How Karan Johar ‘queered’ the Bollywood love story

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This isn’t to low cost the position that different filmmakers, similar to Onir, have performed in telling much-needed tales about queer lives, neither is this an try and play down the house for such tales that opened up with the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 2018. It is usually not potential to miss the troubling portrayal of queer people, particularly homosexual males, in a few of Johar’s productions: the jarring comedian sub-plot involving the 2 male leads (Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan) and a housemaid (Sulabha Arya) in Kal Ho Na Ho (which Johar wrote, however didn’t direct) is infamous. As is Dostana (produced by Johar) during which the 2 male leads (John Abraham and Abhishek Bachchan) fake to be homosexual in an over-complicated try and woo the feminine protagonist (Priyanka Chopra). Such depictions, as a few of his critics level out, did injury that was not helped by the truth that Johar himself, past a brief within the 2013 anthology movie Bombay Talkies, has not made a full-length characteristic with a queer love story at its coronary heart.

Nonetheless, Johar have to be credited with “introducing the concept of homosexuality by stealth into the Indian house”, as the author Atish Taseer as soon as put it — by, in different phrases, making what was as soon as by no means talked about the topic of dinner desk conversations. He did this, firstly — and controversially – not a lot together with his motion pictures, as with the relentless queer-baiting on his massively in style TV present Koffee with Karan. The present’s sly jokes and innuendos, made with Johar’s complicity and often at his personal expense, all however confirmed what everybody with any familiarity with Hindi cinema had lengthy gossiped about. On this matter, it’s price noting that no quantity of hypothesis about Johar’s sexual orientation (which he has hinted at often, together with in his memoir, An Unsuitable Boy, with out ever explicitly popping out of the closet), has finished little to have an effect on his field workplace success.

However the second means during which Johar, in a way, “queered” the Bollywood love story is much more refined. He uncoupled the digicam from the male heterosexual gaze, thus making room on the display screen for tales that have been decidedly non-mainstream earlier than him. It’s, for instance, laborious to think about one other Hindi movie director who allowed the lens to coach so lovingly on the sensual male physique as Johar did within the track ‘Suraj Hua Maddham’ from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (K3G). In the best way it zoomed in on Shah Rukh Khan’s dripping moist, see-through shirt, the digicam’s gaze challenged Bollywood’s thought of romance, opening up house for, amongst different issues, feminine want. This, the truth is, is Johar’s different nice achievement, so far as Hindi movie love is anxious: So lots of his feminine characters, whether or not it’s Pooja in K3G, Jazz in Kal Ho Na Ho or Saba in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, have been unabashed in pursuing what they desired, bodily and in any other case. This quest to centre non-masculine heterosexual want discovered its apogee within the 2018 anthology movie Lust Tales, the place Johar’s part instructed the story of a newly-wed lady (Kiara Advani) who seeks sexual success.

In his announcement, Johar famous that he’s been within the trade for 27 years. That may be a lengthy sufficient interval during which to begin feeling like one has stagnated. And whereas making an motion movie could be sufficient of a problem to provide Johar the inventive shakeup he appears to really feel he wants, a queer romance could be an excellent larger one. Hopefully, sooner or later, Johar shall be as much as it.