The Hindu Business Line : Raising the bar

It's Bollywood's first quasi-mainstream film dealing with homosexuality and HIV/AIDS. If My Brother Nikhil breaks even, it might prove to be a production landmark as well.

Sanjay Suri

About three weeks ago, a film slipped into a few multiplexes, and is still chugging along quietly in a show or two.

What's surprising about the placid run of My Brother Nikhil is its theme: it's the first quasi-mainstream film to come out of Bollywood which deals with homosexuality, and its sometimes fatal fallout, HIV/AIDS. Miraculously, it hasn't managed to ruffle feathers, either of gay activists or the general audience, both of whom are extremely thin-skinned when it comes to controversial subjects like sex, and variants thereof.

Directed by Onir, My Brother Nikhil tells the story, in flashback, of a young swimmer who discovers he is HIV positive. The time is the late-1980s, and the setting is Goa, and Nikhil finds himself ostracised not only by his coach and teammates (when he dives into the pool, everyone rushes out), but by his parents as well. The only people who stand by him are his lover Nigel, his sister Anu and her fiancé.

Based on a real-life situation (a Goan swimmer had been similarly afflicted during the same period), the film doesn't spare us when it comes to mirroring the ugly face of society when it is confronted by `differentness'. Nikhil's parents, who can't bear the derision directed at them, flee to Mumbai. He is locked up in a filthy sanatorium, and is allowed out by the courts only after a protracted battle.

The film's chief strength is that it manages to acknowledge that Nikhil is romantically and sexually involved with a man without letting it overpower the movie. Their relationship makes them like any other couple (there are no overt hugging and kissing scenes): there is even a line which tells us that Nikhil may have contracted the virus through a blood transfusion.

However, the film's uneventful passage raises a couple of questions. Has the Indian metro audience finally come of age? Or have too few people seen the movie, aimed as it is at the converted, with a spate of smart TV spots from celebrities not directly involved with the movie: `I care about my brother Nikhil, do you?'

Produced by its lead actor Sanjay Suri, the film positions itself not as a documentary, though there are times when the actors speak direct to the camera, but as a `zara hatke' mainstream product (it even has a song) with mainstream actors. Juhi Chawla, who plays Nikhil's sister winningly, is fashioning herself as an actor of substance, as well as a power behind several interesting, cutting-edge projects.

And Sanjay Suri, who has been biding his time to break into Bollywood's top rung, has made himself visible in some good movies. If the film goes on to break even, it may turn into a production landmark as well. We don't really have a tradition of showing alternative sexuality with the dignity it deserves. Mainstream movies usually play it for a laugh: legions of limp-wristed, bird-brained gay men have coursed through our potboilers (even such celebrated actors as Naseer and Om Puri have been pressed into turning queers, into people you only snigger at).

Not too many `gay women' have been seen in our movies. Deepa Mehta's Fire, which had Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das in a sweaty heap among tangled bedclothes, aroused the ire of feminist groups, and conservative viewers, all over the country. Some protestors even broke windows at the Regal theatre in New Delhi, and there was so much trouble elsewhere that the film had to be briefly pulled off. But by then the notoriety had paid off — the film made money, and has been Mehta's only bestseller in the country of her origin. Last year, there was Girlfriend, which also made money because of its explicit lovemaking scenes between its protagonists, but the filmmaker was careful to tell us that one of the girls has been abused as a child, and the other was too drunk to know what she was doing!

My Brother Nikhil is dramatically different in both content and treatment. Nikhil's sexual preference is determined by his own volition (he gently tells his childhood sweetheart that he is not interested in her in `that way'). Nikhil and Nigel are a couple in as matter-of-fact and tender ways, as Nikhil and a Neena would have been, if the former had been so inclined. There is no prurience, no serving up voyeuristic delights.

That's where, like Hollywood's Philadelphia and Bollywood's Phir Milenge, (though it was directed by Revathi, the latter was very clearly a Bollywood movie — Salman Khan plays the HIV positive lover who infects Shilpa Shetty, and Abhishek Bachchan in the role of the sympathetic lawyer and friend), My Brother Nikhil raises the ceiling. In the pantheon of characters of different hues and persuasions, gay people have been added on.

Picture by S. Subramanium

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