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Pride Month | From 'Paatal Lok' to 'The Royals': Why Do We Bury Our Gays?
Indian streaming’s clinching moment thus far, this year, from 'Paatal Lok,' is of queerness affirmed. It also ties into a troubling trope.
Somewhere in the middle of Paatal Lok’s sophomore season, police inspector Hathiram Chaudhary (Jaideep Ahlawat), a “nikhdu Jaat aadmi” is fuming at Imran Ansari (Ishwak Singh)—his junior in the first season, and now, in the second season, an IAS officer whom Hathiram reports to. Hathiram just found out about Imran’s lover—a man.
They are in a car cloaked by an uneasy silence. Imran, then, asks Hathiram to not mention his homosexuality to anyone, especially in the police department, his voice low and anxious. Both know what is at stake. Hathiram bubbles in anger—his anger, which is actually his concern, which is actually his affection for Imran— “Agar tujhe andar se lag raha hai ke yeh sahi hai, toh yeh sahi hai, b**nch*d.” (If you think that this is right, it must be right.) How dare you be afraid of the world?
At the end of this episode, within scenes of Imran’s queerness being established, he is killed, and this pulls Hathiram’s trajectory into overdrive.
Like ‘the hooker with a heart of gold’ and ‘the black guy dies first’, ‘bury your gays’ is a narrative trope—the queer character’s life as expendable, and by being expendable, is essential to the main story and the arc of the protagonist. Until Imran is killed, the pretense that Paatal Lok was about Hathiram and Imran was kept up. His murder clarified his status in the narrative hierarchy.
“Burying the gay” is something Paatal Lok’s creator Sudeep Sharma had done previously, in Kohraa, too, where a jilted lover murders his boyfriend. Writer Gazal Dhaliwal had then written about this lacking empathy for queer life in storytelling, “I don’t mean empathy written into the story for your characters AFTER you have decided on a great twist.” What director Onir called “problematic”, director Faraz Arif Ansari framed as “internalised homophobia that creeps out in the most unimaginative ways”.
Abishek Banerjee, one of the writers of Paatal Lok tells The Hollywood Reporter India, that while writing Imran’s arc, they were not burdened by such questions. Gay, Muslim, Kashmiri, in some sense he is triple marginalised, but the show’s writing lands so softly, the character is never burdened by this knowledge, identity as something pulled at, not leaned on, for when your identity becomes so central to who you are and how you express yourself, you turn into a moral category.
“We were thinking about what more we can do with the characters of Ansari and Hathiram. How do we add a layer to the character?” Ansari’s queerness is not the point, it is Hathiram’s relationship to it that the show teases out tenderly. “Ansari was always supposed to die, to up the stakes for Hathiram,” Banerjee notes.
A trope can be discarded—it can also be complicated. Sharma and his writers were interested in the latter. Their characters are so full, that their death is not the end of their presence, but the inauguration of an absent presence that haunts the show’s path forward. It feels odd to reduce them to a type, and to then see this type as belonging to a trope. But the trope does exist, and writers reach—consciously or otherwise—towards it.
In some ways, the capacity to dispense with queer characters comes from the fact that despite a spike in representation on streaming, despite care being taken in their writing, they are often relegated to the sub-plot. Would anyone dare murder their central protagonist?
Even in crowded shows like Mismatched, Dabba Cartel, and The Royals, queer characters rupture the surface with their desires, but at a slight angle to the story, at the edge of the spotlight. “There isn’t space for us to tell love stories or stories of other genres with queer central protagonists. I don’t see excitement for that. Even if I broach that subject, I can sense a casual attempt to move past it. They will ask me, what other stories do you have? While streaming definitely gives queer people more space than theatrical, I don’t see a Heartstopper happening in India anytime soon,” Dhaliwal, the writer of Mismatched, tells The Hollywood Reporter India.
While Bhavna Kher, the writer of Dabba Cartel, tells The Hollywood Reporter India she has heard of platforms, producers, and creators “stitching in queer characters because they must be represented”, for her, the queerness of her two characters—Shahida (Anjali Anand), the real estate broker and Sub-inspector Preeti (Sai Tamhankar)—emerged fully formed with their sprouting. One thing Kher was clear about was that she would not “dilute, restrict, and diminish the characters to just sex. No wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.”
The absence of queer eros, though, sticks out immediately. In a show where heterosexual desire is flexed, we merely see the before and after of Shahida and Preeti slipping into bed together. The question of whether they even slept together is raised. “They definitely had sex. Not showing it is just a coincidence. It is an executional choice to move the story forward, faster,” Kher responds. What was kept, instead, were “gentle, charming, soft visuals of romance, like the ‘bike pe baithe hain aur baarish padh rahi hai’ (seated on a bike, in the rains) often associated with heterosexual couples.”
It is not just written death, but the editing of a show, too, that crops the life of a queer character. The Royals, for example, circles around the feral desire between Aviraaj (Ishaan Khatter), a prince and Sophia (Bhumi Pednekar), a CEO. Queer presence is penciled into one of the royal siblings, Jinnie (Kavya Trehan), who is struggling with her sexuality, playing hide and seek with her queer desire for Nikki (Lisa Mishra). “We lost some of her character to the edits, because she is a secondary character in this ensemble piece, but we have retained the essence of the character—a story of self discovery rather than a coming-out tale,” the writer Neha Veena Sharma tells The Hollywood Reporter India.
When asked if there could be a version of this show where a queer couple is central and indispensable, Sharma responded, “My instinct is that this can happen. But perhaps a first season could not be mounted at this scale with queerness as the main plot in India, yet.”
While stuffed to the neck with heterosexual sex, taking the route of Dabba Cartel, there was no trace of queer eros. “There was never a question of skirting queer desire,” The Royals writer Vishnu Sinha notes, “We were truthfully tracking their characters in a relationship. If Aviraaj and Sophia were beginning from a place of carnal physical attraction devoid of emotional intimacy and the show was about reaching there; Ginnie and Niki’s journey began with emotional intimacy, moving towards a physical attraction. It would feel odd to have them skip over steps of self knowledge, and jump into the sack.”
Queer representation is a fragile thing. On the one hand there is a testy history of queer villainy or turning queer characters into punchlines that writers want to be careful about. But on the other hand, queerness should not become a moral category. It should be allowed the full latitude of being human—to love, lust. That is, the right to be careless. Unbury the gays, yes. But also, unburden their gayness.