The rain-bow and Cupid’s arrow!

Stills from Rainbow Rishta

Besides the fact there is a French Beach in Karachi, what I learnt from Saim Sadiq's film Joyland (2022) is that an unborn child's sex determination is legal in Pakistan. Unlike in India. As you can tell in the family drama, where the grand old patriarch is craving a male grandchild from his two sons.

The ultrasound delivers a false-positive report for a boy once. The result could be correct, the second time on. Joyland is easily the most feted Pakistani film in the art-house scene - the first to win an award at Cannes. It officially dropped online, recently, on Mubi.

I watched it with immense interest, finally - for how it is aesthetically delightful, checking all the boxes: authentic performances, gentle camerawork, grey characters, and a world so geographically close to Indians, of course, and yet so politically far.

Joyland

At its margins is the story of a fling between a gay man and a transgender dancer. That the film was initially banned in Pakistan, before a limited release, tells me the homosexuality laws, first put in place by the British, continue to prevail. It would be the same Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code since 1860.

A society that criminalises love, of any kind, actively legalises hate. To be fair, the Indian Supreme Court struck down 377, eventually, only on September 6, 2018!

One of Joyland's lead actors is a transgender person, Alina Khan, playing the transgender role, Biba. Which can't be said for transgender roles in Indian cinema over decades.

A reason the transgender activist Gauri Sawant said she wished former Miss Universe Sushmita Sen to play her in the biopic Taali (2023, Jio Cinema) - she had already led such a dark life, full of insurmountable challenges.

She wanted someone beautiful to depict her on screen, for starters. Sen was Sawant's personal choice. Seeking beauty, whether in art or otherwise, is a birthright - well-known realities are secondary.

Director Jaydeep Sarkar

Joyland, named after an amusement park in Lahore, is altogether a joyless film. As are most films/series/docs with LGBTQ+ characters, on occasion, tending towards atrocity porn. Consider the sheer ugliness in an equally recent film, Haddi (2023), with Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a transgender don.

Why is the recent, six-part, LGBTQ documentary series, Rainbow Rishta (2023), on Amazon Prime Video, produced by Vice Studios, following six stories, across economic classes and geographies - Lajpat Nagar (New Delhi), Guwahati (Assam), Bhayander (Thane), Imphal (Manipur), Manipal, Mumbai, etc - so different?

Chiefly, because it is joyous - from the zingy soundtrack, to attractive visuals; playful dating, to the seven-year-itch in a relationship; aspirations for stardom, to rare intimacy; even a marriage ceremony.

As for the latter, since the Supreme Court had taken the lead with both Section 377 and officially recognising transgenders as the third gender (in 2014) - if only they'd similarly gone ahead with legalising same-sex marriages in 2023. They got close. They didn't. Many would have gained. What does anybody gotta lose, anyway?

Rainbow Rishta is a reality series, where the principal cast has come together to open their lives up for camera - finding, keeping, normalising love, without veering towards cringe TV, or an advocacy/activism doc.

You watch the Indian, queer characters being celebrated for who they are. Rather than their genders or sexual orientation. Which isn't all that anybody is, 24x7, anyway.

Why was I drawn to Rainbow Rishta? Because of the series director, filmmaker Jaydeep Sarkar, better known to friends, including me, as Jhandu. Jhandu and I were the first friends in Bombay. We moved at the same time from Delhi.

We were together at Jamia, reading mass communications. We met one evening over coffee at Max Mueller Bhavan, concurrently suggesting to each other: Let's just drop out, and go to Bombay; touche.

I left the next morning. His kaali-peeli cab drove in to my home, perhaps a week later. Neither of us had a clue what we were gonna do professionally. He probably had a better idea.

That he was simultaneously struggling with issues to do with love, dating, companionship, being a closeted gay man, is something I couldn't have known.

We somewhat lost touch later. Although when we met (and still do), we could start bitching about the world, just from where we'd last left off. Which is mark of the healthiest friendship. But for an elemental aspect of his life that he'd kept from many, like me, still. Jhandu ‘came out' to his parents a decade ago.

This could've been even tougher in the preceding decade - as captured grimly in Nishit Sharan's short-doc, Summer in My Veins (1999). There are a couple of characters, I noticed in Rainbow Rishta, who still haven't quite ‘come out'.

Maybe the camera is their catharsis. This is 2023: same-sex love is not even a legal taboo. Most parents in the series have accepted their children for who they are - i.e., their children, what else.

Jhandu himself must've internalised a lot in his 20s. He eventually found love, which is what the series is about, shorn of even an iota of bitterness.

It felt so personal to me, for a friend. As it would for the community, healing with time, so comfortable in their skin, before the camera/world. That's instantly why Rainbow Rishta is such a joy-land!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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