Festival of love marked by spirit of reconciliation

A version of this piece on the Delhi Gay Pride 2009 will appear tomorrow in The Indian Express.

As the Gay Pride March took a brief halt near K G Marg, a middle-aged woman was standing alone at a distance carrying the placard – Proud to be a Mother. She was one of many parents who had come here in support of their children. Did she feel apprehensive? “Not at all,” she said. “Awareness creates an understanding that being gay is not unnatural.”

The 2009 Annual Gay Pride March was marked by this spirit of reconciliation. Bisexuals and transgenders had, in earlier years, felt marginalised by this movement. But this year, they were out in full strength. Kiran, 30, a person from the transgender community, was delighted by this show of unity. “We are one soul, one thought,” she said. “Together, we are stronger.”

Nor could this be dismissed as detached upper-class activism. They came from the villages of Khanpur, Kapashera and Ashram, as they did from the elite neighbourhoods of Defence Colony and Jangpura. Mohammad Akhtar, who works as a tailor, had come all the way from Mumbai. He had been to gay pride rallies in all parts of the country, but he had never seen anything of such fervour and magnitude. Delirious and lost for words, all he could say was, “Bahut accha lag raha hai.”

The gathering had also been enthused by reports that came in yesterday that the government was considering repealing Section 377 and de-criminalise homosexuality. There were an air of optimism and the sense that, after years of hard work, victory was near. Pulapre Balakrishnan, who insisted I use his full name, and has been part of the movement for 15 years said, “The government’s reaction has been very positive. This has been long overdue.” Fashion designer Suneet Verma was ebullient. “Bravo to the new government and the sensitivity they have shown,” he said.

The most heartening aspect was the solidarity shown by people outside the gay community, as placards with Homo Hetero Bhai Bhai could be seen in abundance. Though accurate numbers cannot be known, it would not be far off the mark to say that almost 50% of the gathering comprised of heterosexual people. Kanta Advani, in her mid-60’s, walked carefully through the raucous crowd while holding her husband’s hand. “I’m here in support of freedom,” she said.

The march began at 5.30 p.m. from Barakhamba Road and continued for more than two hours until its culmination at Jantar Mantar. Sulekha, a gay activist, took the stage and announced, “I have nothing to be ashamed of. I’m proud to be gay.” Balloons soared over the crowd, whistles rent the air and people of all hues and colours danced to the beat of Asha Band. Once the band stopped briefly, the crowd chanted, “Hum Dilli lene aaye hain, hum Dilli lekar jayenge.(We’ve come to conquer Delhi, we will leave after we conquer it).”

By the time the march dispersed, nobody was left to argue that it wasn’t the case.

Through an astute lens

For almost three decades, cinema has been a perceptive mirror to the forces shaping modern Iran

Mania Akbari in Abbas Kiarostami's Ten

As the crisis in Iran escalates, the pictures of protests and unrest would not have surprised those who follow Iranian cinema closely. Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian cinema has developed a subtle language of dissent, circumnavigating the dreaded censors of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture and holding a mirror to the country’s fissures. Film critic Godfrey Cheshire wrote in Newsweek, “Iranian films show us a society struggling with itself, trying to reconcile cultural traditions with political choices, vaunted ideals with thorny realities.”

The most visible struggle, for those of us who view Iran from the outside, is the issue of women’s rights. Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple, a film about the forced confinement of two women, and Jafar Panahi’s Offside, which trained its lens on the exclusion of women from football stadiums, are among several such acclaimed films.

But to understand how Iranian cinema articulates its political protest, Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten is particularly revealing. In the film, a dashboard cam eavesdrops on a divorcee’s impromptu conversations with fellow passengers in car journeys across Tehran which bring Iran’s sexual and social policies into sharp focus. In one scene, a camera focusses on a character as she scratches wildly around her hijab in the summer heat. In another, the veil drops in a moment of catharsis but is quickly put back on — Kiarostami has made his point by showing us the exhilaration of the unlocked genie. In an environment where dialogue can swiftly be clamped down upon, Iranian cinema has mastered the art of subversive suggestion, without leaving any footprints.

The picture of Tehran that has emerged in recent days has been that of a city divided — the pro-Moussavi supporters who have crowded the elite, affluent neighbourhoods in the capital’s north distinctly separate from the poorer neighbourhoods in the city’s south where support for incumbent president Ahmadinejad is strong.

In a country where one-fifth of the population accounts for 45 per cent of the household income, the class divisions point to irreconcilable narratives. Iran’s cinema has observed the chasms that separate the westernised elite and the middle classes, who long for greater freedoms and a secular state, and their poorer fellow citizens, who support religion’s primal defining role.

Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold is the tale of an overweight pizza delivery boy who, in encounters with Tehran’s wealthy classes, realises his inability to transcend his social class. Majid Majidi’s The Song of Sparrows takes this even further — portraying the working classes as powerless and inconsequential, he shows the primal role of religion as a form of social glue that gives them a sense of community and belonging.

What gives Iranian cinema its significant political weight is how often its films blur the distinctions between fiction and documentary. Solely relying on dialogue and minimal use of supporting narrative devices like background music, Iranian cinema regularly comes up with genre-defying films —Ten and The Apple being two examples — impossible to determine whether their realm is fiction or non-fiction.

At other times, they can be remarkably prescient. In 1997, Kiarostami’s most celebrated film, Taste of Cherry, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in the same week that an assertive electorate chose reformist intellectual Mohammad Khatami as president. Taste of Cherry, the tale of a nihilist who drives on the outskirts of Tehran looking for an accomplice to complete a task after he commits suicide, was distinctly at odds with the euphoric mood in Iran at the time. However, reformist hopes withered away as hardliners prevailed, leading to an environment of frustration and failure similar to the predicament of the protagonist.

But its role as an instrument against authoritarianism retains primacy. In his book, Close Up Iranian Cinema: Past, Present and Future, Hamid Dabashi has written, “In the cinema, we were re-born as global citizens in defiance of the tyranny of the time and the isolation of the space that sought to confine us. In cinema, everything was possible, and in that possibility we defied our paralysing limitations. The cinema revealed our hidden hopes as nation.”

Armed with the radical fervour of artists under siege, Iran’s filmmakers have created a searing chronicle of a fascinating and complex society — its tenuous social fabric, the weight of history, the arduous battle between tradition and modernity — as it charts its way forward in the modern world.

This piece appeared in the op-ed pages of The Indian Express on June 20.