Lives on the Fringes

Despite a few refreshing narratives, most of Indian mainstream cinema still struggles to portray transgender people with all their human complexities and contradictions

- Basav Biradar

THE portrayal of transgender people in cinema can be analysed from three perspectives: as a representation of the community’s lived personal and social experiences; the specificities of physiological representation; and finally from the perspective of politics of representation. While the conversation around this subject has matured considerably across Hollywood and European cinema, Indian cinema, especially the mainstream genre, continues to have a tenuous and tension-filled relationship with the complexities of identity and sexuality of the transgender community.

For a long time, trans narratives were absent in popular cinema and the representation was limited to featuring characters from the hijra community in song sequences and comedy sequences. All time chartbusters like Tayyab Ali Pyar ka Dush man (Amar Akbar Anthony) and Saj Rahi Gali Meri Maa (Kunwara Baap) feature a group of hijras singing and dancing. The other popular practice, which can be considered as vaguely alluding to the existence of sexual minorities, was to feature male stars crossdressing. Many Hindi male leads from Rishi Kapoor (Rafoo Chakkar) to Amitabh Bachchan (Laawaris) to Amir Khan (Baazi) to Shah Rukh Khan (Chamatkar) have famously performed in drag for songs and other scenes. In both these representations, the idea was to exploit the perception of the physicality of the hijra community and the drags as emasculated for the sake of laughs. Sometimes, hijras were also used in crucial moments to play the god-sent saviour—remember Rallapalli’s cameo as the person who saves the protagonists’ child in Mani Ratnam’s