In a country where the Black population represents almost 60% of the racial make-up of the total population,  Marielle Franco as the first black, lesbian Council Member of the city of Rio de Janeiro created history. As a Council member she raised issues which were important to poor black communities such as police violence against black communities. The fact that issues which were literally life and death issues for black people and queer people were raised at the level of the city by her is a testament to the importance of having people from marginalized communities in positions of power. In fact, the last tweet she put out was about the  needless death of a young black man to police violence. It was obvious that Franco’s outspoken opposition to police brutality made her a target of assassination herself.

Cortana’s film is a remarkable tribute in that it is not in a voice overwhelmed with sadness. Sadness runs like a strand through the film but the ‘broken hearts’ are transformed into the voice of resistance. She is remembered by the community in events such as the Carnival, women’s day celebrations on March 8 and the day of her assassination on March 14, 2018.

The film captures the assassination of Marielle Franco as a part of the larger war in Brazilian to obliterate Afro-Brazilian histories.  In fact one of the floats in the Carnival shows Marielle Franco as an important part of a history which since the sixteenth century has sought to erase Afro-Brazilian voices. As one of those interviewed tellingly notes, ‘though the voice of Marielle Franco reverberates in the Carnival it is silenced in the public domain.’

Viewing this documentary as an Indian queer person, I was struck by the invitation to remember Marielle not as an invocation of the past but as a commitment to the future. The persona of Marielle Franco is intertwined with the struggles for which Marielle Franco was killed. Thus the remembering of Marielle Franco is really about taking her ideals forward.

Viewing this film makes me think about Indian queer histories and the need to remember otherwise forgotten queer lives in the Indian context. Four figures come to mind. Pioneering queer rights activist Siddharth Gautam who died at the young age of 27. Transgender feminist activist Famila who tragically took her life at the young age of 24 and Swapna and Sucheta who died together by suicide in a small village in West Bengal. Like Marielle Franco  is fiercely remembered, we too need to remember all those who died too early in the Indian context. Remembering these figures is as much about honouring their memory as about taking their ideals forward.

Siddharth Gautam, as part of the group ABVA, was a key figure in the writing of the first human rights report on LGB rights, namely, ‘Less than Gay’. Siddharth Gautam in his life embodied an intersectional politics and worked on issues such as HIV/AIDS, corporate crime, Sex worker rights as well as gay rights. The Report, ‘Less than Gay’, was the model for all subsequent reports on queer rights and in its invocation of James Baldwin, ‘the victim who is able to articulate the condition of his or her victimhood ceases to be a victim. He or she has become a threat’ remains as relevant today.

I remember Famila in public meetings quietly introducing herself saying, “My name is Famila, I am a bisexual, hijra sex worker”. In those few lines, Famila disrupted a series of assumptions, that there are fixed categories of sexuality which do not overlap, that sex has to be associated only with love and intimacy and cannot be a way of livelihood and that you are the sex that you are born into. Famila was queer in the sense of someone who constantly questioned the fixed  assumptions of both gender and sexuality. Famila is a constant reminder to always broaden and deepen our engagement with the politics of sexuality.

Due to family pressure which refused to let them live together, Swapna and Sucheta died by suicide in Nandigram (West Bengal) on Feb 21, 2011.What insistently reminds us of the multiple stories underlying these deaths is a haunting picture by a police photographer who documented the deaths. In this photo we see Swapna and Sucheta lying on a stack of hay, in an image of peaceful repose calling to mind a deep intimacy. What gave an added poignancy to the joint death was the suicide note, which expressed their last wish of being cremated together. It is almost as if their wish was to find another more tolerant more accepting world, since this world was so harshly intolerant of their deep desire to be together. Remembering Swapna and Sucheta is to pay homage to a deep love which brooks no counter and to honour them is to build a world where such queer suicides become a historical anachronism rather than a sad contemporary reality.

Like our Brazilian comrades remember and celebrate Marielle Franco, we in India have to do the work of remembering and celebrating innumerable queer lives as a way of taking forward our struggle. Leonard Cortana’s film is an insistent reminder of what Milan Kundera once said, ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Notes and Acknowledgements

• ‘Marielle’s Legacy Will Not Die’ will be screened at South Asia’s biggest LGBTQIA+ film festival ‘KASHISH 2020 Virtual’ (July 22-30th, 2020) in the Short Documentary Competition Category. More details coming up.
• Visit the website of Marielle Franco Institute for more information on her family’s actions to spread her legacy.
• All images courtesy Leonard Cortana

Nisha Pahuja’s film ‘The World Before Her’ tries to trace the diametrically opposite journeys of two groups of young women in India viz. contestants of the Ms. India beauty pageant and the trainees of Durga Vahini, a right wing women’s training unit of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

As the film navigates through the aspirations and beliefs of many such young women, it takes a closer peek at the lives of Ruhi Singh and Prachi Trivedi who come from very contrasting socio-cultural milieu.  While Ruhi is a 19 year old contestant competing with my other girls for the tiara of the Ms. India beauty pageant, Prachi is a 24 year old trainer at the Durga Vahini camp and is by her own submission, a die-hard stickler.

The film quickly meanders between the worlds of glamour and Hindutva to give us an intimate view of both.  One gets to observe the strong assimilationist tendencies of both the Hindu fundamentalist movement and the fashion industry.  While on one side, young girls are being fed with religious intolerance and are being trained in martial arts on the pretext of self defence and Hindu ethos only to uphold patriarchy and Hindu supremacy; the other world makes the commodification of women’s bodies stark and total.

The notion of objectification comes clearly to the fore when Sabira Merchant proudly likens the models in the pageant to finished products on an assembly line in a factory.   Dehumanization and visual dissection of body parts of women attains an even higher and a newer orbit when the models are paraded like scarecrows shrouded in white burkha-like cloaks for the judges to evaluate ‘just the legs’.

The film may have done its best to raise curtains over both the realms of modelling and religious fanaticism but does end up offering a very binary and a polarised view of the choices ahead of the young women in India.  Sabira Merchant’s binary juxtaposition of the ‘old and the new worlds’ as the only two destinations ahead is a case in point here as it tends to ignore the wide spectrum of other choices and possibilities.

The film is brilliant when it uncovers the dark underbelly of the Hindutva discourse by revealing its inherent islamophobia and contempt for Christianity and Christian evangelists.   Adolescent Chinmayee’s firm resolve to shun friendship with Muslims and Christians denudes the dangerously high levels of indoctrination of some vulnerable Indian youth.

It is interesting to note how two young women have different takes on the same issue of female infanticide.  Both Pooja Chopra, a Ms. India 2009 and Prachi Trivedi speak of it, although with contrasting views.  While Prachi is raised and moralized to be rather grateful to her father for the great favour of letting her stay alive despite her being a girl child; Pooja is enormously thankful to her mother for separating from her violent husband i.e. Pooja’s father, to save Pooja from female infanticide.  Prachi’s understanding of terrorism as being limited to the use of ammunition and her legitimization of vigilante justice yet again unmasks a lopsided value system carefully handed down by belligerent Hindutva supremacists.

Nisha Pahuja does a exceptionally brilliant job of holding up a mirror to show how religion is used to interpret filial duties (of a daughter) only to perpetuate the patriarchal paradigm and to promote a unitarian concept of a Hindu state to the point of extermination of all other faiths.

The film does well in laying bare the deeply entrenched stigma in the minds of some fashion wannabes in the industry.  Gurpreet’s bigoted and flagrantly homophobic response to Fardeen Khan on being asked how she’d respond to her son being gay only shows how deeply rooted homophobia is in our society and how even the fashion industry that claims to be equal and inclusive is no exception.

Also, Shweta’s overarching views on Americanization and the urbane, as she tries to build a case to label the rising urban Indian middle class as largely progressive are very telling.  We are able to view the level of indoctrination that deftly invisibilises the subaltern.  Ruhi’s sense of self at 19 and of her future ahead that according to her allows her freedom only for another 4-5 years unveils the underlying culture of subordination that operate of out age old patriarchal postulates.

It is only very reflective of a largely prevalent mind set among many girls like Ruhi, who are caught between the cross hairs of westernization and patriarchy and struggle to make their best possible choices within the patriarchal stranglehold.  All this is made possible with skilful editing that zig zags between both the worlds to arrest the attention of the viewers while bringing out important issues.

The film portrays all its characters i.e. both the beauty pageant contestants and the girls at the Durga Vahini camp as real people of strengths, inadequacies, insecurities and fears. Their views are not sensationalized and the film offers responsible and sensitive access to their lives and does justice to them.

In short, the film appears to be an intimately rich narrative of the private worlds of SOME young women in India pursuing paths chosen by them through highly blinkered and insular frames of reference.