended family gathered in their ancestral village in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district to mourn the passing of this man who had worked as a chauffeur and built a life in Mumbai, speculation swirled about why his 30-year-old son was not yet married. Pressure was mounting. Every day, someone accosted him with the question, Kanawade says.
It was becoming unbearable, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to stir the pot. “My mother had lost her partner. She needed relatives. I wasn’t sure how they’d react if I came out. Would it make her relationship with them more difficult?”
Amid the many rituals that mark the end of life in rural India, the interior designer-turned-short filmmaker found himself drifting, and thinking of escape. What if he had a friend in the village? Could he have snuck out for a few moments of respite, a jaunt, some laughter?
From that vortex of emotions emerged the kernel of an idea that became the feature film Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), now playing in theatres, marking the rare mainstream release of a queer film in India.
The 116-minute film opens at the deathbed of the protagonist’s father, and follows Anand (played by an exemplary Bhushaan Manoj) and his mother Suman (Jayshri Jagtap) as they travel from Mumbai to the arid interiors, where an encounter with the son’s childhood friend Balya (Suraaj Suman) changes his life.
The languid storytelling exploresqueerness through the tense, tentative embrace of two men trying to build a fragile connection in a world often stacked against people like them. “I would say about 10% of the film is drawn from my life,” says Kanawade, 39.
The gentle romance, which won a World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in February, is the latest in a string of queer-themed movies and shorts made in India over the past decade; a marked shift from decades gone by.
When Prem Kapoor made Badnam Basti in 1971, based on the renowned Hindi writer Kamleshwar’s debut novel, Ek Sadak Sattavan Galiyan, which featured a relationship between two women, the movie tanked and was thought to be lost for 40 years, before being rescued from obscurity in 2019.
In 1996, when Deepa Mehta’s Fire presented a searing portrayal of a relationship between two women, it sparked violent protests and eventually a ban. In a milieu in which queer and trans characters were used largely for comic relief or a tragic side-arc, any depictions imbued with dignity was deemed out of step with the values of Indian society.
Same-sex acts were, of course, also still a crime under a colonial-era law that was only struck down in 2018. In addition to the fear of judgment, censure and possibly violence, the fear of harassment and blackmail simmered under the surface of queer lives. Amid the miasma of dogma and prejudice, any attempt to secure funding or production support for stories of these lives was futile.
So much has changed.
Buoyed by a new generation and shifting social mores around the turn of the millennium, queer movies, many of them helmed by queer directors, have freed such stories from the slapstick closet, exploring instead themes of family and illness (My Brother… Nikhil; 2005), art and loneliness (Arekti Premer Golpo; 2010), relationships (Kapoor & Sons; 2016), violence and class (Aligarh; 2015), childhood (Daaravtha; 2015), hyperlinked destiny (Super Deluxe; 2019) and caste (Geeli Pucchi; 2021).
The Kashish film festival, held in Mumbai since 2010, and a clutch of others that followed, offer to independent filmmakers still struggling to fund their vision a toehold. Kanawade himself made 30 short films over a decade before he could put together the team for this first feature.
“I started making short films in 2007. My first was a horror short shot on a friend’s mobile phone. I didn’t know much about direction, camera or editing. I hunted for royalty-free music. The writing came first, and took a long time. That became my film school,” he says.
At the back of his mind was a movie that shifted the gaze out of India’s cities and explored the heartbeat of queerness in the interiors. Capturing this on screen would be tricky, he knew. Gazes are shy, words are left unspoken and the vocabulary is largely missing. Exploration is tentative as queerness hides more determinedly.
Hence, in Sabar Bonda, Balya asks Anand if he had a “khaas mitr (special friend)” in the city. Anand’s mother’s quiet acceptance comes in the form of her telling the family he will “marry when he feels like it”. Balya’s singlehood, meanwhile, is justified as a consequence of the dwindling sex ratio in interior Maharashtra.
Kanawade doesn’t force the issue, letting queerness unfurl at the same unhurried pace as life. “When my friends spoke about my ex, they wouldn’t say boyfriend, they would say ‘your special friend’. When Anand’s mother speaks to him, it is natural she will not use the word ‘gay’,” Kanawade says. His film stays true to the liminal nature of such queer existence.
Grief lingers at the edges of every frame, but the storytelling is not overpowered by either sorrow or sexuality.
Kanawade spent three years casting the main characters — most of whom are Marathi theatre actors doing their first feature film; Bhushaan Manoj and Suraaj Suman are also friends off-screen — even as many baulked at the queer story arc and scenes of male intimacy.
Kanawade was certain he wanted to depict male intimacy, and pushed back against a poignant but tragic ending, a staple for independent cinema. “I wanted tenderness but not tragedy. I wanted to reimagine how queer characters end up; not as tropes but as normal people trying to build a life,” he says.
What’s next? He is still soaking up the praise from his debut feature, Kanawade says, laughing. “Who knows? I’d love to make a movie about dinosaurs.”
