And Onam seems the appropriate time to announce that the queer
community in India is about to receive a present from Kerala: Sancharam (The Journey), a really excellent feature film with a
lesbian theme that's set in rural Kerala. The film has been written
and directed by a Ligy Pullapally and has been released to very good
reviews in Kerala.

Ligy is a good friend and when she was in Bombay for a few days
recently to do the subtitling the film in English, she managed to find the time to show it to a few of us. I knew that she was working on a film, but I had little idea of what it was about.

I guess I'd thought vaguely it was a short film or documentary, so I
was really surprised to see a full fledged feature - and such a good
one, with a simple, but strong story line, lyrically shot and with very good performance. After all the crap news we've had to deal with
in recent months, this was a real tonic.

The film starts in rural Kerala - not the backwaters, but the hilly
areas in the North, if I'm right - where the family of Kiran, a Nair girl, comes to settle in her mother's old tharavad (ancestral house).
Next door there's a Christian family with whose daughter, Delilah,
Kiran quickly becomes best friends. They grow up together, playing,
swimming, going to school, making fun of the boys.

As they grow older though Kiran realises her attraction for Delilah,
who's really beautiful, but does her best to suppress it. A Cyrano de
Bergerac like situation arises, when Rajan, one of the local boys
who's besotted with Delilah asks Kiran to help him write love letters
to her. Eventually though Delilah finds out it was Kiran writing the
letters - and she responds to her.

But people start talking, Delilah's family starts panicking and they
start looking for ways to marry her off. Kiran fights back, trying to
get Delilah to resist the pressure. And then... well, I'll leave it
for when you see it, but I will say that the ending, while not of the
storybook kind, isn't unhappy either. One person at least gains
freedom.

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. This is very much a women's film with all
the strong roles going to them. Men instigate and force things, but
its the womens struggles that are at the fore.

The character parts are excellent: Delilah's strong and shrewd
mother, who runs the family since her husband is dead, her wise and
loving grandmother, Kiran's rather cold mother, a teacher who is
unnerved when she finds out about the affair, and the local village
witch who susses the girls out, long before they realise themselves.

But the film rests with the two main characters and they are excellent. Delilah is really pretty and she knows it. She's the outgoing, flirtatious, confident one - until the end when realities
start closing in. Kiran is quieter, more inwardly focused, but
idealistic and able to find the strength when she needs it. I also
found her really attractive, all the more so for not being obviously
so.

The film is undoubtedly slow, but I never felt it dragging. My only
criticism - apart from a computer generated image at the end which
did NOT work - is that perhaps Ligy underplayed the hostility the
girls would face. They encounter plenty, but its mostly shock and
confusion, whereas I'd guess - and I'm really guessing, I could be
quite wrong here - in real life the girls would be likely to face even more direct contempt and violence.

Perhaps Ligy decided not to go down that route since that would unbalance the film, and give it a dark edge that would take away from the relationship which really is its focus. One scene though did ring true. After Delilah's family finds out she's shut up in her room
while her mother, uncle and the priest come in turns to sit with her. The mother wrings her hands, the priest prays and tells her about the mercy of Jesus, but the uncle... he's sort of turned on.

He sits on the bed next to her with a half mocking, half lewd expression on his face, he cups her chin in his hand and says, "So
you've had your fun then!" It was a moment of toe-curlingly truthfulness. I can think of so many Mallu men of that type, the useless ones who are still so full of themselves, who sit around
drinking tea and shaking their legs and passing crude comments onany woman who passes. That is _exactly_ how they would react.

Ligy has returned to Kerala, and from there will be going back to the
US, where she lives, but she will now be finalising the formal release of Sancharam, entering it for festivals, looking for distributors and so on. Perhaps if we're lucky it might find commercial distribution, but one way or the other, most people should be able to see it soon. Don't miss seeing it if you get a chance!

Arvind Narrain, Bangalore, for Sappho for Equality

Moving beyond the limits of Fire: Sancharam as a queer exploration

Sancharram ( The journey) is a film set in Kerala which deals with an emerging relationship between two young school going girls. The relationship starts from a childhood friendship which grows very naturally into a full fledged romance between the two girls. This love, is disrupted by the societal injunction to heterosexuality, which appears through the presence of a boy who is also in love with Delilah. However when the boy finds Delilah and her friend locked in an embrace he quickly tells of this ´unnatural love´ to Delilah´s mother. who after a hurriedly summoned family conference, decides that the only way out is to quickly marry off Delilah. Delilah when she comes back home, is beaten by her mother and the symbol of her love a bangle given to her by Kiran is broken and slowly the enormous pressure put on Delilah makes her re-evaluate her life choices. Inspite of two brave attempts made by Kiran to convince Delilah to run away with her, Delilah feels that there is no option but to get married to the man her mother chooses for her. Possibly the only support apart from Kiran which Delilah gets is from her grandmother who berates her mother by saying that you are marrying off your daughter to please society and tomorrow none of these people who you are trying to please will be there. Apart from her grandmother, Deliah gets reassurances from Kiran that she will find a way of sustaining both of them. Delilah however can see no future and is further traumatized by the strong religiously induced feeling that what she is feeling is wrong and that to even think of taking it forward would be a sin. The movie ends by Kiran going off on the wedding day to a cliff to commit suicide, but at the last moment she decides against it and rather chooses life. This according to the young director Ligy Pullappally, is the beginning of the journey ie Sancharam.

The film itself won an award instituted in the memory of the well known progressive writer, P. Lankesh and was screened in Bangalore to an audience which had turned up to honour his memory. If one reads the film in the context of contemporary India one has not note that it was an important film in at least two aspects.

Firstly, it is posed refreshingly as a critique of the institution of family. Most films being in tune with the culturally hegemonic view of the family as a natural, nurturing element which protects one from the big bad world outside, generally end up reinforcing the institution of the heterosexual family. Perhaps emblematic of this romanticism of the family is the film Hum Aap Kha Hai Koun, which has no story apart from the long drawn out elaboration of the rituals of the heterosexual marriage.

This film by contrast turns this conventional understanding inside out, by exposing the violence of the family. The family of Delilah is a nurturing space only until the mother discovers that there is a love which threatens the very ability of the family to be respectable and indeed to be a family as conventionally understood. Lesbian love is a threat which the institution of the heterosexual family cannot countenance and will have to smother to ensure its own survival. Thus the words nurturing and loving are precarious and apply only so long as actions do not threaten the very ability of the family to reproduce as a institution. The moment the heterosexual family is threatened at its very root by the emergence of a lesbian love, violence becomes the very face of this otherwise benign institution.

Secondly, the film is an incredible act of affirmation of queer desire. Unlike Fire, in which the two women turn to each other only after dissatisfaction with their respective heterosexual relationships, in Sancharam the love of the two women is not premised on a failure of a heterosexual relationship. In fact, the final scene in which Delilah gets married to a boy, highlights the ´lack´ in the heterosexual relationship with her crying out for Kiran. The importance of this affirmation cannot be underestimated in a culture in which queer desire figures if at all as something which is a perversion or in the case of Fire something which happens because of the tragic failure of heterosexual love. In a culture of silence where there is often no queer community to affirm one desire´s a film such as Sancharam which shows the love between two women is an important cultural marker. This film is one small but highly significant step in affirming lesbain desire. One can imagine that for the many thousands of women who will hopefully view this film, this will act as a symbol of resistance, awakening and a call to follow through on one´s desires.

Ligy Pullappally in response to a question as to why she had not seen fit to develop the idea of a queer community as an affirmative space particularly in a context in India when the community was being increasingly visible, noted that, while it was true that the community was being more and more visible it was equally true that for a large number of women both in urban and in rural areas there was no realistic possibility of accessing community support. For most of these women who lived their lives in utter isolation the structure of support and affirmation was really to be found in the relationship which doubled up to play the role of friend, confidant , lover and counsellor in the queer context.

However what is significant about this film is that through its depiction of lesbian love, it begins the process of creating cultural markers which in turn become the means through which one affirms queer desire. It is true that this is by no means the first film in which a queer relationship is depicted and if we go by the work of many cultural critics its apparent that in many cultural artefacts there is a queer thread which runs through. Right from recent films such as Kal Ho Na Ho to earlier depictions there is a thread of queer desire which runs through in subterranean currents which sometimes reach the surface. However what is different about this film is that there is no need to look deep to unearth the possibilities of reading queer desire. The film in its open embrace of queer desire affirms an important thread of contemporary culture and politics.

One hopes that this initial film in Malyalam will begin the process of queering Indian cinema.