Lost and Found: The Story of India’s First Queer Film

LGBTQ Indian cinema has had a turbulent history, and a vital part of that history went missing for more than 40 years. In 1971, Prem Kapoor’s Badnam Basti, an esoteric Hindi-language art film widely considered the country’s first queer production, was released to muted response, followed by a subsequent, heavily edited re-release a few years later. This, too, failed to succeed commercially, and the film soon disappeared altogether. For decades, it was considered lost, and it became the kind of artistic curio frequently blogged about in niche spaces but never actually seen. That is, until its rediscovery in 2019.

In the decades since its release, regional-industry Indian artists, like the late queer Bengali icon Rituparno Ghosh, have created understated, challenging works, and the last few years have seen a groundswell of soulful Indian regional and independent films from across the spectrum of lived experience—like Geetu Mohandas’s queer gangster saga Moothon, or Sudhanshu Saria’s complex road trip movie Loev—even without Kapoor’s lost landmark to guide their sensibilities. However, the media hubbub around more mainstream queer movies, out of India’s various studio industries (like the Hindi-language Bollywood), seldom leaves room for discussion on the larger history of queer cinema in India.

These films are often imperfect steps forward—films like the Hindi romance Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, in which trans leads are played by cisgender performers whose work receives the lion’s share of the spotlight—or they’re widely touted as “firsts” or special attractions. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, released in 2019 for instance, was called both “Bollywood’s first depiction of a lesbian relationship” and “a lesbian groundbreaker” in The Guardian, in a review that fails to so much as reference Deepa Mehta’s Fire, an Indo-Canadian lesbian drama so controversial upon its Indian release in 1998 that several theaters around the country were set ablaze for daring to play it. In an age where the Indian government continues to oppose LGBTQ rights, this sort of historical erasure only serves to limit the wider context of queerness in Indian art and culture, and the challenges it faces.

In an age where the Indian government continues to oppose LGBTQ rights, this sort of historical erasure only serves to limit the wider context of queerness in Indian art and culture, and the challenges it faces.

Depictions of queer characters in Hindi cinema are the furthest thing from new, even though mainstream Bollywood treated them as running gags until recently. However, only a small handful of queer-themed Indian films were released after 1971—there was the 1986 Malayalam-language mystery Deshadanakkili Karayarilla and the 1992 Marathi-language drama Umbartha—until a minor queer resurgence in the late ’90s. So, it’s hard not to wonder what shape Indian movies (and the discourse around them) might have taken, had a film like Badnam Basti survived and been properly preserved and curated, potentially strengthening the lineage of queer Indian movies across the decades.

Based on the book Ek Sadak Sattaavan Galiyan (One Street, Fifty-seven Alleys) by Kamleshwar, Badnam Basti (The Alley of Ill-repute) was made on a shoestring budget of 250,000 rupees—a little more than $30,000 at the time. It follows a stoic truck driver caught between a strong-willed woman and a demure younger man. The film had all but disappeared after its initial release, though according to reporter Manish Gaekwad, who’s covered the film extensively, a purportedly censored version resurfaced briefly and was re-released in 1978 (the same year as Randu Penkuttikal, an early Malayalam-language film with lesbian characters). However, by then, the original “A” rated cut of Badnam Basti (the equivalent of an American “NC-17”) had long since been lost, and it remained so until a battered 35mm print was found in a Berlin archive in November 2019.

This print was originally sent to the Mannheim Film Festival in West Germany in 1972, but upon its rediscovery, it was so old and fragile that it couldn’t be shipped overseas. So, with help from the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin—who, I’m told, are currently working on a new restoration for distribution in the near future—Northwestern University's Block Museum briefly aired a digital transfer of the film on Vimeo in early 2020, followed by a post-screening discussion. More than 150 people tuned in, making them the first audience to watch this version of the film in nearly 50 years.

Kapoor, a first-time director, was said to have had trouble making the movie because of his inexperience, according to the film’s cinematographer R. Manindra Rao (per Gaekwad’s reporting). But like its last remaining celluloid print, Badnam Basti perseveres against all odds. Parts of it strike like lightning; one early moment in particular, in which the camera crash-zooms into a freeze frame at breakneck speed, feels like an adrenaline rush, as if a common fixture of the modern digital age had miraculously manifested decades in the past.

A narratively straightforward cut was first created early in the post-production process, but Kapoor eventually settled on a more oblique and avant-garde edit than originally planned. The final film ended up more akin to Godard’s Breathless or a Chris Marker documentary than a traditional feature. It’s disjointed, but dreamlike, often using fragments of memory to tell its story. It doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of queer cinema that tend to break into the modern mainstream today: It’s neither about a straightforward, frowned-upon, and eventually accepted romance, nor is it a story of tragedy and love lost. And yet, it is very much about those things, but in secret, as if the film itself needed to be disguised and closeted to even exist. Its possibilities live only as dreams and unspoken desires, dramatized in silence and harrowing isolation.

Unsurprisingly, the film doesn’t feature any on-screen sex, or even a kiss (it’s a product of its time and culture), but it’s hugely transgressive even for an arthouse (or “parallel”) Indian film from the 1970s, depicting complicated male characters brushing up against the walls of traditional manhood—in the ways they relate to women, to each other, and to themselves—as well as the boundaries of traditional narrative cinema. Its main character, Sarnam (the late Nitin Sethi), is a rugged former bandit who now works as a truck driver, and his on-and-off star-crossed romance with a young woman, Bansuri (Nandita Thakur), is the story’s larger framing device, from which it often takes detours into abstract vignettes. Sarnam and Bansuri’s dynamic is “traditional,” in that it’s heterosexual, but the film also zeroes in on what underscores the characters’ traditional behavior, emphasizing the masculine control of both men and women alike. Bansuri, for instance, falls victim to the desires and gazes of leering men at every turn, despite her own headstrong attitude. She’s part of a troupe of stage dancers who work for men’s pleasure, then she’s sold into sex slavery, and she eventually ends up in a reluctant arranged marriage, albeit with a man whose own emotional openness (and kindness towards Bansuri) makes for a stark contrast to the more rugged Sarnam, whose aggressive tendencies emerge after a couple of drinks.

Sarnam and Bansuri’s dynamic is “traditional,” in that it’s heterosexual, but the film also zeroes in on what underscores the characters’ traditional behavior, emphasizing the masculine control of both men and women alike.

Whenever Sarnam is torn away from Bansuri by circumstance, his wistful romantic longing finds itself replaced by suspicions and insecurities, which he expresses as furious and violent musings on his lengthy truck routes. The film doesn’t allow masculine views of romance to be decoupled from the more destructive and possessive tenets of masculinity, the way they’re so often decoupled in mainstream Hindi cinema (in films like Simmba and Kabir Singh, where the line separating flirtation and harassment is razor-thin). Badnam Basti portrays sweeping, ethereal scenes typical of Hindi romance across the decades, but through a self-aware lens and often from a distance, as if Sarnam is merely acting out heterosexual cinematic conventions. That he longs for Bansuri is never in question, but their romance never feels genuine or intimate. When he isn’t lost in dreams of settling down, Sarnam’s withheld demeanor reveals a man simmering with anger beneath the surface, ready to return to his old and violent ways at any moment.

Despite this distant framing of romantic grandeur, the film has no dearth of intimate moments; it just so happens that Sarnam's intimacy is reserved for Shivraj (Amar Kakkad), a soft-spoken young cleaning boy introduced about halfway through the story. They sleep in the same bed, and the private fantasies Sarnam begins to express sound more wistful and gentle than his thoughts of violence. The film’s fragments also begin to feel more whole. Eventually, a scene in which Sarnam watches Shivraj sleep—light softly illuminating the young man’s face, like Sarnam has discovered a newfound sense of  calm—becomes the movie’s first truly tender moment, foretelling a tale in which Sarnam wrestles between the serenity he feels with Shivraj, and the life of masculine violence he still feels drawn towards.

It’s as if the film is asking: which of these modes of emotional expression, the tender or the violent, truly makes Sarnam a man? However, the more he wrestles between these vastly different worlds, the more they become entwined in his subconscious and in his vivid dreams. Beyond a point, he can no longer tell violence from affection. In his moments of drunken dilemma, even a gesture as intimate as placing his hand on Shivraj’s shoulder begins to feel uneasy, when he holds him a little too long, and a little too tightly. 

The way these more grounded and literal scenes linger on charged moments makes for a vivid aesthetic contrast with the film’s discombobulated opening images. During its introductory moments, a split-screen tracks along the ground in opposing directions to capture feet on either side, running toward and away from the camera simultaneously, as if the people and places hinted at in these dreamlike shots aren’t meant to be together. It isn’t until later in the story, when Sarnam finds a way to anchor these abstract thoughts—and Kapoor, similarly, finds a way to ground them in realism—that the film’s imagery snaps into place. It can take a while for it to make rhythmic and emotional sense, but the wait is worthwhile. Early montages, scored by prayers and chants, are connected through the recurring image of Sarnam’s sleeping face, which is in turn juxtaposed with scenes of melas, or chaotic street fares, a contrasting energy that’s curious at first, but eventually comes to represent a potent swirl of paradoxical emotions. During the film, the mela becomes a space of secrets. It’s where Sarnam is reunited with Bansuri after a long time apart, but it’s also where he first notices a cross-dressing male dancer in her vicinity, catalyzing his journey of sexual and romantic exploration.

Perhaps the mela is the basti (or the alley) of the movie’s title, a realm of disguises and facades, where truth might be frowned upon, and yet it’s a realm where Sarnam begins to find some sense of freedom for the first time. That freedom, however, is fleeting, a sensation that echoes through the rest of the film thanks to the window bars on Sarnam’s home, which are framed like those of a prison cell, constricting him when the camera shoots him at a distance.

While it’s ostensibly about the trajectory of a queer romance, Badnam Basti outdoes most of its Hindi descendants—especially those in the Bollywood mainstream—because it isn’t about society’s (and straight filmmakers’) nominal and prescriptive acceptance of queerness. Rather, it’s about the potent intersection of masculinity and sexuality, long after they’ve taken root in traditional ways, at a time when the characters may not have even had the words to describe their experiences or states of being.

The copy of the film that now exists was transferred from a scratched and jittery film print, with barely-legible English subtitles that have, for the most part, faded. Watching it today, during its occasional film festival programming, feels like unearthing a lost relic—like finding those parts of the characters that had been shrouded from the outside world, and scarred by nearly 50 years in hiding, as if Sarnam and Shivraj had been lying in wait, trying to find ways to be heard.