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Nobody used the phrase “having a moment” back in 1971. Had they done, it could have been applied without contradiction to developments in queer cinema. It was four years after the Sexual Offences Act 1967 had partially decriminalised sex between consenting men over 21 in England and Wales, and two years after the Stonewall uprising in New York City. Queer desire was everywhere: in Sunday Bloody Sunday, Death in Venice, Pink Narcissus, the trans classic Women in Revolt, the lesbian horror Daughters of Darkness, the gay porn landmark Boys in the Sand and Rosa von Praunheim’s droll and provocative It Is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives. Fassbinder, who could cough out movies in his sleep, made four.
It was also the year in which the first known queer Indian movie flared briefly on the screen before not so much fading as plummeting into obscurity for nearly half a century. Badnam Basti – translated as Neighbourhood of Ill Repute – was based on a 1957 novel by Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena, published in English as A Street with 57 Lanes and serialised in the prestigious Hindi literary magazine Hans. It concerns Sarnam (Nitin Sethi), an ex-bandit making a living as a truck driver in Uttar Pradesh. He still holds a candle for Bansuri (Nandita Thakur), the woman he saved from one of his fellow marauders, but is drawn to a young male domestic, Shivraj (Amar Kakkad). A tentative love triangle emerges.
There is nothing here as emphatic as the gay kiss filmed in closeup in Sunday Bloody Sunday, but Badnam Basti still crackles. Sarnam is shown standing over the sleeping Shivraj, a pair of globe-like pendants dangling suggestively from his neck as he strokes the young man’s head. A cut to the next morning reveals Shivraj getting dressed beside the bed while Sarnam, under the covers but naked from the waist up, sleeps on. Later, Sarnam tells him: “I thirst for you.”
Badnam Basti, directed by Prem Kapoor, arrived at European festivals in the early 1970s as part of a package of new Indian cinema. After that, it remained largely unseen until 2019. “I’d never heard of it,” says the film-maker and curator Shai Heredia. “It wasn’t even mentioned in the encyclopedia of Indian cinema, which tells you a lot about erasures and how history is constructed.”
The discovery of a 35mm print was entirely accidental. That print might still be languishing in the archives at the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, where it was screened in 1971 before being filed away, had two US curators, Simran Bhalla and Michael Metzger, not happened upon it in 2019 while searching for work by a different director with the same surname.
Markus Ruff, head of archive projects at Arsenal, balked at the US curators’ request to send the print overseas. “This is a rare, even unique, print,” he tells me, his unflappable demeanour permitting the tiniest wrinkle of alarm. “Shipping it would represent a danger.” Instead, it was digitised, and screened online during the pandemic to great interest. This in turn unearthed information about its history, and attracted the funding necessary for a restoration. Kapoor’s full 132-minute cut may never be found, but the 108-minute version, which was pieced together using recently discovered sound and picture negatives, represents a sizeable improvement on the one from the archives, which was a little under 90 minutes.
Amid the celebration, Ruff expresses some mild scepticism about the film’s queer credentials. “The relationship between the two men is forward for the time,” he says. “But from our perspective, you can question it. The homosexuality is initiated by Sarman, who is the dacoit, the dark character, so it’s linked to him. You feel the boy is something that covers up for what he doesn’t have: the woman. So is it a gay movie or a bisexual one?”
Heredia insists the approach is more radical than that. “It presents queerness in a nuanced way, which is how we in India have always lived with and experienced it,” she says. “What it shows is a normalised view of MSM – men who have sex with men. Everyone here is pushing the boundaries of social norms. They have agency.”
It isn’t only the characters who challenge convention. Audiences familiar with the French New Wave, Nicolas Roeg or the experimental work of India’s Films Division will be unperturbed by the fragmented structure, which flits back and forth through time and memory. It was this, as much as the rejection of queer comic stereotypes common in Indian cinema, that went against the grain. Perhaps audiences weren’t ready for the extraordinary visual texture, which incorporates dissolves within dissolves, crash-zooms into freeze-frames, as well as split-screen sequences during which one half of the action halts while the other continues running.
“Oh, it was way ahead of its time,” agrees Heredia. “I think that’s the real reason it was discarded and neglected, not the subject matter. It’s hectic, right? That’s what I say when I introduce the film: it’s queer, yes, but ultimately it’s crazy and amazing!”
English (US) ·