Age of the lesbian cop

The Hindu

2 days ago

Pride month means rainbow emojis galore. And these days web series seem to be the new place to show Pride. LGBTQIA+ characters are all over the OTT platform.
'Everyone is putting in a lesbian cop,' laughs Sridhar Rangayan, filmmaker and director of the KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival. 'The lesbian cop is the new trope.'
If OTT series like Aarya and Paataal Lok gave us the gay cops, the lesbians are popping up in series such as Dabba Cartel and Inspector Rishi. The lesbian cop might just be the new 'gay best friend'.
Sure, it's better than the old days when Anupam Kher put on an orange-pink mohawk and camped it up as the villainous, simpering, handsy Pinku in the film Mast Kalandar (1991). It was one of the first representations of queerness Rangayan had seen on Indian screen. 'That was horrible,' he says. 'I didn't dress like him. I didn't make a fool of myself like him.'
Lesbian cops undoubtedly make for better representation than Pinkus. Representation is certainly important but is it the end goal?
'There was a time when just visibility was a struggle,' says novelist Santanu Bhattacharya whose latest book, The Deviants, follows three generations of gay men in one family. 'Now I need a deeper understanding. I don't want that lesbian cop.'
Representation matters
Years ago, I used to edit a South Asian LGBTQIA+ magazine called Trikone. As we put one issue to bed, I would worry whether we'd find enough material that was both queer and South Asian to fill the next issue. At that time, I would have been grateful for Indian lesbian cops even as side characters.
In the 90s, Trikone did an issue on new South Asian queer titles. Short of models, the board members lay on the carpet holding copies of the few books around — like Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy, a gay coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the civil war in Sri Lanka and Rakesh Ratti's anthology, A Lotus of Another Colour. We called it a 'blossoming of South Asian gay and lesbian voices in literature', but in reality the options were pretty sparse. Some were not even desi.
John Irving's Son of the Circus snuck into the round-up because it had gay and transgender characters in a rambling novel set in Mumbai. The list even included Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy thanks to a 'tantalising whiff of homosexual romance buried deep' in the magnum opus. Shobhaa De's collection of essays, Shooting from the Hip, made the cut because she had one on being a 'fag hag'. All in all, it covered barely two pages. Nevertheless, the article optimistically hoped readers would flood the magazine with letters saying 'How could you leave out…?' No flood happened.
More than just tokenism
That same issue carried a profile of Selvadurai who said he wrote Funny Boy because he wanted to 'record for posterity, and for now as well, our lives', to say gay people existed in Sri Lanka, because 'that is so seldom recorded in any significant way'.
That visibility remains important. But now we must also understand that there is a difference between being visible and being seen. Bhattacharya says being seen is about 'engaging with the interiority of these characters'. The lesbian cop needs a back story. She should be there because she matters to the story, not to make some studio or director feel woke. Otherwise, she remains nothing more than a novelty factor.
Rangayan has been making films since The Pink Mirror in 2003. Despite the proliferation, 'blossoming' if you will, of queer characters in popular culture, it's still not easier to raise funds for a film that has queer lives in the spotlight. Rangayan still crowd-funds and says no matter how family-friendly he makes his films, shorn of all sex and violence, he has to argue against an A-certificate every time. Just because it has gay characters, he says.
At the same time, the cool cachet exists as well. In his book The Urban Elite v Union of India, Supreme Court lawyer Rohin Bhatt mentions another lawyer who quips, 'I want to do LGBT cases and become famous.' The coverage LGBTQIA+ cases like the same-sex marriage case receive, especially in English-language media, can create the optical illusion where we think that jumping on the rainbow is a shortcut to fame and recognition.
Perhaps it is. But one suspects it's more so for the ally than for the queer persons themselves. Delhi advocate Saurabh Kirpal's openness about being gay became a red flag (or pink flag?) when the Supreme Court recommended him for judgeship. That still hasn't happened. And it certainly hasn't made it easier for someone like Rangayan to make films.
But hey, at least we have lots of lesbian cops.
The writer is the author of 'Don't Let Him Know', and likes to let everyone know about his opinions, whether asked or not.