The
Bollywood director has long known that one way to make suppressed
desire acceptable for conservative audiences is to giggle at it.
Photo Credit: All India Bakchod via YouTube
Did Karan
Johar all but come out during the All India Bakchod roast, or was this
yet another attempt to transform whispers about his sexual orientation
into social (and actual) currency?
The comedy collective’s public
event, which put Bollywood actors Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor on the
mat, featured Johar as the “roastmaster” or master of ceremonies. An
edited version of the event posted online on Wednesday opens with the
disclaimer that it will be “filthy, rude and offensive”. The three videos on YouTube are faithful to this promise.
One
of the running gags in the show is about whether Johar is gay. AIB
member Ashish Shakya thanks the packed auditorium for “coming out” and
“Karan for not”. Ranveer Singh smooches Johar (in the online video, the
visual is replaced by a bee on a flower), there are references to Johar
participating in group sex and jokes about how male actors need to
please him in order to be cast in his films. Johar declares that he
doesn’t like “hairy men”, and blushes when Shakya said, “Let’s just
address the elephant in the room.”
Going strictly by his movies,
television shows and public appearances, Johar has been addressing the
elephant in the room one scene and one joke at a time. The successful
director and producer has turned the tables on whispers and rumours
about his sexual orientation by using the comedic trope of ridicule in
his films and in his television appearances. He has allowed celebrity
guests on his popular television show
Koffee with Karan to wonder about his single status, lampooned homosexuality in his box-office hits
Kal Ho Na Ho and
Dostana, and tackled sexual orientation head-on in his contribution to the 2013
Bombay Talkies omnibus movie, featuring two gay men, one out and the other closeted, and a male-to-male kiss.
Showbiz strategyIn
a country in which homosexuality remains illegal, it is unethical, not
to mention downright dangerous, to identify public figures, especially a
film celebrity of Johar’s stature, as queer unless they have chosen to
do so themselves. Johar’s private life remains, as it should, out of
bounds, for the public. But since he is an expert practitioner of show
business, he recognises the commercial value of confronting puritanical
ideas about sexuality in public forums. Johar understood a long time ago
that one way to talk about suppressed desire and make it acceptable for
conservative audiences is to giggle at it.
One of the pleasures of watching
Koffee With Karan,
and the reason the celebrity talk show has no rivals, was Johar’s
ability to convert tabloid chatter about his movie star guests into
jokes and gags. By getting his guests to confirm or deny rumours about
themselves and share their uncensored views on their peers, Johar
allowed them to take control of their own narratives – and ensured that
viewers were hooked week after week, awaiting the next big revelation.
In a sense, the AIB Roast is a more explicit version of what Johar has been practising in his movies since his 2003 production,
Kal Ho Na Ho. Directed by Nikhil Advani, the movie has a sequence in which a shocked maid suspects
that there is something more to the friendship between the characters
played by Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan. The naughty sequence sends
up the well-established convention of male bonding in Hindi cinema.
Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor showered together in
Silsila, Bachchan and Vinod Khanna had the kind of charged friendship in
Muqaddar Ka Sikandar that could keep queer theorists occupied for the rest of their lives. By lampooning this tradition,
Kal Ho Na Ho flirted with the possibility that the traditional love triangle can be differently imagined.
Breaking the mouldIn
Dostana,
written and directed by Tarun Manshukani for Johar’s banner Dharma
Productions in 2008, two male friends pretend to be in a relationship in
order to rent the apartment of a woman they both love. One of them has a
caricatured Punjabi mother, played by Kirron Kher, who expresses her
horror at her son’s sexuality in the song
Ma Da Laadla Bigad Gaya.The
film industry, like the rest of the country, is packed with closeted
individuals as well as figures who are openly gay. Some of them openly
explore queer themes in their films, as Onir did in
My Brother Nikhil and parts of his anthology film
I Am.
The hand that pushes the envelope in a Dharma film is always perfectly
manicured, and the characters that break the mould, whether quasi-queer
or straight, are dressed to the nines. Their masks might drop, as does
Kabhi Alvida Na Kehnaa’s
Maya,
who has an extra-marital affair, but the maquillage stays intact. The
characters who breach the iron-clad boundaries of the traditional Indian
family, prefer kith to kin, and choose to live life on their terms
might be too perfect-looking and air-headed to be labelled truly
radical, but they do represent a break from convention.
Love triangleIt’s now possible to cast Johar’s directorial debut in 1998,
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai,
in a whole new light. The movie was a smash hit on account of its cast
(it stars Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and Rani Mukerji), its unrelenting
glamour and razzmatazz, and its chart-topping soundtrack. The love
triangle that powers the plot is curious, to say the least. The
tomboyish Anjali loves Rahul, but he loses his heart to the
ultra-feminine Tina. Rahul and Tina get married, while Anjali goes off
to heal her broken heart. Tina dies in childbirth, but manages to
arrange the union of Anjali and Rahul from beyond the grave. This she
does through a series of letters she writes in advance to her daughter.
The
daughter meets Anjali, who has shed her boyishness and swapped her
sportswear for saris – Tina has been reincarnated, in one sense. Rahul,
who has until now not expressed any desire for Anjali, finds that his
heart has actually been beating for her all along even though he married
another woman and had a child with her. The love triangle is
unconvincing, but it works better if you replace Anjali with a man.
Suddenly,
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai makes perfect sense. Two men love
each other in college, but neither can admit it. One of them goes to
extreme lengths to affirm his heterosexuality (marriage, children), but
his need to put up a façade ends when his wife dies. Free to follow the
beats of his heart, he meets his old college friend again, who is now
openly gay.
Fanciful? Perhaps. But not as eyebrow-raising as
Johar’s immense courage in allowing himself be ridiculed along with
Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor for the AIB show. The event proves that
all comedy is, at the end of the day, deadly serious. The thousands of
clicks that the AIB videos are notching up on the internet prove that
there is a huge constituency for popular culture products that
articulate the unmentionable. If the only way to come out, or pretend
to, is in full public glare, to an audience that has paid for steeply
priced tickets, and earn praise and acclaim in the bargain, who is the
joke really on?
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