Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1464-9373 (Print) 1469-8447 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/riac20

Shifting spaces, frozen frames: trajectories of

queer politics in contemporary India

Navaneetha Mokkil

To cite this article: Navaneetha Mokkil (2009) Shifting spaces, frozen frames: trajectories
of queer politics in contemporary India, Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies, 10:1, 12-30, DOI:
10.1080/14649370802605142

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Published online: 23 Mar 2009.

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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 10, Number 1, 2009

Shifting spaces, frozen frames: trajectories of queer politics in

contemporary India

Navaneetha MOKKIL

This paper is a comparative reading of two Malayalam films The Journey

nmokkil@gmail.com
Inter-Asia
10.1080/14649370802605142
RIAC_A_360682.sgm
1464-9373
Original
Taylor
102008
10
NavaneethaMokkil
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and
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Francis
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Francis Studies (online)

ABSTRACT
(Sancharram, 2004) and The Wandering Bird Does Not Cry (Deshadana Kili Karayarilla, 1986)
as representative of differing trajectories of queer politics in the Kerala public sphere. It uses an
analysis of the representative strategies of these two films, to interrogate the limits of a universal
language of sexual identity politics. The paper places the two films in the different historical
contexts in which they are produced, and deploys a film from an earlier time period to problematize
some of the assumptions of contemporary queer politics. For this purpose it undertakes a close read-
ing of the cinematic codes of both these films, especially the spatial arrangements in the films. I
argue that the location of Sancharram in the LGBT discourse in India and abroad makes it so
enmeshed in setting up an established meaning for the term ‘queer’ that the process of queering
becomes one of stabilizing a chosen form of desire as the ideal one. In this process of setting up a
stable trajectory for queer desire, it also freezes the spatial and social terrains of Kerala. The process
of queering that Deshadana Kili Karayarilla undertakes is not one that attempts to set up a particu-
lar subject position as the queer subject position. It sets out to trouble the naturalized construction
of the heterosexual couple and injects a sense of instability into the social sphere itself. The paper
examines how some of the taken-for-granted assumptions of transnational queer politics, like the
celebration of visible bodies, gets radically questioned when we turn to non-metropolitan sites of
analysis. It aims to look at how cultural texts can embody different modes of sexual politics, as
activists struggle to coin strategies to articulate the political possibilities of non-normative sexual
practices in Kerala today.

KEYWORDS: queer politics, public sphere, visibility, the couple, Kerala

Released in 2004 Ligy Pullappally’s film The Journey (Sancharram, 2004) makes an important
political statement by portraying a lesbian love story in rural Kerala,1 a coastal state in
South India. Sancharram makes a strong claim for the need for positive representations of
lesbian desire in order to counter societal violence against non-normative sexual arrange-
ments. It makes possible a cinematic space within which lesbian desire is openly affirmed.
Labeled as a ‘lesbian film’, Sancharram has been celebrated in reviews coming from India
and abroad as inaugurating radical sexual politics within Malayalam cinema. This film, in
which two young women defy societal conventions in order embrace their desire for each
other, is read as emblematic of a radical desire for sexual liberation within global India.
This is in keeping with a narrative of progress in which contemporary forms of representa-
tion and politics are often characterized as breaking the silence and making visible hitherto
silenced forms of sexuality in the non-Western world. My aim in this paper is to push
against this narrative of progress where current forms of representations are easily
assumed to be more progressive than in the past. I will read Sancharram in conversation

ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/09/010012–19 © 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649370802605142
Trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India 13

with another Malayalam film from the eighties The Wandering Bird Does Not Cry (Deshadana
Kili Karayarilla, 1986), in order to mine the multiple sexual imaginations that are available
within the Kerala public sphere.
While acknowledging the important political contribution made by Sancharram, the
comparative reading in this paper interrogates the limits of a universal language of sexual
identity politics. It points to the dangers of valorizing a singular model of politics as univer-
sally applicable and the only available mode. At this point of history, where sexuality is
becoming a political issue in different parts of the world, it is important to recognize and
deploy multiple ways of forging a politics based on sexuality. By reading a film text from
the 1980s that does not circulate in the public sphere as a lesbian film, alongside a film like
Sancharram, I am opening up the possibilities of a different imagination of queer politics. I
hope this comparative reading will enable us to interrogate the radical claims of a
dominant, identity based sexual politics.

Two visions for the present

The opening shot of Sancharram depicts a steep, menacing cliff and a surging waterfall
below. A young woman is vulnerably positioned at the edge of the cliff. The camera gives
us a close up of her feet as she holds them out precariously into thin air. Booming sounds of
temple drums can be heard in the backdrop, making this a climactic moment of possible
suicide, which the film returns to in the end, as we see the girl turn back to stake her claim
over life rather than death. Sancharram is bracketed by this threat of suicide both within the
film plot and the contemporary events that the film responds to.2 The Wandering Bird Does
Not Cry (Deshadana Kili Karayarilla, 1986), directed by P. Padmarajan, is one of the rare
Malayalam films from the 1980s that touches on the issue of ‘lesbian suicide’.3 This film
ends with the double suicide of the two women protagonists. We see them in the closing
shot in bed – entangled bodies in a final sleep. This paper offers a comparative reading of
both of these films on sexual practices, from different moments of Kerala history, in order to
offer a critical commentary on the political debates around queerness in contemporary
Kerala.
Sexual minority rights as a political project is still at a fledgling stage in Kerala. So this
is an important juncture to reflect on what possible directions ‘queer’4 politics can take
within Kerala and what complexities arise within this particular regional context. ‘Lesbian
suicide’ is one of the visible events around which sexuality has become a political issue in
the Kerala public sphere in the last decade. Deepa V.N. in her article ‘Queering Kerala’ says
that concerns about the reports on lesbian suicides were an important starting point for the
activist group and helpline Co-Traveller (Sahayathrika)5 to articulate sexual minority rights
as a political issue in Kerala (Deepa 2005). ‘Newspaper reports of double suicides among
women companions who were unwilling to be separated are probably the most visible
indicators of the difficulties endured by women loving women in Kerala. Other news stories
have also appeared in the mainstream press, of women asking courts for permission to live
together, or students being evicted from schools or hostels for having lesbian relationships’,
she writes (Deepa 2005: 182). Lesbian suicide can be seen as an act of claiming recognition
for a non-normative sexual relationship through an ultimate stepping out of the social. The
ending of life here becomes a desperate act of visibility, a slashing of the social sphere by
staging a public death.
The acts of lesbian suicides and the debates and mobilizations around it point to an
existing terrain of discourses around sexuality in Kerala within which some of the dominant
assumptions around the public and the private, norms of desiring and modes of resistance
get troubled. My readings of the two films Sancharram and Deshadana Kili Karayarilla (from
now on DKK) are both firmly rooted in the demands of the contemporary moment as the
14 Navaneetha Mokkil

dominant frameworks of a global LGBT rights movement,6 such as the politics of visibility,
the concept of a counter-public, and the desire for a solidified gay or lesbian subject
position, get transfigured in the public sphere of Kerala. Although DKK is from an earlier
time period than Sancharram, this paper is not advocating a nostalgic return to ‘traditional’
models of desiring. On the other hand, a film such as DKK is relevant because it speaks
about the complexities of sexual desire within modern Kerala. It stages the gendered
struggles, in the negotiations of the public sphere that resonates with the challenges faced
by queer activism in Kerala today. Rather than fixate on the temporal differences between
these two films, I use them to speculate on the different models of sexual politics that are
available to us today.
It seems productive to look at how cultural texts can embody different modes of sexual
politics, as activists and academics struggle to coin strategies in order to articulate the
possibilities and impossibilities of non-normative sexual practices in Kerala. This is also
important in the face of the concern around lesbian suicides that is often read as the only
desperate measure that a same-sex couple can take in the absence of any existing
discourse within a culture on same-sex desire. My analysis of cultural production in the
1980s and the present, will question the linear narrative of an absence of representation of
non-normative sexual relationships in the past to a greater visibility in the current moment.
I will use this reading to rethink the neat binaries of silence and speech, visibility and
invisibility and point towards the need to have a more complex lens to think about the
grave issue of lesbian suicides in Kerala. My attempt is to critically re-examine the politics
of visibility and the dangers of positing that as the only strategy to critique the violence of
normative heterosexuality.
Feminist scholars who work on questions of sexuality in India, such as Nivedita
Menon, have observed how in the post-1990s period in India, after the liberalization and
opening up of the Indian economy, we see a new language of sexuality emerge. This is
tied to the AIDS discourse, the mushrooming of Non-Governmental Organizations
within civil society, and the new lingo introduced by international donor agencies and
governmental policies. Menon argues that, from the late 1980s, growing awareness about
the AIDS epidemic made it increasingly legitimate to talk about sex outside the realm of
law, demography and medicine. She observes that, ‘although AIDS is a disease which
also fits into medical discourse, its source made sex itself speakable’ (Menon 2007: 5).
Within the Kerala public sphere too, the AIDS awareness programs provided openings
and monetary resources for public articulation of issues around sexuality. But it would
be inaccurate to claim that sex was not ‘speakable’ before the late 1990s. There are multi-
ple sites of cultural production like films, literature, popular magazines and pornography
since the 1950s in Kerala that produced sexual texts. However, from the 1990s there is a
shift in the articulation of these sexuality-based issues, as a more well-formulated
language of sexual identity politics makes its way into the Kerala public sphere. These
developments have played an important role in engendering an LGBT movement in
metropolitan India that relies heavily on an international language of sexual rights.
Sancharram is a film that locates itself centrally within this international LGBT counter
cultural space.
There is a cultural discourse around desire and female friendship7 that DKK is informed
by, but it is much less solidified and therefore available for multiple depictions through film.
This paper attempts to think about how these earlier representations of sexuality can trouble
some of the more rigid formations around sexual identities in the contemporary moment.
I am interested in exploring the political implications of the cinematic codes used by
a director8 from the 1980s who might be aware that he is taking up a ‘taboo theme’, but
represents it so that the lesbian relationship is posited as one among other possibilities of
desire. This provides a productive counterpoint to a film such as Sancharram, which is the
Trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India 15

product of a different cultural representational logic and wears its queer identity politics on
its sleeve. The imagined audience and the circuits of circulation of both these films are also
markedly different.
Chicago-based director Pullappally’s9 Sancharram has garnered critical attention,
awards10 and appreciation for being a bold film that breaks accepted boundaries. It has been
lauded as ‘an incredible act of affirmation of queer desire’ by well-known gay rights
activists in India, such as Arvind Narrain (Narrain 2004). It premiered in the Chicago Inter-
national Film Festival and has been screened in film festivals in India and also in many
noted gay and lesbian film festivals in the US, Canada, and Australia. This is a film that
locates itself in the visible LGBT networks in India and abroad through the publicity of the
film, its places of exhibition and networks of circulation.11 The Wandering Bird Does Not Cry
(Deshadana Kili Karayarilla), on the other hand, was not labeled or marketed as a queer film
at the moment of its production, but the intimate relationship between two women forms
the crux of this film too. Its context of production and circulation is mainly for a regional
Malayali audience that is very different from Sancharram, which has not yet had a commer-
cial release in theaters in Kerala. A film such as DKK, which is be historically positioned
outside the current moment, can be reappropriated in order to offer a new lens to look at the
contemporary.

Critically queer
Whether it is through the metaphor of the ‘closet’ or the paradigm of ‘coming out’, the
questions of visibility and invisibility and the stakes of what it means for a sexual relation-
ship to be public and recognizable has been one of the persistent concerns of contemporary
LGBT politics. A sexual relationship acquires social sanction as a legitimate couplehood
only when it stakes a claim in the public sphere through an act such as marriage or living
together.12 The publicness of sex becomes intimately tied to the spaces that a couple
occupies. In cinema, we can track this by looking at the mise-en-scène and camera work that
place the characters within different spaces. There are also specific codes of representation
within film through which a couple is established through certain acts or positioning within
a shot.13 In the case of a film such as Sancharram, the exercise of producing such a film is
itself mired in the language of visibility and invisibility, and a ‘breaking the silence’ trajec-
tory is one that the film neatly fits into. The link between sexuality and the public sphere is
explored in complex ways within the cinematic text of DKK so as to dramatize some of the
strategic negotiations that the heroines in this film have to undertake in order to walk the
thin line between visibility and safety.
Through my readings of these two films I will show how the different conceptions of
desire these two films put forward, and their political implications, are played out through
the different spatial economies of these films. My ‘spatial’ analysis in this paper will be
twofold. It will mainly look at how spaces are framed within these two films, but I will
attempt to read this in conjunction with the different sites of production, circulation and
reception of these two films. My primary focus in this paper is on the use of space within the
two cinematic texts, but I support this analysis by referring to the locations within which
both these films are produced and received. A more detailed understanding of the spatial
circuits of these films can be arrived at by tracking their reception in theaters and exhibition
halls, the sales figures of DVDs or VCDs, the festival circuits they enter into and the reviews
they received from critics and the audience. In the future, I plan to take up the study of the
cinematic movements of both these films in order to support my argument further. For the
purposes of this paper, I will analyze the spatial dynamics within these two films to argue
that a film such as Deshadana Kili Karayarilla, which does not make its heroines claim a queer
subject position, manages to retain a sense of contingency of the term queer. Through its
16 Navaneetha Mokkil

more subterranean ways of working, it disrupts and queers the social sphere of Kerala in a
more critical fashion than Sancharram.
Reading against the grain of some of the more celebratory reviews of Sancharram, which
describe the film as ‘queering’ the terrain of Malayalam cinema, I hope to demonstrate how
this film might be putting into place a narrow and rigid definition of what the process of
queering involves. In her essay ‘Critically queer’, Judith Butler writes that the assertion of
‘queer’ must never purport to ‘fully describe’ those it seeks to represent (Butler 1993: 230).
She argues that to democratize queer politics and retain an awareness of the exclusionary
ways in which discourses of power work, it is essential to emphasize the level of contin-
gency of the term queer. A critique of the ‘queer subject’ should be built within critical queer
politics, which is aware that a single trajectory of queerness cannot be universally applica-
ble. ‘For whom is outness a historically available and affordable option? Is there an
unmarked character to the demand for universal “outness”? Who is represented by which
use of the term and who is excluded?’ (Butler 1993: 227), she asks, drawing attention to the
complexities that are bound to arise when certain crystallized forms of queerness are
exported universally. A comparative reading of DKK and Sancharram will enable me to
explore how and why certain cultural texts capture the possibilities of being ‘critically
queer’.

Differing scripts of travel: Deshadanam and Sancharram

Sancharram tells the story of two young women Kiran and Delilah (Lilah) in a rural setting
in Kerala whose friendship crosses accepted boundaries and enters the realm of the sexual.
Kiran comes from a prestigious Nair14 family with a father who is an established journalist
and a mother who has a wealthy legacy. Delilah, Kiran’s neighbor, is Christian and her
mother runs her household and their rubber estate after Delilah’s father’s death. The film
shows the budding relationship between the two girls as they study together in the same
school and share their everyday lives. Kiran is reluctant to express her sexual desire for
Lilah, but when circumstances force her to do so she discovers to her surprise that Lilah
shares her feelings. They confess their love for each other. But a crisis develops when
Rajan, one of their classmates who desires Lilah, sees them in an intimate moment and
reports this to Lilah’s mother. Due to familial pressure, Lilah agrees to an arranged
marriage and Kiran is ostracized both by her family and in school when news about their
relationship circulates in the community. Kiran repeatedly attempts to convince Lilah to
cut ties with her family and run away with her, but Lilah refuses to do so. On the day of
Lilah’s marriage, a desperate Kiran contemplates suicide, but changes her mind in the last
moment and turns back to embrace a new life. At the same instance, in a dream-like
sequence, Lilah rebels in the wedding hall and refuses to passively enter into a suitable
marriage.
The motif of the journey is central to Padmarajan’s film. Its title The Wandering Bird
Does Not Cry (Deshadana Kili Karyarilla) refers to the figure of the migratory bird who roams
the nation or ‘desham’ and never cries. The film follows the trajectory of the lives of two
young girls, Sally and Nirmala (Nimmi) who are in a strict boarding school run by Chris-
tian missionaries in Kerala. They are both seen as a disruptive presence in the school and
are punished for breaking school rules. Sally is shown from the beginning as the more
aggressive and assertive of the two and she often takes the initiative for their escapades.
The principal of the school even calls Nirmala ‘Sally’s tail’. Both the girls are shown to have
apathetic families. There is one teacher in the school, Devika, whom Sally and Nimmi rebel
against. To take revenge for Devika’s disciplinary actions, the two of them decide to run
away from a school picnic organized by her. Things work according to their plan and their
disappearance results in Devika’s suspension.
Trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India 17

The two of them take on new identities as tourists and research fellows and start to live
in a youth hostel in a different town. Nimmi also finds a job in a handicrafts store. They
seem satisfied in each other’s company until the entry of an older man, Harikrishnan, into
Nimmi’s life. Sally is suspicious of this man, but Nimmi is clearly attached to him and
looks upon him as her ‘father, lover and companion’. He also seems to reciprocate her
affection. But as the film progresses, we see that he is actually in love with Devika and
hopes to marry her. He also wishes that Nimmi and Sally would return to their school and
to resume their education and for Devika to get back her job. Towards the end of the film
he convinces Nimmi to go back to school, while Sally resolutely refuses to do so. On the
day before Nimmi is to return to her old school, Harikrishnan tells her about his plan to
marry Devika. Nimmi is shattered at this news and attempts to commit suicide when Sally
packs her bag and leaves. But Sally returns at the right moment and tells Nimmi that she
cannot go off anywhere by herself. The film stages an intense moment of reunion between
the two girls, but the narrative takes us to the following morning, when we see both girls
dead in bed hugging each other. ‘To a far, far, far away place,’ says the postscript to the
film in small black letters.

The public sphere and the making of the couple

Sancharram through its textual politics, its marketing and circulation is part of a counter-
public. It positions itself as a ‘lesbian’ film which is staking a claim for an expression of
queer desire that goes against societal norms. A counter-public is seen to be in a conflictual
relationship to the dominant public and therefore operating in frictional relation to the
norm. As Michael Warner argues, ‘a conterpublic maintains at some level, conscious or not,
an awareness of its subordinate status. The cultural horizon against which it marks itself off
is not just a general or wider public, but a dominant one’ (Warner 2002: 86). Pullappally’s
film is working within the logic of a neat splitting between the dominant public sphere and
a disruptive counter culture. In order to perform this dichotomous relationship, the film
posits a traditional Nair home and a picture-perfect rural Kerala as the backdrop for its ‘love
story’. There is a need to construct a calm river for a counter cultural stone to create its
ripples.
What seems striking to me in DKK, both in terms of its spatialization of desire in the
film and the spaces it occupies through its circulation, is that it undoes this binary between a
dominant culture and a counterculture that sets itself against it. It makes visible the ‘contra-
dictions and perversities inherent in the organization of all publics’ (Warner 2002: 81). By
doing so it points to the limits of positing a counter public as an exclusive site of resistance.
This film was screened in mainstream film theaters and it also made its way into the home
later through its transmission on Malayalam television channels. Padmarajan is seen as one
of the established and highly popular filmmakers of Kerala whose films are still nostalgi-
cally evoked as part of the ‘golden era’ of Malayalam cinema. So there is a certain culture of
aesthetic appreciation and film reception that places DKK as culturally acceptable, ‘good’
cinema. The circuits of circulation of this film as a mainstream film meant for ‘family audi-
ences’ show how the dominant public sphere can itself be an unstable space. Thus, my
move towards a reading of DKK suggests that films and cultural texts that circulate in the
mainstream public sphere and carry the label of ‘good art’ might at times have their own
strategies of undoing normative codes of desiring.15
Of the three interlocking strands of desire in the film – the relationship between Nimmi
and Sally, the marriage-oriented relationship between Harikrishnan and Devika,16 and the
incomplete romance between Nimmi and Harikrishnam17 – it is the one between Sally and
Nimmi that functions as its emotional fulcrum. There are sequences in the beginning of the
film where the camera movements and the spatial arrangements help to set up a bond
18 Navaneetha Mokkil

between the two. For example, there is one sequence where both the women sit on the long
steps in an open courtyard in the school and Sally unfolds her plan of how to foil a school
entertainment event. The first shot we have is a medium shot of Sally and then the camera
tracks out and we have both of them in the frame. As they talk Nimmi clicks a photograph
of the view before her and then the camera moves behind Nimmi and we see her hand and
shoulders and Sally as seen from her perspective. Then quickly Nimmi takes a photograph
of Sally, thus we see her through Nimmi’s gaze. The scene ends with a long shot of both of
them now seated close to each other with Nimmi’s hands on Sally’s lap. They are placed
together at the center of the long steps that extend to both ends of the frame. The spatial
arrangement of the two of them, framed by the long steps and planted in the middle, struc-
turally resembles the genre of ‘couple’ photographs and it enables them to be established as
a connected unit within the film text.
The song sequence, which celebrates their togetherness, is one that again follows many
of the conventions of representing romantic couplehood in Malayalam films. In the song,
we see them holding hands and walking together to the backdrop of the sunset on the
beach. Sally puts her arm around Nimmi’s shoulder as they walk in parks or go shopping.
They go boating together on a blue lake. They run around playfully and try to chase each
other and end up falling into each other’s arms. The song ends with both of them in a
merry-go-round in a fair, another familiar space of the couple. By placing them in spaces
that are often marked cinematically as the space of the couple, like the beach, the park or
even the merry-go-round and deploying a body language that marks a sense of physical
intimacy, this song gives them the position of a couple in the film. This is emphasized when
we watch the second song that comes later in the film and is dedicated to the budding
romance between Nimmi and Hari. Similar scenes are repeated against similar backdrops
such as the beach, the park and the street, showing how the codes with which the filmmaker
represents queer desire echo the ones he uses to put into place the heterosexual couple. This
replication of representational codes and repetition of the ‘space of the couple’ in the film
makes it difficult to differentiate one couple as the legitimate and the other as the illegiti-
mate one. One does not seem to be more or less impossible, than the other, in the cinematic
space.
DKK weaves a criss-crossing network of relationships where one organization of sexu-
ality overlaps and throws a shadow on the other in such a way that it disrupts the central-
ity of normative heterosexuality. It manages to do so by claiming publicness to the
performance of sexual relationships. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in their essay ‘Sex
in public’ draw on the work of Foucault and Habermas in order to discuss the counter
impulses within the discourses around sexuality and public culture (Berlant and Warner
1998). On the one hand, there are multiple mechanisms in place through which certain
normative forms of sexuality acquire public recognition. This could range from the approv-
ing smiles a hand-holding heterosexual couple in suburban United States gets, to how
landlords in most cities in India prefer to rent out apartments to married couples. On the
other hand, there is an erasure of the public in sex when ‘sexuality seems like a property of
subjectivity rather than a publicly or counterpublicly accessible culture’ (Berlant and
Warner 1998: 560). These contradictions around sex as both public and intensely private is
one that is of much significance to queer politics today. These are questions that get staged
in opposing ways in Sancharram and DKK.
DKK foregrounds the publicness of sexual relationships by making the couple through
displaying them in public spaces, and showing the role of public spaces in the making of the
couple. Thus, couplehood is shown as a public construction with established codes of
narrativization within film. One obvious example of this is the mandatory song sequence
that the couples in this film, Nimmi and Sally, Nimmi and Hari, are fitted into. These song
sequences mirror each other. They show up the conventions of the making of the couple
Trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India 19

and reflect how cultural forms like cinema play a role in this construction. Often in films the
rituals of normative heterosexuality are reiterated so much that its ritualistic codes become
naturalized. But when two women as a couple mimic the codes of heterosexual couplehood,
it opens up gaps and fissures that foreground the constitutive instabilities of romantic
couplehood. The acknowledgement of the public construction of couplehood in this film
undercuts the assumption that heterosexual couplehood is a stable or natural formation. It
thus enables the opening up of the possibility of multiple directions of desire within the
social realm. Thus, the film, through its strategic ways of drawing attention to the conven-
tions of the construction of heterosexual couplehood, manages to queer the public sphere of
Kerala, instead of setting up a separate niche or space that could work as counter cultural.
A comparative reading of these two films enables me to reflect on the different literary
and filmic conventions that make couplehood culturally intelligible. Sancharram draws on
the existing literary and cinematic convention of making the couple, but its impulse seems
to be in opposition to that of DKK because it enacts couplehood and the act of desiring as
intensely private and subjective. The space of the couple as it emerges in Sancharram often
appears as a dream space that is disassociated from the social or the public realm. The film
is heavily invested in the visual and verbal discourse of romantic love in which sexuality
becomes a ‘property of subjectivity’ (Berlant and Warner 1998: 560). The plot device, which
is used to kindle the romance between Kiran and Delilah, is a familiar one from the Malay-
alam romantic writing dating from the 19th century and even earlier. Kiran’s smoldering
desire finds an outlet when one of their classmates, Rajan, asks her to help him pen love
notes to Delilah in order to win her heart. ‘I like her as much as Kunjakko Bobban likes
Shalini in Adorable Sister (Aniyathi Pravu)’, says Rajan drawing on a popular Malayalam
teenage love film to express his desire. But Kiran employs another high literary discourse of
love when writing to Delilah. Her language comes from the romantic poetic traditions of
Malayalam literature and it is saturated with imagery of nature and is emotionally intense.
Kiran is set up as the intense, introspective poet in the film after one of the initial scenes in
the Malayalam literature classroom where she interprets Sugathakumari’s18 poem ‘Krishna,
Don’t You Know Me’ (‘Krishna Nee Enne Ariyallalo’) about the Radha Krishna relationship,
as a poem about the hellish loneliness of love. Their love is also revealed to each other
through poetic words. The first poem that Kiran publishes is titled ‘Awakening’ (‘Unnarvu’)
and I cannot miss the parallels to the American feminist writer Kate Chopin’s novel Awaken-
ing (1899), a classic evocation of sexual liberation stemming from a deep sense of selfhood or
interiority. Placing the love story of her film in the high-romantic tradition creates a reified
object of same-sex love; in this idealized form it can be practiced only by certain privileged
subjects. The queering of the public sphere in DKK and the reification of lesbian desire in
Sancharram, is paralleled in the contrasting spatial dynamics of both these films.

Sexual places, sexual spaces

If we take a quick look at the title of both of these films, what stands out is the reference to
movement and travel. Travel is a process through which space is rendered mobile. Sanchar-
ram literally embodies this sense of movement. DKK’s reference to travel is through the
term deshadanam. It also refers to the figure of the migratory bird (deshadanakili) who
seasonally wanders from one destination to another in search of a conducive environment.
Deshadanam suggests the ambiguities in the Malayalam language with reference to the
concepts of space and travel. Deshadanam is a compound term made up of the two parts
‘desham’ and ‘adanam’, which means travel. Desham as a term conjures up multiple imagina-
tions of space. It refers to the macropolitical unit of the nation, but it can also be used in a
much more local sense to refer to the spatial unit of a particular geographical region within
Kerala.19 Deshadanam is the process of traveling through the desham in a wandering manner
20 Navaneetha Mokkil

without necessarily having a destination in mind. It is the journey itself that matters than
the final destination. There is an element of quest or search that is built into such traveling.
It is through occupying space and encountering new experiences that you arrive at new
meanings. Since the term desham can refer to a large geographical space unit of the nation,
but also a specific localized region, it infuses multiple histories and spatial dimensions into
a localized space. Layers of possibility are packed into one single space that is rendered
mobile and unstable through ways in which it is occupied. The term desham has parallels to
De Certeau’s definition of a ‘space’ as distinct from a ‘place’. For him, place carries an indi-
cation of stability where every object has a specific location, while space does not have a
stability of the ‘proper’, ‘space is a practiced place’ (De Certeau 1984: 117). One of the impor-
tant distinctions I would like to draw between the spatial representations in DKK and
Sancharram is how, within DKK, the specific area of Kerala within which the film is set
becomes a ‘desham’ or a ‘space’, while in Sancharram the location appears as a ‘place’, which
remains stable and frozen.
Although the film is titled The Journey (Sancharram), it loses its sense of mobility because
of the rather rigid sexual politics that is reflected in the spatial dynamics of the film. One of
the privileged sites within this film is the inside space of the home, which is represented
through the image of the Nair Taravad.20 The film spends a lot of its energy in constructing
this space of the imagined home as rooted in tradition. This is one of the chronotopes that
the film uses repeatedly. The opening sequence of the film is a shot of the ancestral home of
Kiran’s mother. This is shot from outside and a leaf falls in slow motion in front of the house
giving it an aura of having lived through the passage of time. The image is arrested so that it
resembles a still photograph. This is followed by two shots, one of the wooden pillars and
the ceiling of the house, and then a close-up of a lamp blackened by time and use that hangs
from the ceiling. When the young Kiran enters the house we have a high angle shot of a
dwarfed-looking Kiran who seems physically overwhelmed by the house. The camera tilts
up to show her reflection on the old photographs on the wall. Then the camera tracks her
exploration of the old house, which looks like a museum with the woodwork, artillery on
the wall and Ravi Varma21 like paintings. Through these carefully chosen and arranged
artifacts, such as black and white photographs and Ravi Varma paintings, the film
condenses time and produces an imagined cultural cocoon within Kerala. As a backdrop to
this guided tour, we have Kiran’s mother’s voice telling the story of the continued lineage of
this Nair heritage as sustained through women. It is the shot of this house that functions as
the transition device for Kiran and Delilah’s move from childhood playmates to intimate
adolescent friends. Although the film is exposing the heterosexual foundations on which
this matrilineal tradition is built, it relies on a manufactured idea of Nair tradition that is
portrayed as timeless and eternal, and embodied in this architectural structure of the Nair
Taravad.
‘In a land steeped in tradition… a secret love’, says the blurb on the DVD of Sancharram.
The construction of a place that stands still and seems to be untouched by modernity is a
device that the film uses in its portrayal of Kerala as well. ‘All this is filmed against the lush
backdrop of Kerala, the histories and customs of the tharavads, the strong women who run
the houses in this matrilineal society’, says Vikram in a review of Sancharram cited on the
official website of the film (Vikram 2004). The film establishes a continuity between the
idyllic landscape and the sphere of the Nair home as both become emblematic of a rural
Kerala. Reviews of this film mention its ‘mesmerizing lyricism’ and emphasize that what is
different about the film is the eruption of same-sex love in a pristine, rural setting. Thus, the
film sets up an imagined Kerala, which is steeped in tradition. The construction of this
frozen space is essential for the forbidden desire to seem radical.
The one explicit scene of intimacy between the two girls shows us how much the film
relies on its idealized construction of a place in order to deliver its ‘queer’ statement. The
Trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India 21

scene is set by a secluded pond that has stone steps, and the sequence begins with a long
shot of the pond itself. We see the lilac water lilies, the lapping green water and the reflec-
tion of the coconut trees. This is followed by the sequence in which the women express their
sexual desire, which is mainly shot in a series of extreme close ups. At the end of the
sequence we get a close up of Lilah’s feet as they hit the water. The camera pans to give us a
shot of the green water with fishes moving inside it. There is a cut to a long shot of the pond
seen through the window and then a cut to a stone statue on the steps of the pond. Thus, we
can see how cinematically it is essential for the director to set up an idyllic setting within
which this desire is staged. The pond, the greenery and the temple drums that form the
backdrop, these are the conventional pegs on which Pullappally hangs her ‘radical’ love
story.
Most of the scenes between the two girls are located in places that are marked by an
absence of human occupation. Narrow pathways with emerald green fields on both sides,
towering hills, bubbling brooks, the moonlit sky – it is often a pristine landscape that offers
the backdrop to the unfolding of their desire. Or it is within the closed space of the house,
the bedroom of either Kiran or Lilah, that we witness their interactions. This particular
construction of a cinematic ‘place’, to use the term in De Certeau’s way, makes the spatial
organization of this film a static one. The regional setting within this film does not acquire
the layered texture of a desham, but remains inanimate like a picturesque postcard.
In sharp contrast to this, DKK is mostly set in the urban center of Kerala, Cochin and
uses as its backdrop the public spaces in this city that are shown to be mobile and dynamic.
Unlike the neat binary that Sancharram sets up between the stable realm of the home/home-
land and the disruptive forces of desire that rocks it, DKK sets out to map a fluctuating
social field of an urbanizing Kerala. It is important that he chooses Cochin as the destination
point to which the heroines run away in an attempt to build a new life. Even today Cochin is
seen as the urban hub of Kerala – which embodies a heady mixture of anonymity, sexual
activity and criminality.22 There are constant references to the dangers and possibilities that
the city offers in the film. When Nimmi and Sally come to a Catholic convent in Cochin and
request accommodation for a night, Sally tells the missionaries that if they deny them
accommodation, they may have to read about the gang rape of two young girls in the
newspapers the next day. When Harikrishnan and Nimmi first meet, he refers to the multi-
ple encounters between people in the city who meet and part as strangers. Sally and Nimmi
often capitalize on the fact that Cochin is a site of tourist flow and behave as if they are
outsiders visiting Kerala. They rename themselves Maya and Eileen, speak in English or
broken Malayalam, carry cameras and exude an interest in Kerala folk arts. With every step
they take in this new space, they are well aware of unpredictable new developments. In this
film, the unnamed desire and intimacy that is staged between the two women seem to be
intrinsic to the lack of stability of the social sphere they occupy. It is the layered and mobile
realm of the ‘desham’ which they occupy that engenders this desire. Therefore, queerness is
not posited as a ‘forbidden desire’; it is part of the messy contours and multiple possibilities
within the urban space itself.
While Sancharram unfolds in the home space and the realm of the family, DKK is
marked by its absence of home or domestic spaces. In fact, all through the film there is not a
single sequence where either Nimmi or Sally is shown inside a house. They occupy a range
of public spaces and the film focuses on their negotiations of these spaces. These spaces
form a shifting terrain as viewers get a sense of how they are occupied by these two women.
The film begins in the highly disciplined boarding school run by Roman Catholic sisters and
we see the attempts of Nimmi and Sally to upset the order of this school through various
pranks and rebellious acts. After they run away from school, the youth hostel marks their
arrival in the city. Here they can don a new identity and temporarily erase their history. A
place made for travelers and tourists, this is shown as a transitory space which can offer a
22 Navaneetha Mokkil

temporary shelter to the two women. One of the crucial moments in their journey together
is when they feel that they have escaped the surveillance of the school authorities. To show
their sense of newly acquired freedom there is a sequence of both of them running together
on the open road. The camera visually captures their process of occupying the open space of
the road. This sequence is in slow motion with background music and we have a close up of
their legs moving rhythmically as they run into the road that stretches before them. The
background music is fast paced; it is early morning and the two women merge with the
morning joggers, another sign of a more urban lifestyle.
The public spaces that these two women occupy reflect the everyday spaces of an
urbanizing Kerala in the 1980s. There are night shots of crowded streets with shops on both
sides and political posters that festoon the roadsides. STD23 phone booths, ice-cream
parlors, public parks, bus stations, restaurants and theaters give the audience a texture of
the developing urban spaces in Kerala in that period. The two women’s encounters in these
public spaces are often tinged with a sense of danger. In fact, the first rule we see them
breaking in school is when they go to a theater to watch a matinee and the news reaches the
school authorities because they are harassed there by some men. After they run away from
school, we see them negotiating the streets and using various methods24 to evade different
men on the streets, including a policeman who targets them. In the night scenes on public
roads, men often follow to harass them and Sally at one point says in English how ‘they are
getting on my nerves’.
The film speaks directly to some of the feminist debates in Kerala since the 1980s about
women’s lack of access to public spaces and the high level of violence against women in
such spaces. This is an ongoing debate and a matter of concern for activist groups based in
Kerala. Deepa in her observations around the responses to Sahayatrika, a support network
and helpline for lesbian and bisexual women in Kerala, mentions that many of the women
supporting Sahayatrika did not identify primarily as lesbians or women loving women.
They were ‘drawn to the potential of a political and social space where one could articulate
issues and experiences of women’s sexuality more freely’ (Deepa 2005: 192). These
responses to Sahayatrika show the absence of locations where women can resist the ‘patriar-
chal ordering of their bodies’ (Deepa 2005: 192) and the continuing struggle of women to
stake a claim on public spaces.
Thus, the strategies staged in DKK of two women occupying public spaces do have a
political resonance even today. In fact, the film retains a sense of ambivalence about what
brings these two women together – is it their desire for each other or their common dream
of an imagined space of freedom? Or is it even possible to distinguish these two motiva-
tions? They often express a shared desire for a safe space. This is the question that Nimmi
asks Sally when they first come to the youth hostel, ‘Is this the place you told me about…
the safe space far, faraway?’ But at no point in the film do they seem to attain this sense of
reaching a destination. They are always on the run, always in search of another world; this
is how they perform a deshadanam, a constant wandering within one regional location.
What is disruptive about the film is that it shows that the journey is a possible one.
These women do manage to enter into public spaces usually closed off to women and
occupy it in strategic ways as a couple. When Hari first sees them in a restaurant eating ice
cream and chatting together, he mistakes them for a heterosexual couple. Later when he
realizes that they are two women, he has no qualms in interrupting their shared space and
even insinuating that they are immoral women because they wile away their time in a
public place. He interrogates them and tells them how he could inform the police of meeting
two young women in suspicious circumstances. The ease with which he is able to disrupt
the space shared by these two young women comes from the fact that the public space of the
restaurant is not in the first instance a space that belongs to them. The film’s tragic ending
seems to be a statement of the impossibility of safe spaces for two women. But in spite of
Trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India 23

this closure of possibilities, the whole film stages multiple enactments of two women’s
struggles to occupy the public sphere. ‘As the film concludes, a new journey begins’ says the
synopsis of Sancharram on the film’s official website with reference to the ending of Sanchar-
ram (The Journey website 2005). I would argue that DKK begins where Sancharram ends; it
actually sets the two women off on a physical journey through the world and the grittiness
of life. It is a journey that ends in suicide but what the film captures is the journey itself. It is
the sense of movement that remains with us even when we are confronted with the shock of
the ending. By showing these two women performing this disruptive journey and by
making them occupy public spaces in unconventional ways, Padmarajan’s film is queering
the social sphere within which this film is located.

Strategies of queering
A comparative reading of Sancharram and DKK and the strikingly different representation
of spaces within the two films highlight the different discourse of sexuality within which
these two films are located. Ligy Pullappally undertakes the project of setting up a visible
lesbian subject and makes a claim for the expression of lesbian desire within the Kerala
public sphere. Pullappally’s political agenda, as it is projected through her film, cuts
against the more tentative and conflicted political positions and strategies that emerge from
groups like Sahayatrika, which are based in Kerala. In DKK, through the journey of the two
women, we see a dramatization of the tensions between visibility and invisibility and their
attempts to deploy different everyday strategies of survival. After they run away from
school, Sally exclaims that they are free birds once they get out of the school uniform. ‘No
one can say who we are now, we can decide that now on’, is her statement of celebration at
the masking of their past identity. From renaming themselves, to dressing differently and
taking on new identities as tourists or researchers, there are multiple ways in which they
erase their past and make use of anonymity in a new place in order to lead the life they
desire.
In the political organization of sexual minority rights in Kerala, there is an implicit
critique and a search for alternatives to the politics of visibility. Since the backlash against
lesbian couples who come under media scrutiny is often tremendous, Sahayatrika orga-
nizers mention that they have to use a multiplicity of strategies and often try to negotiate
the tensions between visibility and safety. Deepa draws on the experiences of Sahayatrika
to emphasize how ‘visibility continues to be both empowering and disempowering for
sexuality minority groups, and we must all grapple with its contradictions’ (Deepa 2005:
192). Sahayatrika is an organization that has made statements in the public sphere with-
out having any visible spokespeople (Deepa 2005: 194).25 The organizational experiences
of Sahayatrika points towards a strategic use of invisibility and anonymity, even as they
are trying to fight for public acceptance for sexual minority groups. The lesbian subject
position that is posited in Sancharram seems to have a less conflicted relationship to the
politics of visibility. It transplants the ‘coming out’ narrative to the Kerala scenario in an
unproblematic way.
Ligy Pullappally, in her conversations about the making of Sancharram, draws attention
to how her film is a particular process of translation. She draws on the frameworks about
LGBT rights within a metropolitan Indian and transnational context and applies it to a rural
setting. In an interview that appeared in the Bangalore based newspaper Deccan Herald, she
positions her film in the middle of the mainstream LGBT movement in India and abroad
when she says that Sancharram was also her response to the Deepa Mehta’s film Fire (1998).26
‘That film handled the subject of a lesbian relationship as well. […] In addition, Fire is an
English language film in an urban setting. I made my film to reflect the more traditional gay
experience in India. My characters are unapologetically gay and speak a regional South
24 Navaneetha Mokkil

Indian language’ (Cheerath-Rajagopalan 2005, italics mine). A climactic moment in Deepa

Mehta’s film which triggered off multiple responses is one in which the two women protag-
onists bemoan the fact that there is no word in their language to name their relationship.27
Pullappally seems to function within this same logic of naming and making visible as she
sets out to show how lesbian love in a recognizable form is alive and thriving in rural
pockets within India. It is not surprising that she highlights her choice of Malayalam as the
language for the film instead of English. But I would argue that this process of translation in
which an already processed concept of lesbian desire is neatly plastered onto a new context,
is a process that faces the risk of freezing cultural formations rather than queering the social
sphere.
In her attempt to produce a ‘traditional’ lesbian narrative, Ligy Pullappally at times
slips into an unquestioning valorization of a Nair identity and banks on a caste-based
stratification to deliver its heroes. Kiran is in many ways the icon of rebelliousness in this
film. She is the one who takes the initiative to express her desire to Lilah and refuses to be
crushed by social pressures. When Delilah says that she is willing to get married but
continue to have a relationship with Kiran, Kiran refuses this adulterated existence. The
film also ends with Kiran on a cliff top choosing life over death, cutting her hair and throw-
ing it in the waterfall, as she walks forth to encounter her new life. But this sense of agency
that the film bestows on Kiran seems to be tied up to an essentialized Nair identity28 which
the film constructs for her. The film draws on the tropes through which Nair hegemony is
consolidated in contemporary Kerala like the caste group’s claims of a military past with
expertise in martial arts. In the beginning of the film we see Kiran as a young girl returning
to her mother’s ancestral home in Kerala and wandering around its huge, palatial rooms. It
is in this place that the film embeds her. Even when her mother confronts her about her
relationship with Delilah it is her Nair identity that Kiran asserts to articulate her sprit of
rebellion. ‘Isn’t it the blood of the warriors that flows through me also?’ she asks, as she
refuses to settle for any compromising marriage. Thus the film, in its attempt to set up a
heroic female figure resorts to the trope through which male heroes in Malayalam films are
often made. Caste, religious privilege and a noble lineage become the marker of heroic
valor.29 The setting up of totalized identity categories in a film like Sancharram, results in
relations of power, within which selected practices and subjects are privileged over others.
The celebration of a high-romantic lesbian desire and a singular lesbian subject position in
this film sets off a pattern of cultural exclusions and inclusions. This is a risk that the film
does not seem to be much aware of.
DKK, because of the historical moment of its production and the circuits of circulation
it was located in, steers clear of a counter-cultural labeling. Padmarajan as a director was
an important exponent of the genre of ‘middle cinema’, which blended the conventions
and concerns of commercial and art cinema and thus appealed to a larger audience base.30
Although he was quite experimental in his representations of sexuality, his attempt was
primarily to address a Malayali middle class audience. The star-casting in his film with the
popular hero Mohan Lal and successful actresses such as Urvashi and Karthika, the atten-
tion paid to the song sequences, are all markers of the fact that this was a film made for a
mainstream theater release. Padmarajan in this film steers clear of a graphic expression of
sexual desire and this is different from some of his other films like Butterflies of the Clear
Blue Sky (Thoovanathumbikal, 1987) and Vineyards for Us to Dwell (Namukku Parkkan
Munthirithoppukal, 1986) which are noted for their bold expression of erotic desire on
screen. Deshadana Kili Karayarilla is understated in its verbalizations of emotions and
romantic feelings. Even in the final emotionally-charged scene when Sally returns to
Nimmi, her affirmation of her attachment to Sally is in the form of a question. ‘Didn’t you
understand me till now?’ she asks Nimmi, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps of what
they or Nimmi understand and thus making possible multiple interpretations of the
Trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India 25

relationship. The process of queering that this film undertakes is not to set up a stable unit
of the ‘lesbian couple’ nor is it privileging a particular subject position as the queer subject
position.

In search of a resolution
When filmmakers attempt to give a representational form to relationships that are consid-
ered to be outside the realm of the legitimate, the plot resolution or the ending of the film
seems to be a point of crisis. Sancharram takes a conscious turn away from suicide as a
possible ending and stages Kiran’s decision to turn away from the abyss of death to the
beginning of a new life. This is cinematically represented by the metamorphosis of a cater-
pillar into a butterfly that flies into the blue sky. At the same moment, Lilah’s voice booms
through the air as she cries out Kiran’s name. Here the film suddenly cuts to the scene of
Lilah’s wedding in the church. As the wedding vows are read out by the priest they are
repeated multiple times, as if it is resonating in Lilah’s mind. The camera gives us Lilah’s
point of view as she kneels down and we see everyone around her elongated and blurred.
Suddenly the church empties out and Lilah drops her bouquet and runs out of the church,
screaming Kiran’s name. It is this voice that reaches Kiran and a fantasy reunion is staged
as the same butterfly flutters before Lilah’s watching gaze. Thus, Sancharram resorts to a
break from realism in order to stage a resolution to the ‘love story’. This formal turn-
around, in order to enact a hopeful resolution to the problem the film poses, brings to the
fore a clash of registers between the realist commitments of the film and its sudden slide
into the realm of fantasy. The issue of ‘lesbian suicides’ that the film is responding to and
denouncing is rooted within the contemporary social field of Kerala. But the depiction of
lesbian desire in this film, as a romantic passion that can be realized only through an act of
individual rebellion, evacuates queer desire of its potential to destabilize the public sphere.
The dream-like quality of the ending of Sancharram becomes symptomatic of the split
between the questions of sexuality within the social sphere of contemporary Kerala and the
politics of the sexuality that the film puts forward. This seems to suggest the limits of a
sexual politics, where rebellion is posited as an individual act of grand revolution and
desire is set up as a radical force outside the realm of the social or the public. The binary
opposition the film constructs between the ‘secret love’ and a ‘land steeped in tradition’
makes a turn to a dream sequence the necessary cinematic device through which a final act
can be staged.
The final act of suicide in DKK becomes a difficult one to read, because the film makes a
simple reading impossible. The film comes from a time period when ‘lesbian suicides’ was
not established in the public sphere as an object of public concern and political activism. So
the suicide at the end of the film cannot be linked to the issue of lesbian suicide as we know
of it today. The film has an unexpected ending, when the morning after an intense night of
reunion between Nimmi and Sally, the viewer sees the inert bodies of the two girls in bed
together. The euphoria and hope of their coming together the previous night does not in
anyway prepare the viewer for the rude shock of death in the next sequence. ‘To a far, far,
far away place’ in small black letters is the postscript to the ending of this film. The fact that
the two girls have to commit suicide after they swear to be together forever, does point to
the tenuous nature of their tactics of survival. It may signal the hopelessness of their search
to find a safe haven within existing social structures. But the sliding chain of referents
within which the final shot of the entwined dead bodies of the two girls can be placed,
complicate the reading of the suicide simply as a statement about the impossibility of non-
normative desires.
The suicide in DKK can be read within the conventions of climaxes in romantic films
and literature in Malayalam. This plot resolution is reminiscent of endings in other
26 Navaneetha Mokkil

celebrated heterosexual romances in Malayalam literature and film where the ultimate
triumph of love is to die together, especially in the face of social opposition.31 By making
two women stage this final act of togetherness, especially after a climactic scene of reunion
where they pledge to be with each other forever, the film once again mimes the conventions
of heterosexual couplehood. Thus, the suicide, instead of cementing and privileging a
heterosexual matrix, functions as another trope through which the film destabilizes the
normative sexual arrangements of society. In a culture of representations, where the testi-
mony to true love is to die together, Sally and Nimmi’s couplehood becomes established
beyond doubt through their suicide. Thus, the film retains its ability to destabilize the social
sphere even through this seemingly dark gesture of suicide.
My comparative reading of both these films posits the desire for cultural productions
that capture a different language of queer politics in Kerala, grounded in the specificities of
the context. My analysis pushes for the need to reflect on the dangers of setting up a
universal demand for ‘outness’. It attempts to show how some of the taken-for-granted
assumptions of transnational queer politics, such as the celebration of visible bodies, gets
radically questioned when we turn to non-metropolitan sites of analysis. The location of
Pullappally’s film in the LGBT discourse in India and abroad makes it so enmeshed in
setting up an established meaning for the term ‘queer’ that the process of queering
becomes one of stabilizing a chosen form of desire as the ideal one. In this process of
setting up a stable trajectory for queer desire, it also freezes the spatial and social terrains of
Kerala. The process of queering that Deshadana Kili Karayarilla undertakes is not one that
attempts to set up a particular subject position as the queer subject position nor does it plot
a blueprint for the direction that same-sex desire should take. It sets out to trouble the
naturalized construction of the heterosexual couple and injects a sense of instability into
the social sphere itself.
Unlike Sancharram, which projects a picture perfect image of Kerala that is disrupted by
same-sex love, DKK puts a finger on the queerness within the nebulous terrains of sexuality
in Kerala. This film gives a representational form to the destabilizing possibilities that are
necessarily there in any social sphere, but not always talked about. This might be why DKK
can be both enabling or more disturbing to a regional Malayali audience, while Sancharram
can be accepted or dismissed easily as a quaint love story in an imagined Kerala. If the
dominant sphere can be shown to be an unstable one, it is useful for coming up with a
different model of queer politics that is not always invested in the project of naming and
solidifying identities, but can work within a terrain of the contingent. Butler argues that the
term ‘queer’ can be useful for future imaginings only if it retains its sense of contingency
and its meanings are never fully anticipated in advance (Butler 1993: 228). Deshadana Kili
Karayarilla puts forward a critical process of queering that is threatening because of its very
instability and non-cohesiveness. This is a sense of contingency worth retaining for a critical
queer politics.

Acknowledgements
I thank Anne Herrmann, Manishita Dass and Sarita See for their productive comments
during the various stages of the shaping of this paper. Thanks also to Sharmila Sreekumar,
Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, S Sanjeev and Ratheesh Kumar for detailed conversations that
helped me in developing different aspects of this paper.

Notes
1. Kerala is a state in Southern India on the Western coast. The official language of this state is called
Malayalam. This state was formed as an administrative unit in 1956.
Trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India 27

2. Pullappally places her motivation for making this film in the issue of lesbian suicides in Kerala and says
her ‘social agenda is this: I hope my film helps young gay people consider the option of moving ahead
with their lives, instead of taking the devastating step that will resonate for years within their own
families and communities, suicide’ (Interview, Cheerath-Rajagopalan 2005). The choice of theme, she
says, was triggered by an e-mail she received in January 2000, describing the death of a young woman at
a university in Kerala, who could not cope with the humiliation inflicted on her by society when they
became aware of her intimacy with a classmate.
3. In a state that has the highest suicide rate in India, there have been since the mid-1990s newspaper
reports about women who die together. Initially these were unspecified reports tucked away in some
corner of the newspaper, but as the pattern repeated it drew the attention of some concerned individuals
and groups. Journals such as Sameeksha published special reports on these suicides in the 1990s that had
not received much public attention until then. Today, as the category of the ‘lesbian’ becomes well circu-
lated in public discourses, even mainstream newspapers mark such suicides as ‘lesbian suicides’.
4. I use the term queer in order to tap into the critical political possibilities opened by it. The process of
queering is not one of setting up rigid identity categories, but on the other hand it questions the normal-
izing mechanisms that divide the social world into hierarchical binaries such as male/female, homosex-
ual/heterosexual or married/single. Queer is a term that is currently gaining circulation in India in an
attempt to forge a sexuality politics that questions normativity.
5. Sahayathrika is a non-governmental organization that provides a support structure to sexual minorities
in Kerala. It was established in 2002 as a concerned response to the reports about lesbian suicides in
Kerala. It provides a helpline and a post-box number so that women in distress can get in touch with
them through mail or phone. Its agenda includes creating awareness about lesbian rights and educating
activists, doctors, social workers and counselors about sexuality and sexual orientation. It has published
an investigative and analytical report on specific cases of lesbian suicides in the anthology Beyond
Misconceptions: Homosexuality in Kerala (2004). Social activist Deepa V.N. has been the spokesperson and
coordinator for Sahayatrika since its inception.
6. There are significant political and historical differences between the two terms ‘LGBT’ and ‘queer
politics’ as it is used in India and elsewhere. The LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) movement
is the term used in India to refer to the political activism around sexual minority rights and I use it to
denote the more visible face of a largely identity-based sexuality politics. The movement gained strength
since the 1990s in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, protests against human rights violations and
mobilizations to repeal Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes sexual acts outside the
frame of normative heterosexuality. Recent publications such as Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in
India (2005) point to the complex conversations that are emerging within the field of sexuality studies in
India today. Its introduction suggests that the term queer is useful to move beyond the limits of identity
politics: ‘queer politics does not speak only of the issues of these communities as “minority issues”, but
instead speaks of larger understandings of gender and sexuality in our society that affect all of us,
regardless of our sexual orientation’ (Narrain and Bhan 2005: 4).
7. There are certain common tropes that this film shares with other representations of homoerotic relation-
ships between women in Malayalam literature, the most noted one being V.T. Nandakumar’s Two Girls
(Randu Penkuttikal, 1974) and also popular discourses in women’s magazines since the 1970s. One of
these is the concern around the possible intimacies between women in sex-segregated spaces such as
women’s hostels and educational institutions.
8. Kerala-based writer and film-maker Padmarajan made his first film in 1979 and the last one I, the
Celestial Lover (Njan Gandharvan) in 1991. In a short span of 12 years he made almost 20 films and wrote
screenplays for another 20 films. At the time of their release and in the two decades after that, his films
have enjoyed both popular appeal and critical appreciation. He is celebrated and iconized as one of the
important figures within the Kerala cultural scene and many of his films are marked as landmarks
within Malayalam cinema.
9. Ligy J. Pullappally was born in Kerala, and grew up in Chicago. She is a trial lawyer by profession who
has worked specifically on women’s issues. Sancharram is Pullappally’s first foray into full length feature
films. As a transnational director, Pullappally is placed by some reviewers in the new group of Non
Resident Indian (NRI) filmmakers who are coming up in the Kerala film scene in the last decade, such as
Satish Menon with his film Emotions of Being (Bhavum, 2002) and Anup Kurian with Manasarovar (2003, in
English).
10. Sancharram has been honored with the Chicago Award from the Chicago International Film Festival, The
Lankesh Award for India’s Best Debut Director and the John Abraham Special Jury Award for Best
Malayalam Feature Film.
28 Navaneetha Mokkil

11. The DVD of this film is marketed by the US Company, Wolfe Videos, a well-known distributor of gay
and lesbian feature films. This is one of the Malayalam films whose copies can be easily picked up in
video rental stores in the US such as Blockbuster or Net Flix and it is one of the only films that audiences
in metropolitan centers in the West and India have an earlier and easier access to than a Kerala-based
audience.
12. There seems to be a dark twist to this in the case of lesbian suicides where the couple becomes estab-
lished through the act of dying together.
13. Film critics such as Madhava Prasad and Moinik Biswas have analyzed the complex codes of representa-
tion of desire in Indian film, where a public gaze often disrupts the private space of the formation of the
heterosexual couple (Prasad 1998; Biswas 2000). Moinik Biswas in his study of the highly popular Bengali
film Hurano Sur (1957), ‘The couple and their spaces: Hurano Sur as melodrama now’, observes that the
journey from the familial to the conjugal remains largely unfulfilled in popular Bengali cinema in this
period (Biswas 2000). In fact he suggests that the lasting popularity of Hurano Sur is because it finds a
way of recognizing and articulating the absent space of the couple.
14. The Nairs are a dominant Hindu caste group from Kerala. The Nairs practiced martial arts and until the
early 20th century they exerted their influence in medieval Kerala society as feudal lords and owned
large estates. They dominated the civil, administrative and military elite of the pre-British era in Kerala
and they also have easy access to educational and cultural institutions in contemporary Kerala. This is
the caste group in Kerala that practiced matrilineal forms of family arrangement and inheritance until
early 20th century.
15. Film critics like Muraleedharan have argued how the absence of a recognizable gay/lesbian cinema need
not undermine the relevance of queer mass culture studies in India. His articles, such as ‘Queer Bonds:
male friendships in contemporary Malayalam cinema’, are a queer reading of the male bonding in 1980s
and 1990s popular Malayalam films (Muraleedharan 2002).
16. This is shown as a ‘mature’ love story of a man and woman who belong to the same caste and religious
background and are eligible for each other. It has the clear aim of marriage written into it. So this
relationship in many ways has the ingredients necessary for the making of a normative couplehood, but
the film actively dislocates this story from its narrative center and reduces it to at best a sub-plot.
17. This relationship is shown within the diegesis as an interrupted love story and this couple is never stably
established in the film because Nirmala’s desire is not completely reciprocated by Hari.
18. Sugathakumari is a contemporary Malayalam poet and activist who has been at the forefront of environ-
mental and feminist movements in Kerala. This poem is taken from her collection Where is Radha?
(Radhayevite, 1995).
19. The etymology of the word can be traced to the pre-independent practice of dividing a princely kingdom
into smaller land units called ‘desham’. The current usage of desham refer to a regional district within the
Kerala state. One of the examples of the use of the term desham in this way is the well-known Malayalam
novel by S.K. Pottekad (1971), The Tale of a Desham (Oru Deshathinte Katha), which records the life-world
of one particular location within Calicut district in Kerala and shows the layers of movement unfolding
within this small place.
20. This is the conventional architectural structure that was the housing and property unit of affluent Nair
families. Architecturally wealthy taravads encompassed a spacious house built in a specific architectural
style, and a fresh-water pond (Kulam). These taravads have become a symbol of Nair privilege in contem-
porary Kerala and, although structures like this are relatively few today, they are repeatedly invoked in
Malayalam films and writing as part of the process of constructing an essentialised Nair identity.
21. Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) was a painter who is seen as one of the founding figures of modern Indian
art. His depictions of Indian women, especially Nair women, and scenes from Hindu epics are mass-
produced and well circulated in Kerala even today. They are often deployed in the invention of a Kerala
tradition which is rooted in a dominant caste Hindu culture.
22. Cochin is a port city in Kerala and has been the center of tourism and urbanization in Kerala. It is also at
present depicted in popular Malayalam cinema as the city in Kerala where you can see the darker sides
of urban life. It is here that gang wars and smuggling are often staged. A 2007 film Small Mumbai (Chotta
Mumbai) is an underworld film in which Cochin is set up as Kerala’s mirror image to Mumbai. We can
see the traces of this imagination of Cochin in DKK with the multiple references to the signs of urbanity
and criminality.
23. Standard Trunk Dialing (STD) is the process of calling from one region to another in India. There are
public phone booths to do this and they show how a place is interconnected to other regions in the nation.
24. They often speak English, behave like tourists and capitalize on their class privilege as convent-educated
girls in order to ward off harassment on the streets.
Trajectories of queer politics in contemporary India 29

25. In her introduction of the organization, Deepa highlights its tenuous nature and its strategic use of invis-
ibility or anonymity. I quote her: ‘Sahayatrika itself came to be perceived as representing a community
and movement (one tabloid newspaper estimated our organization membership as being 1000 women
strong!) when in fact our contacts with women were sometimes tenuous and fleeting. This tenuous
community had an invisible spokeswoman with a fake name and dubious identity – “Devaki Menon” – a
pseudonym which sometimes represents myself and sometimes Sahayatrika workers collectively’
(Deepa 2005: 176).
26. Deepa Mehta’s film Fire is an English language films that tells the story of two sisters-in-law, in a
Hindu joint family who break the stifling bonds of duty and tradition to enter into a sexually and
emotionally sustaining relationship with one another. The theater release of this film in November
1998 was disrupted by the Hindu right-wing groups and the film was cause for much moral and
cultural panic. As a response to the Hindu right violence, gay and lesbian groups entered into the
public sphere in an unprecedented fashion in major cities in India. They sought alliances with femi-
nists and other progressive voices in order to counter the claim that homosexuality was alien to
Indian culture. The debate around Fire is a foundational event within gay lesbian politics and mobili-
zation in contemporary India.
27. See Bose (2007), John and Niranjana (1999) for some of the important debates on Fire.
28. Pullappally’s choice of the social location of her main characters cuts against some of the repeated
patterns brought out by the Sahayatrika group in their study on lesbian suicides. The study has brought
out a disturbing trend that many of the lesbian women who have committed suicide are from marginal-
ized communities, especially Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims.
29. One of the more recent and hyperbolic manifestations of this trend is Mohanlal’s action films, also known
as ‘Thampuran films’ (Thampuran can be translated as lord, an honorary term used to refer to an upper
caste, land-owning man) which includes films such as The Sixth Lord (Aram Thampuran, 1997) and King
Ravana (Ravanaprabhu, 2001) where the hero’s dominant caste status and prestige is central to his heroism.
30. Middle cinema is the name given to a segment of films within the Malayalam film industry which self-
consciously carved out aesthetics of its own. In well circulated accounts of Malayalam film history, middle
cinema is seen as occupying an intermediary space between ‘art’ cinema and ‘commercial’ cinema. The
exponents of middle cinema in the 1980s and 1990s were seen as producing films that appealed to a
broader audience than the niche audience of the 1970s’ art cinema. For more discussion on the ambiguities
and significance of these categorizations within Malayalam cinema see Menon (forthcoming).
31. One of the classical examples of this is Kumaran Asan’s poetic work Leela (1914), an epic of romantic love,
in which the heightened moment of union between the hero and heroine is the moment of death, with the
hero ending his life in the river and the heroine following the same course. Shrimp (Chemmeen, dir. Ramu
Kariat, 1965), an internationally acclaimed Malayalam film, based on a cult love story by noted novelist
Thakazhi Shivashankara Pillai, also tells the story of a couple whose desire transgresses social norms.
They finally have to die together in order to stage their eternal union.

Filmography
Adorable Sister (Aniyathi Pravu) (1997) Dir. Fazil.
Butterflies of the Clear Blue Sky (Thoovanathumbikal) (1987) Dir. P. Padmarajan.
Fire (1998) Dir. Deepa Mehta.
The Journey (Sancharram) (2004) Dir. Ligy Pullappally (107 min.).
The Wandering Bird Does Not Cry (Deshadana Kili Karayarilla) (1986) Dir. Padmarajan.
Vineyards for Us to Dwell (Namukku Parkkan Munthirithoppukal) (1986) Dir. P. Padmarajan.

References
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Biswas, Moinik (2000) ‘The couple and their spaces: Hurano Sur as melodrama now’. In Ravi Vasudevan (ed.)
Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 122–142.
Bose, Brinda (2007) ‘The desiring subject: female pleasures and feminist resistance in Deepa Mehta’s Fire’,
Indian Journal of Gender Studies 7(2): 249–262.
Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge.
Cheerath-Rajagopalan, Bhawani (2005) ‘Why fear being yourself’, Deccan Herald, 2 January, http://www.
deccanherald.com/Archives/jan02205, accessed 5 October, 2006.
De Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Deepa, V. N. (2005) ‘Queering Kerala: reflections on Sahayatrika’. In Arvind Narrain and Gautham Bhan (ed.)
Because I Have a Voice: The Politics of Alternative Sexualities in India, New Delhi: Yoda Press, 175–196.
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and Political Weekly 34(10/11), March: 6–19.
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(ed.) Sexualities, Delhi: Women Unlimited, 3–51.
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Author’s biography
Navaneetha Mokkilmaruthur is a PhD candidate in English and Women’s Studies at the University of
Michigan, USA. Her PhD project is titled ‘Disrupting the Figure of the “Kerala Woman”: Shifting
Discourses of Sexuality in the Post-Liberalization Era’. She has an MA in English Literature from the
University of Hyderabad in India, and works in the areas of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Literary Studies
and Film Studies, with a focus on contemporary India. She has been teaching introductory courses in
Women’s Studies and Indian Feminism at the University of Michigan. She has completed a research project
on women’s hostels as urban spaces in India and done prior research work on sexuality debates in contem-
porary Kerala for her MPhil Dissertation.

Contact address: 1984 Traver Road, #203, Ann Arbor, MI – 48105, USA.