In Deepa Mehta’s Fire, Sita talks about the difficulty of expressing her lesbian relationship in her native tongue saying that there is no word in her language for what they are and how they feel for each other. Hence, there is a clear indication that over here, the vocabulary and language does not exist for referring to a phenomenon which is (supposedly) not socially and morally acceptable. Thus, the whole episode is rendered useless.
In one of her interviews, Deepa Mehta said that it is like lesbians and homosexuals do not exist in India. In India, sex is considered taboo even if it is performed in heterosexual form, which further goes to show the deep layer of taboo that a same sex relationship might be shrouded in. The socio-cultural landscape, the exploration involved and the reception in the said landscape becomes a problematic sphere. The movie Fire redefines queer film by adapting it to the Indian cultural context while exploring the issues stemming from the heavily patriarchal value of the country. The 1999 edition of the Human Rights Watch World Report notes: “In December 1998, the award-winning film Fire, by director Deepa Mehta, was recalled from theatres after Shiv Sena activists vandalized at least fifteen cinemas where it was playing. Sena members objected to the film’s depiction of a lesbian relationship between two Hindu sisters-in-law, adding that had the women been Muslim there would be no objection”.( Human Rights Watch, 1999, 189) Pointing to grandparents’ stories, folk songs and the sculptures in Khajuraho and Konark (which depict, among others, lesbian relationships), Bachmann shows that lesbians are not new to Indian culture. In this sense, Fire not so much unfairly introduces foreign elements into Indian culture, but rather resurrects elements which, over time, have become close to extinct, and forces the viewer to acknowledge them because they form an actual part of current Indian society.
The inclusion or exclusion of this element in Indian society however, demanded that sex be considered in terms of political economies, something that is accomplished by “aligning” the different bodies at play (both abstract bodies such as religious or right of choice bodies, and specific ones like the bodies of the women in Fire), thus “transmuting the body of person into forms of the body politic” ( Patel, 2002, 230)
In conclusion, we have seen how Deepa Mehta’s Fire manages to bring the queer film to Indian cultural context and what are some of the issues that it explores in doing so. Looking at the circumstances surrounding its release in India and the this release’s impact in Indian society, both culturally and politically, we observed the significance that it had in generating public discourse and strong reactions which reflect the country’s moral and political state. Finally, considering the same-sex relationship in the film I have seen how it operates in terms of a lesbian project and how this fact was viewed after the film’s release. The way in which the lesbian aspect of Fire was either explained as a an effect of other issues or as a tool for the advancement of other agendas, separate than gay rights, was considered and ultimately linked to feminism through the concept of gender construction. Ultimately, there are many other issues left unexplored, namely the uniquely transborder qualities of the filmmaker and her own identity as Indian, Canadian and Indian-Canadian. There is no doubt however that, as Tom Waugh notes, the “larger context of a transnational artistic milieu where courage is rare and a turbulent planetary traffic in sexual identities increasingly calls into question cultural and national borders confirms Fire’s status as a historic moment in Canadian – and Indian – queer film history” (Waugh, 2006, 468) As such, it is perhaps fitting that the film was made by a director with a “hyphenated” national identity, a quality which enables Mehta to view both the weaknesses of her two cultures as an outside observer as well as their strengths as an integral part of said cultures. And while the fact that she is not gay herself risks rendering her as less apt at expressing issues affecting gay people (in both India and Canada), it was perhaps an important first step which shows that these issues do not preoccupy gay people alone, but are rather of broader significance to people everywhere.. . .
CONCLUSION
Thus, all things queer are not sexual. All things sexual are not reproductive. The word hijra, transgender are often confused. Hijra is a community of male to female transgendered people into which one has to be granted entry by a guru. A transgender is a man or a woman who has a deep desire to live in society as a member of the opposite sex. A cross-dresser may wear the clothes of the opposite sex for fun or sexual pleasure. A transsexual is a person who feels trapped in his/her own body and wants to change to the opposite sex. The word ‘sex’ is used more in the biological sense, while ‘gender’ is used for how biology is expressed socially (mannerisms and clothing). The word ‘sexuality’ deals with all aspects of the erotic: sex, gender, orientation, identity, psychology and sociology. The idea of ‘trittiya prakriti’ (third gender or third sexuality) first appears in The Mahabharata and is elaborated a few centuries later in the Kamasutra. It refers to people of this category using the feminine and masculine. The feminine dress as women and are often courtesans. The masculine dress as men and are often masseurs. The Kamasutra advises men to entice women slowly and force them to have sex but he warns them that if they are too slow they may be accused of ‘trittiya prakriti’. The word ‘trittya prakriti’ is never used for a woman.
In his nineteenth century translation of the Kamasutra, Richard Burton addressed trittya prakriti as eunuch, resulting in confusion. He was probably following the Orientalist convention of describing men of the East as oversexed and effeminate. Again, in the Brahmanas, manuals that explain Vedic yagnas in detail, there is the story of how the world is divided by the gods into three parts: the sky is masculine, the earth is feminine and the atmosphere is sexless. The pain of the sky goes to the rule breaking man, whereas the pain of the earth goes to the wanton woman. The pain of the atmosphere goes to sexless beings. Do these sexless beings refer to queer people who challenge notions of masculinity and feminity? This question still needs to be answered. The idea of a spectrum of gender and sexuality is strongly embedded in an idea found in the Tantras, and even in the law book Manu-smriti, according to which male children are born when the male seed is stronger, female children are born when the female seed is stronger and queer children are born when both seeds are of equal strengths. In the Veda, there is a line ‘vikruti evam prakruti’ which can be translated as ‘all things queer are also part of nature’. In the Bhagavad Gita, in the tenth chapter, Krishna shows his cosmic form to Arjuna and says, ‘ I am all there is, was and will be.’ In Hinduism, the world is not distinct from God. The world is God. God contains everything. The queer is not excluded.