Late last month, a low-budget drama called My Brother Nikhil opened in movie theaters across India, telling the story of a gay man's struggle with his family and his country after contracting the virus that causes AIDS.
Quietly, gently, My Brother Nikhil has tested the limits of the Indian cinemagoer's sensibility.
Commercially, it is no runaway Bollywood blockbuster; nor is it meant to be. Rather, its impact lies in having served up a story about love and loss -- sentimental staples of contemporary Indian cinema -- with a gay man at its center, and having done so without kicking up the slightest fuss from India's cultural conservatives. As one review published in the latest issue of Outlook, a mainstream newsweekly, put it: "The two lovers seem just like any other couple."
PHOTO: AP
Playing here in Mumbai, formerly called Bombay, and in about a dozen other major cities in India, My Brother Nikhil is part of a new breed of Bollywood pictures known here as the "multiplex movie" -- appealing to an urban middle-class audience, peppered with English phrases, and easy on the song-and-dance numbers and potboiler story lines usually associated with Indian commercial cinema.
"For me, it's a film about relationships," said its director, who goes by one name, Onir. "Between father-son, brother-sister, lovers, a gay couple, friends."
Even so, it was the gay relationship that had to be most carefully rendered. Onir, 35, said he took pains to make a film that would speak not to an elite, worldly, film-festival set, but to ordinary Indians who watch ordinary Bollywood films.
There are no explicit love scenes in the film. There is not a single kiss between the two men in the leading roles, and nothing approaching a bedroom scene -- this at a time when Bollywood is witnessing an explosion of skin flicks, albeit all heterosexual.
"It's not advocating anything; it's not propaganda; it's just another love story," Onir said of his film. "I've had old people coming up to me. They don't say gay. They say `Unka friendship accha dekha hay."' ("Their friendship is well portrayed.")
"It means a lot in a country like India," he added. "It's important for me that it was accepted."
The film comes at a time when rights activists are pressing for the overturn of India's constitutional ban on homosexuality. This week, the Supreme Court agreed to review the law.
My Brother Nikhil has faced none of the protests that six years ago greeted Fire, Deepa Mehta's film about two women in love. Actors and athletes have been plugging My Brother Nikhil in television spots, an extraordinary marketing ploy in an industry where few people plug movies that are not their own.
"I care about my brother Nikhil. Do you?" is the punch line.
"This film has shown it's possible to show a committed gay couple," said Vikram Doctor, a journalist here who is active with a support group called the Gay Bombay Group. "It's passed the Censor Board without any comment. Theaters have not been attacked. There's no catcalling. It's treated respectfully by the audience and the filmmaker. I'm happily surprised."
The film has many of the ingredients of an ordinary Bollywood picture; it is distributed by Yash Raj Films, a Mumbai house known for its blockbuster Bollywood projects. And the two lead actors are known Bollywood names: Sanjay Suri, who plays Nikhil, and Juhi Chawla, who plays his sister, Anamika.
Perhaps most to the point, it is a tear-jerker, a story of forbidden love and its social consequences. Taran Adarsh, the editor of Trade Guide, a weekly film-industry publication, called it "a lump-in-the-throat movie."
In the film, Nikhil is a star swimmer and the golden child in his family until the day he is found to have HIV. His parents shun him, his friends abandon him and he finds himself locked up in a dirty sanatorium. The two people who do stand by him are his sister and his partner.
One of the most disturbing episodes in the film was lifted from real life. Just as Nikhil is quarantined in the film, the first Indian to be diagnosed with HIV, a young man in Goa named Dominic D'Souza, was similarly confined and isolated in the late 1980s. In other words, as Suri noted, "it took 15 years" to represent that indignity onscreen.
Still, Onir said, it was not easy to make the film. Both he and Suri knew it was a gamble. Some potential producers declined. Others suggested that the gay theme be excised, a suggestion Onir said he declined. Friends and well-wishers counseled Suri to be careful playing a gay lead, warning that it could bode ill for his career.
"At the end of the day, everyone wants to play it safe," Suri said.
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