Interrogating Queerness and Patriarchal Politics in Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya

Abstract

This article will explore the representation of the politics of subversive lesbian bonding in Abhishek Chaubey’s Bollywood film Dedh Ishqiya (trans One and Half Love) released in 2014. The film owes part of its title to Chaubey’s earlier film Ishqiya (trans. Love) released in 2010 and it is partly a sequel in the sense that two of the male lead characters, Khalujan played by veteran and prolific Indian actor Nasiruddin Shah and Babban played by the young Arshad Warsi are integral parts of both the films. In fact, if Ishqiya narrated the romantic and erotic interactions of Khalujan and Babban with the seductive and deceptive widow Krishna Verma played by Vidya Balan, Dedh Ishqiya narrates their love stories with Begum Para and Muniya, respectively. The significant departure is that the heteronormative overtures of the earlier film give way to the submerged homoerotic aspects of its lesbian sequel. The main ideas that this paper is going to explore include a critical understanding of the ‘queer’ and transgressive nature of Begum and Muniya’s relationship and the problems and contradictions of such a same-sex bonding in the context of a patriarchal and conservative Indian social life. The film successfully challenges the so-called norms of a heteronormative society and unsettles the binaries and discursive constructs of romantic love and heterosexual courtships. The film strongly critiques the patriarchal institutions of marriage and re-marriage as safe and necessary survival options for women and interrogates the discursive constructs of patriarchal politics endorsing such subordination and subjection of women. But before going into a full-blown analysis of the film’s representation of two lesbian Muslim women and their romantic bonding, my paper will briefly refer to the social and cultural context of lesbian love in India.