Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 2
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Gosh, Shohini. Fire: A Queer Film Classic. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010. ISBN: 13-978-755-152-3637 (pbk); 160 pp / Christa Zeller Thomas
<1> Shohini Gosh starts her critical analysis of Fire (फायर Phāyar), the 1996 film by Canadian Indian director Deepa Mehta, and its reception, with something akin to an apology: when Fire premiered in India (in 1998), Gosh says, she wrote a generally laudatory review, except for one "damning paragraph" that expressed her doubt that the film would ever be considered "great" (19). The volume here under review seeks to atone for that criticism, although Gosh does not quite use that word. Instead, she calls her study "an attempt to revisit the film in the light of the innumerable insights I have gained in the last twelve years" (21).
<2> The effort to undo, revise, and 'paint over' earlier impressions shows. Gosh dismisses "'artistic merit'" as a "universalist" analytical criterion (24) and instead makes a claim for Fire as a queer classic based on its "crucial cinematic interventions that have implications for both representational conventions and spectatorial practices" (29). The film undoubtedly has been important for political reasons (as Gosh already pointed out in her first review), and not just in India. Even so, the critical approach (practiced not just by Gosh but dominant in the last twenty some years) to discount aesthetic considerations in favor of politics shifts the focus of (film) criticism to ideology, thereby distorting the position of, in this case, films and their directors among cinematic works.
<3> Fire is about two women who meet as sisters-in-law in a joint Hindu household in the New Delhi of the mid-1990s and come to find friendship, understanding, warmth, and, ultimately, tenderness and love, including physical, with each other. Sita, the young bride who joins the family at the beginning of the film is married to Jatin, a sullen lecher who's been pushed into marriage against his will and who is incapable and unwilling to give up his Indian-Chinese girlfriend, Julie. Radha, the older of the two women, has been married for a decade and a half to Ashok, who, in response to her (medically diagnosed) infertility uses her occasionally to test his ability to maintain his celibacy by having her lie in bed beside him. His dogma is, "desire is the root cause of all evil." The two men's mother, Biji, is mute and utterly care-dependent after a stroke, while the family's servant, Mundu, harbors a crush on Radha and masturbates in front of the helpless Biji to Jatin's porn videos (the family's business is comprised of video rentals and take-out fast food). Both women are neglected, mistreated and oppressed (at least by most Western standards).
<4> Given these family dynamics, the Western viewers who saw the film in the two years of its international circuit, after its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and before its release in India, clearly were not taken aback by the two women seeking and finding solace in each other. On the contrary, the film was well received and won some awards. Western audiences were already used, by the mid-1990s, to queering texts - while director Mehta herself has repeatedly protested to "have no idea why they have labeled [Fire] a lesbian film" (see, for instance, Rediff.com) - and read Fire without much problem as a condemnation of women's status in India, a lesbian love story en/gendered by the patriarchal abuse of power.
<5> In India, by contrast, Fire caused a firestorm of political controversy (and critics and the media had a field day inventing ever more creative titles that played on the film's name). The Hindu Right, reports Gosh, organized "mobs [that] vandalized theaters and attacked the film for promoting 'perversion' and insulting Hindu religion." The violence was met by strong resistance that led to "independent India's first public debate on homosexuality and provided unprecedented visibility to queer people and activism. Queer sexuality had tumbled out of the closet," Gosh concludes, "and was in no mood to go back" (23-24).
<6> Gosh's study recounts in some detail (in the introduction, chapter one, and again in chapter three - there is much repetition here) the controversy surrounding Fire and the political events that ensued and finally culminated in the Delhi High Court's decriminalization of homosexual intercourse between consenting adults in July of 2009. The need for the detail is not entirely clear, other than to drive home the point that non-heterosexual people in India were victimized. This approach is aligned with Gosh's proclaimed lack of interest in "cinematic considerations" and instead her focus on "mapping" the film "against a larger social and political history" (24).
<7> Even so, substantial portions of the material presented in chapters one and two seem (better) suited to a film critique rather than a socio-political study. The production history in chapter one is as much concerned with Mehta's career, the influences on her as a filmmaker, and the themes she has explored in her work, as with the circumstances of filming Fire in India. Why would Gosh engage with this thematic if she is not interested in a cinematic discussion? Similarly, chapter two, all 41 pages of it, is entirely given over to a breakdown of the film's individual scenes - including quotations of dialogue passages - even if the writing is more descriptive than analytical. Again, the question arises, why such mise-en-scène detail? With few exceptions - such as when she points out the film's "use of excessive and unwieldy dialogue" (81) - Gosh makes no attempt at a critique of Fire's cinematic merits. The purpose of the scene-by-scene summary can therefore only be to rehearse the development of the lesbian love story against the stereotypically macho behavior of the male characters.
<8> That said, Gosh takes issue with what she calls the "homophobic interpretative scheme" of some (Indian) female critics, who saw Fire as an "'insult to lesbians' because it celebrated a 'rejection vote'" along the lines of a "'bad-husbands-cause-lesbianism'" pattern (138, 137, 139). Gosh sees such an interpretation as a "total disregard" of Sita and Radha's "will and agency" (139), an assertion that, in turn, pays no heed to the flimsiness of Mehta's plot in this regard. The two husbands in the film are completely one-dimensional, lacking complexity and depth to an extent that very nearly makes the film inferior, were it not for the character nuances of the two female protagonists and the lead actresses' fabulous performances. Why do Ashok and Jatin have to be such flat, unlikeable characters? Would it not have been more effective, in terms of the credibility of the lesbian love story, to make them good (or at least run-of-the-mill) husbands? Gosh makes no attempt to consider the implications of such a scenario in her project, because she's too busy emphasizing the alleged subversive nature of Mehta's script (132).
<9> Yet North American critics' perception that Fire's feminism and representations of sexuality, while "perhaps bold and novel in India," come across as "outdated" and "tame" by North American standards (112) is rejected by Gosh. She positively bristles at the racist colonial bias of such critiques. "Unable to see the opposition to Fire as part of a continuing cultural war," she writes, "critics and commentators in North America rushed to present the conflict [enacted in the film and its reception] as one between tradition and modernity. This can be seen to be a logical extension of the persistent Eurocentric belief that history is a grand progressive narrative where the masses of the world march toward a singular civilizational future. While some (European) cultures were destined to arrive early, others had to remain in waiting" (112-113). Almost in the same breath, however, Gosh (paraphrasing Gayatri Gopinath) executes a logical volte-face by allowing that the film itself -that is, Mehta's storytelling - was instrumental "in instigating this false polarity by framing the heroines' dilemma as one in which modernity […] is pitted against tradition" (113).
<10> These blindspots in Gosh's argument stem from one common source that, according to Gosh, goes to the core of queerness in India: "[is] homosexuality Indian? Or [is] it an import?" (121). Gosh is so eager to point to a "vibrant, diverse, and persistent" tradition of (male and female) homosexuality in South East Asia (121), and thereby to identify the lesbian love story in Fire as homegrown, that she falls into a peculiar trap: on the one hand disputing the ability of Western audiences and critics to 'get' the subversively Indian queerness in the film, Gosh herself doesn't seem to understand that queerness doesn't happen in a national vacuum. Although she acknowledges the "changing mediascape of the 1990s" in India that was part of the climate in which Fire emerged (40), she takes no account of the global rise of gay and lesbian movements during that decade. That rise, in turn, was notably fuelled by the change in the way homosexuality was perceived after the effect on gay communities, in particular, of the AIDS epidemic. In the 1990s, not just India embarked on public debates following the release of queer texts (often as book and film) such as Aimée & Jaguar (a German lesbian Holocaust story), Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and the re-release of Martin Sherman's Bent. The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a global wave of gay and lesbian activism that also reached India's shores (quite aside from Deepa Mehta's exposure to it in Canada) and that was marked, among other things, by transnational identification with queer texts. Gosh would perhaps be surprised to learn that Aimée & Jaguar, for instance, considered by Erica Fischer, its author/editor/transcriber, a typically German story, was claimed by gay and lesbian communities around the world as part of 'their' history. To consider a queer document from that decade strictly within national boundaries strikes me as unproductive.
<11> That said, Gosh's concluding comments about Fire's impact on Indian film are insightful (and would have been worth expanding). As long as the larger queer context of the film is taken into account (discussed for example by Barry D. Adam in The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement), Gosh's study would be helpful to readers interested in queer film and social history.
Principle Cast and Crew of Fire
Director: Deepa Mehta
Screenplay: Deepa Mehta
Sita (Nandita Das)
Radha (Shabana Azmi)
Jatin (Javed Jaffrey)
Biji (Kushal Rekhi)
Ashok (Kulbhushan Kharbanda)
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