Visual Anthropology, 19: 335346, 2006 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online

DOI: 10.1080/08949460500297448

Love in the Midst of Fascism: Gender and Sexuality in the Contemporary Indian Documentary
In recent years the Indian documentary has turned its attention to exploring sexuality, the construction of masculinity, and has also begun to experiment with form, moving away from the conventional realist interview-based reporting to a more abstract and personal approach.1 This move towards exploring sexuality by a film movement that has been explicity activist in its orientation is significant both in the history of the Indian documentary and in the current political situation: areas inextricably linked in any discussion of the documentary film. First, these films represent a new moment in the Indian documentary tradition. Second, their explorations of sexuality have to be seen as records of the anxieties and complications of contemporary Indian masculinity as it is being redefined by the political project of Hindu fundamentalism in the midst of late Twentieth Century global capitalism. In this essay I compare three contemporary independent documentary films and discuss their representational strategies against the backdrop of the current political situation to emphasize, once again in a more urgent context, that sexuality is indeed political and that cinematic texts make sense only in their historical contexts. There has been a tendency to understand the upheavals surrounding sexuality in India as a kind of Western import and the work of gay rights activists.2 One of the earlier examples of this thinking was the inertia with which the Indian medical establishment first confronted AIDS. It was first dismissed as a Western disease which was not supposed to find its way into India. When it did, it was blamed on foreigners, homosexuals, and prostitutes. The gay rights movement has been embattled since its inception in the eighties against the charge of being either irrelevant to the more urgent economic issues of survival faced by the majority or being ridiculed as un-Indian and slavish copycats of Western lifestyles. Madhu Kishwar [1999] and Jeremy Seabrook [1999], for instance, argue that the gay rights movement in India is a Western import and a product of the global consumer culture. Such a view essentializes Indian culture. It is also shortsighted in its political imagination, casting the struggle over sexuality to the personal or culture sphere and thus failing to extend the sphere of politics to a full expression of humanity including the need to love.3 While globalization is certainly opening up spaces for sexual behavior it does not achieve this on its own, like a hypodermic needle. Rather, the entrance of India into the global market is being mediated by Hindu fundamentalism. In other words, it is not solely gay rights and AIDS activists or womens groups who have brought sexuality 335

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into the public sphere. Rather, the refashioning of sexuality is very much at the heart of the fascist recasting of India into a Hindu nation. In what is now known as the night of the long swords, the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat that started on 28 February 2002 leaving 2000 Muslim citizens dead and 150,000 homeless, rapist men in mobs came sometimes dressed in saffron underwear or khaki shorts, the emblems of the Sangh.4 Rape in this case, Tanika Sarkar [2002] accurately describes, was performed as a religious and political duty in which Hindu male sexual organs functioned as instruments of torture. A fundamental part of the Sangh ideology is, Sarkar [2001: 275] has argued, an invention of Hindu masculinity as a form of bhakti or religious devotion in which the devotee comes to the rescue of the deity as a savior heroan extremely empowering appeal. It calls for a belligerent and aggressive masculinity committed to establishing a racially pure nation by ridding it of the Other; Muslims being the foremost target at the moment. In audio and video cassettes released by the VHP, Ram is portrayed as a little lost male child in search of his birthplace, lost not to the Western or the foreigner, but to Muslims who built a mosque in its place. Further indoctrination is carried out through disciplinary and militaristic parades, workshops, exercise classes, religious ritual, and ideological and combat training provided on a daily basis in residential neighborhoods all over Northern and Western India. The leaders or pracharaks of the R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh), including Gujarats Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, are celibate men, without ties to families or lovers, who have devoted their entire lives to organizing and spreading the sadistic and cruel message of the Sangh. Women, Sarkar [2001] writes, are invoked in this scheme as wombs, who must conceive and nurture sons as instruments of violence, while the space of violence is reserved for men. Muslim bodies are invoked as source of imminent sexual threat. In a pamphlet signed by the State General secretary, Chinubhai Patel, and circulated widely after the killings in Gujarat, the following verse appears:
The violence which was inactive has erupted It has burnt the arse of the miyas (muslim men) and made them dance naked We have untied the cocks that were tied till now We have widened the tight cunts of the bibis (muslim women).

This brutal and despicable politics is justified by presenting it as something newa change from a usually tolerant Hinduism to a violent onemade necessary, as the then Prime Minister, Vajyapai, claimed, by the inability of Muslims to live in harmony with others.5 The consequences of this discourse were borne by Muslim men, women, and childrenof which the latter were isolated for unprecedented torture in which pregnant women and little girls were raped, their stomachs slashed open, and children burnt before the eyes of their parents. We did not arrive at this point overnight. As Aijaz Ahmed [2002] explains, the Sanghs relentless pursuit of the Hindu rashtra nation is over eight decades old and the present victory a consequence of the three factors, all of which have contributed to increased political instability, growing disparity in the region,

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and fascist politics. The first is the collapse of the political center as global capital has increased the economic gaps in the nation. The major opposition party, the Congresswhich formed the Government in 2004has ended up echoing the former ruling party BJPs stance on all the principle issues. Both parties agree that the Indian market should be deregulated and opened to international capital, take an aggressive stance against Pakistan, and advocate strong antiterrorist laws that would further constrain civil rights. The second factor is the increased instability in the region because of the nuclearization of both India and Pakistan, which has narrowed the space for an oppositional politics that would challenge the militaristic political center. The final reason is Americas so-called war against terrorism, in which the BJP and the Congress have emerged as eager junior partners posting their own internal authoritarian policies regarding civil liberties and Muslims as a mirror reflection of the U.S. The feelings of castration and emasculation that Hindutva (the ideology of Hindu fundamentalism) identifies as haunting the Hindu male are the product of a political campaign that attempts to conceal its collaboration with international capital at the cost of betraying the needs of Indian people, and the legacy of anticolonialism. Hindutva makes up for that betrayal by casting nationalism as a virile masculinity that is turned not against a foreign power but an insider. For instance, bangles were sent to those villages that did not support the present Home Minister, L.K. Advanis, campaign to demolish the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya and build a temple in its place. A rallying cry of the Sangh is that either Hindu men rescue their birthplace from Muslims or live forever as emasculated. They chant, gary se kaho hum Hindu hai (Say with pride I am a Hindu) or jis Hindu ka khoon na khole who Hindu nahin who hijra hai (The Hindu whose blood does not boil is not Hindu but a eunuch). Perhaps at no other time has this question been raised so loudly: what is it to be a man?

THE CINEMATIC INTERVENTION In the nineties, popular Bombay cinema suddenly seemed to erupt with alternative sexualities. Commenting on the appearance of the hijra (the eunuch), the gay goonda (goon), and his sidekick in recent Bombay cinema, Tom Waugh [2002] described these representations as both tentative and kamikaze. Predominantly the object of ridicule and contempt, these alternative sexualities are also sometimes granted wisdom and poignancy on account of their being outsiders. This expansion of Bombay cinemas language on sexuality (its best-selling commodity) is a clear indicator of the upheavals surrounding sexuality currently. The independent film, one characterized as Indias Third Cinema by Tom Waugh, is pitted against both the commercial Bombay film and the alternate, parallel or art cinema that makes it to international film festivals. Tackling sexuality within this cinema comes up against an established tradition of equating politics with the public sphere of economy and culture. The first filmmaker to explore the politics of sexuality was Anand Patwardhan, who in Father, Son and the Holy War [1986] revealed the construction of masculinity as a fundamental aspect of the fascist enterprise. This has been followed by Lalit Vachanis In the Tree [2002],

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which followed the lives of young men involved in the Bajrang Dal (the youth wing of the R.S.S.). Both films continue the analytic, interview-based tradition, examining sexuality to the extent that it is being reinvented by the fundamentalist project. The focus was still in the public sphere, which was imagined as distinct from the private, more emotive and imaginative sphere of sexuality. This underlying assumption invariably affected the formal choices as well, restraining them to a rationalist, argument-based logical approach. The three films that I discuss here, Rahul Roys When Four Friend Meet [2001], Amar Kanwars King of Dreams [2001], and Neeraj Bhasins My Friend Su [2001], did not directly address Hindutva and also varied in their formal approaches. They are, nevertheless, significant in addressing Hindutva. First, in making masculinity a subject of enquiry, they presented it as a social construction. Secondly, they presented alternative sexualities just when Hindu fundamentalism was inventing an essentialist=fundamentalist view of gender and sexuality. In order to evaluate fully the success of their intervention, we need to keep in mind the rhetorical strategies of the discourse they are speaking against. The fascist discourse is highly charged emotionally, makes a fetish out of masculinity, and represents it in short, authoritarian, rigid commands that create a dualistic opposition between male and female, to complement its Otherizing of Muslims. There is no place within this discourse of a portrayal that would show masculinity as a socially constructed performance in process that is inherently subject to change.

MALE FRIENDSHIPS AND INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING In When Four Friends Meet Roy follows four young working-class men from one of Delhis largest slums in their workplaces, schools, and playgrounds, asking them about their dreams and desires. We see the hardships of living on a meager income and working from the age of eight or nine for a subsistence wage, the inability to rise above the standard of living of their parents and provide for them, and the brief alienated encounters with the opposite sex. Roy juxtaposes the reality of their lives with the fantasies of an affluent, erotic, and globalized lifestyle projected by popular Bombay cinema on television and radio sets, fantasies written on the hearts and the minds of these young men. The film is very much in the nature of a report in which the filmmaker is the expert, quite removed from the subjects of his film. Although the relation between the filmmaker and the young subjects is affectionate (one of the men begins to cry on camera, just sad that the film has come to an end) the filmmaker own masculinity is not open to discussion. For instance, Roy asks fairly personal questions including, When was the first time you masturbated? Arent you worried that you might not be able to give pleasure to the woman you marry? without volunteering any of his own history. While the young men do not directly ask him about his history, they do ask him for information. For instance, they ask if it is possible for a woman to become pregnant after sexual intercourse only one time, or how a baby could be born through such a small hole. Roy either asks the question right back, letting them reveal their ignorance further, or

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evades it altogether. Ignorance here becomes a phenomenon limited to young working-class men and therefore a problem to be solved. The film proceeds as a linear and logical lecture in which the young men serve as visual illustrations, thus further reducing them into case studies. In one sequence when the young men describe furtive meetings with women, Roy inserts a romantic sequence from a Hindi film mid-sentence, as if to illustrate his analysis visually. This analytical, expert-centered structure forecloses the possibility of exploring the emotive and imaginative aspects of sexuality. In one brief sequence Roy hints at the erotic longings of these young men by laying a soundtrack of a woman singing of undying love and demanding the same in return over a shot of a kite flying in the sky. This kind of lingering pace that would allow viewer interpretation is an exception to the overall films didactic structure, which is so driven by argument that it gets nervous if there is no narration interpreting the image. The reliance on realism and argument also closes the space for a more ambivalent and open expression of sexuality. Roys questions are markedly heterosexual and elicit corresponding responses. The camera is blind to the openly homosocial and affectionate bonds between these young men (that spill over the rather narrow framing of Roys questions) and fails to explore the emotional resonance of dosti or friendship in its title, When four friends meet.6 The title evokes a popular song, and it is a well-recognized Hindi film convention that narratives of

Figure 1 Still from When Four Friends Meet.

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friendship follow the same tropes as of romantic lovethey are passionate relationships characterized by longing and loyalty between friends. There are several scenes in which the young men speak of the depth of a friendship sustained over years. The filmmaker, however, chooses to read both popular cinema and the lives of his subjects through a heterosexual lens. The film is too timid and inhibited to go into spaces that cannot be easily contained, to let the image speak for itself and allow more open-ended interpretations [Figure 1], and ends up being a report on a social problem, thus marginalizing sexuality to the sidelines of politics.

THE POWER OF DREAMS Amar Kanwars King of Dreams [2001] takes an entirely different track from investigative realism, relying on poetry and an impressionist and abstract form to address sexuality. The move away from realism is a drastic break from the Indian documentary tradition, and represents an extension of the form to cover areas of human experience that have so far not found a place in the canon. Sexuality or eros has its most common expression in Indian popular culture in commercial films and songs whose primary subject has been romantic love. Shohini Ghosh [2002] explains that the special attraction of Hindi film music for gay subcultures is precisely this centering of romantic love and the similar tropes used to represent both romantic love and same-sex friendships. Sexuality is also spoken of in jokes, conversations between friends, in cheap books sold on the sidewalk, and in folksong. Subsequently, Kanwar chooses to construct his examination of masculinity as a collection of fragments of images and sounds that are meant to trigger self-examination among its male audiences. He weaves these fragmentary and apparently disconnected moments through a first-person narrative that speaks not on behalf of an individual but of a collective male obsession with penetration. In what can be identified as at least three narrative strandsof a newly married bridegroom, a gay man, and someone visiting a sex workerare woven other fragmentary narratives, such as losing ones lover to the pressures of heterosexual marriage, searching for aphrodisiacs, lonesome, bored summer afternoons spent masturbating under the drone of the ceiling fan, and a legend about an ascetic finding desire only after destroying it. The images are deliberately vibrant in color, like desire itself, speaking of a whole by hinting at the parts. In one sequence the narrator takes on the voice of a new bridegroom who speaks of the futile violence of penetrating his wife, of senselessly dyeing white sheets in blood to appease family and society, only to then join the mind-numbing generations of son-producing fathers. This is accompanied by mobile shots of a brides eyes and forehead, the priests bald head, the bridegrooms handsmaking this the experience not of one but of a collective. The dream-like structure of the film moves through association, rather than linear logic, inviting the viewer to insert his own memories into the film. Yet, this is no celebration of masculinity but a bitter critique of its obsession with penetration and penis size. In circling again and again around penetration the film reveals this obsession to be violent and demeaning both to the men and their

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lovers. The first-person narrative speaks of both this obsession and the desire to break away from it to find love, a moment of truth, a way to dissolve my body, and the happiness of being. However, the representation of desire in this film [Figure 2] is so abstracted from history that it echoes the fetishized discourses of sexuality that the film wants to rupture for its audience. The several voices that combine to become a whole speak of no one in particularno material reality of class, religious identity or sexualitybut of a generalized male identity in a kind of circular talk of sex amongst men. While this opens up the film for the viewer to make what he would of, it is also easy to detach oneself from because a generalized male identity is not enough to create identification. Personally, as a woman I found myself unable to identify with the films centering of penetration as the only form of sexual expression. However, that is not as much a problem if men could. My concern is that the films abstract circling on penetration and its violent aspects is, perhaps, reductive even for men. The films pessimistic thesis that masculinity, both hetero- and homo-, is essentially preoccupied with violent penetration suggests that there are no alternatives to be found in the present. Subsequently, its utopian visions have to be projected onto a mythical past or future, reinforcing the mystified, fetishized discourses of sexuality that it set out to rupture. Consequently, the film sets its hopes of a

Figure 2 Still from The King of Dreams.

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liberated sexuality upon a legend of an ascetic who finds true love only after complete renunciation.

THE AESTHETIC OF TENDERNESS Neeraj Bhasins intimate portrayal in My Friend Su [2001] combines both poetry and realism to explore the coming to terms with ones sexuality as a journey shared with his close friend, Su, who is transgendered. The intimacy of the relationship is established through the circular nature of the narrative in which conversation, images, and locations are interrupted, only to be brought back again, just as in conversations over lifelong friendships. The film begins with a shot of Su looking at himself in the window-pane. We see the same shot later on the film, only this time it opens up to show Bhasin looking at him. We see Su talk about a teacher who particularly influenced his imagination, and he is back to the same location later to sing a song. Both Bhasin and Su ask questions of each other. Sometimes Bhasin answers questions he has just asked Su about Sus life history; other times he jogs Sus memory to help him answer his questions. For instance, when Su reveals in the film his realization that he was not gay but transgendered, Bhasin asks him where he was when he realized this. Su is somewhat unsure and Bhasin asks him if he was in Hyderabad. Both make frequent references to earlier conversations, thus refusing to cast this film in the form of a confessional or victim story in which the revelations happen on camera. The film retains its improvisational and spontaneous character, both in its editing and filming steadily refusing the investigative expert-centered mode that in this case would only have pathologized Su. The film has the look of a home movie made among friends. Bhasin, Su, and the cameraman have an easy camaraderie. They pass around the camera and audio equipment and Su has an immensely comfortable presence in front of the camera that signals the closeness and intimacy he shares with Bhasin. Bhasin and his camera follow Su into his bedroom, on the street, into a restaurant, and so on. In one sequence we see the sound recordist suppressing his giggles as Bhasin and Su play-act Sus Sikh landlord by putting on a mock beard and moustache. Su is an artista painter, he also has a beautiful voicemaking it easy for Bhasin to adopt a more poetic and evocative stance. Su quite literally signs out his desire for a relationship with a man who would accept his inner womans soul and the pain of not being able to live out this desire, leaving him, in his own words, on the side of the river of life. Life, so heartbreakingly beautiful, leaves him standing as an outsider. Bhasin translates this longing cinematically as well. Just after Su has talked about his running away from the coming-of-age ceremony that Hindu boys have to undertake, we see Su standing on the sidewalk watching a wedding procession go by. His face is unreadable. My Friend Su shows coming to terms with ones sexuality as a continuous process, one that Bhasin, who is in a straight relationship, also understands. There is

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an easy banter between the two about the attraction and friendship between them. Su asks Bhasin if his girlfriend does not worry about the time he spends with him. In another sequence, Bhasin readily takes off the beard he has been playing with when Su says he does not like men with beards. In another sequence Bhasin looks on as Su takes off his shirt, perhaps desiring him, and thus blurring the lines between hetero- and homosexuality. While like Kanwar, Bhasin too expresses the emotional and imaginative nature of sexuality, his address does not remain at the level of abstraction. Rather, it shows the concrete practice of such a life at the level of the banal. The poignancy of the films portrayal is that Sus desires are so ordinary. For instance, he wants to wake up in the morning with his lover, he wants to rub his lovers head when he has a headache, he wants to know someone so intimately that he can predict his moods. Because these ordinary desires are so out of reach for Su the film estranges us from the world that makes it so. The films realist aesthetic which comes out of affection rather than an expert centered investigation confers upon Su a grace and dignity that belligerent discourses of masculinity vehemently oppose. Although this film does not situate itself within the escalating Hindu fundamentalist discourses and presents Sus alienation as an outcome of a continued tradition of patriarchy, it nevertheless threatens the fundamentalist discourse by presenting masculinity as a process and representing alternative, subversive sexualities as deeply human. The films poetic realism finds a way out of both abstracted, fetishized discourses or pathologized, objectified ones. It also avoids the confessional mode. The film also portrays dosti or friendship between men as tender and loving rather than exclusionary and violent. Kanwars film is a significant effort in making men confront the violence of a masculinity, but its lack of historical contextualization creates an easy space for withdrawal from its consequences in the real world. Roys conventional form isolates and distances the subjects of his film and is unable to enter the symbolic and affective realm of sexuality.

LOVE IN THE MIDST OF FASCISM While the three films vary in form and their understanding of masculinity they are important historical records both for the history of documentary and of sexuality in contemporary India. In bringing masculinity into the public sphere and opening it up for examination they are allies in resisting the cruel and sadistic refashioning of masculinity as a violently rigid fascist enterprise. They are a testament to the significance of the documentary film as a participant in not only representing the world but in making it. The independent documentary film in India, as in Latin America, has always aligned itself with a commitment to intervening in the political sphere: a cinema devoted to, as Michael Chanan [1990] has described of Cuban cinema, the denunciation of misery and the celebration of protest. The notion of the public sphere in Indian documentary has tended to privilege the rational over the more symbolic or affective forms of address. While reason, as privileged in Jurgen Habermas [1989] notion of the public sphere, certainly

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appears to be an antidote to the large-scale blood-baths based on religious identity, we know that people are not entirely driven by reason or that rational discourse can cover all aspects of human experience. Kanwar and Bhasins contribution is that they extend the public sphere by bringing to it matters of love in a new language. The tendency to push sexuality to the private sphere, to consider it less important than the economic issues of bread-and-butter or even sheer survival, to relegate it to the sphere of identity politics that can wait until the economic structures have been changed, and to consider the struggles over sexuality as products of a Western, consumer-oriented lifestyle, is to be terribly ignorant of the violent and brutal invention of sexuality and gender taking place right under our eyes under the Hindutva regime. In failing to make alliances with gay rights and womens activists who are expanding our understanding of sexuality as a fundamental form of human expression we will be unable to find a language to counter the hate-filled rhetoric of the Sangh. To speak of love in the midst of fascism is to imagine an alternative and also a means of imagining it. In taking on love, the documentary film too has had to evolve and discover a language that is more open-ended, poetic, and inclusive.

NOTES
1. I wish to thank Amar Kanwar for insights into his thinking, filmmaking, and the realities of independent filmmaking in India today. Thanks are also due to Rahul Roy for his film; to Sudesh Balan and Todd Strother for help with this article; and to Tom Waugh, Chuck Kleinhans, and Ruth Vanita, for critical comments. A version of this article was presented at the Visible Evidence Conference, Marseilles, in December 2002. 2. A perfect example was the controversy surrounding Deepa Mehtas Fire [1998]. Film screenings were accompanied by violent agitations against the film by the Shiv Sena and threats to the films leading actress, Shabana Azmi. For an excellent discussion of the political debate, see Geeta Patel [2002] and Monica Bachmann [2002]. 3. For a fuller critique of Kishwar and Seabrook, see Ruth Vanita [2002] and Monica Bachmann [2002]. 4. The Sangh is the short form of what is called the R.S.S, standing for Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh Corps of Nationalist Volunteers. The R.S.S. was established in 1925 and its foremost leader, V.D. Savarkar, declared in 1938, We Hindus are a Nation by ourselves. See Sumit Sarkar [1983: 356]. The Sangh was also responsible for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, being angry at what they perceived to be his pro-Pakistan stance. The V.H.P. (Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the World Hindu Council) is the religious branch of the R.S.S. The Bajrang Dal Monkey Brigade is the youth wing of the R.S.S. The former ruling party, the BJP, is politically aligned with the Sangh, with the erstwhile Prime Minister an old member of the Sangh. 5. At the BJPs National Executive Meeting in Panaji, Goa, from April 12 to 14, in which Prime Minister Vajpayee went back on his earlier mild criticism of Modi and took the Hindutva hard line. His exact words, quoted by Aijaz Ahmed [2002], Wherever Muslims live in large numbers they dont want to live in peace with others. 6. For a queer reading of male friendships in popular Indian cinema, see Muraleedharan [2002].

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REFERENCES Ahmed, Aijaz 2002 Cry the Beloved Country. Frontline, 19(13): June 22July 5. Bachmann, Monica 2002 After the Fire. In Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. Ruth Vanita, ed. Pp. 234244. New York and London: Routledge. Chanan, Michael 1990 Rediscovering Documentary: Cultural Context and Intentionality. In The Social Documentary in Latin America. Julianne Burton, ed. Pp. 3148. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Ghosh, Shohini 2002 Queer Pleasures for Queer People: Film, Television, and Queer Sexuality in India. In Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. Ruth Vanita, ed. Pp. 222233. New York and London: Routledge. Habermas, Jurgen 1989 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Kishwar, Madhu 1999 Naive Outpourings of a Self-Hating Indian: Deepa Mehtas Fire. Manushi, 109 (MarchApril): 611. Muraleedharan, T. 2002 Queer Bonds: Male Friendships in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema. In Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. Ruth Vanita, ed. Pp. 181192. New York and London: Routledge. Patel, Geeta 2002 On Fire: Sexuality and its Incitements. In Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. Ruth Vania, ed. Pp. 222233. New York and London: Routledge. Sarkar, Sumit 1983 Modern India: 18851947. New Delhi: Macmillan India. Sarkar, Tanika 2001 Hindu Nation, Hindu Wife: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. New Delhi: Orient Longman. 2002 Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rashtra. Economic and Political Weekly, July 13. Seabrook, Jeremy 1999 Love in Different Climate. London: Verso. Vanita, Ruth, ed. 2002 Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. New York and London: Routledge. Waugh, Tom 1991 Words of Command: Notes on Cultural and Political Inflections of Direct Cinema in Indian Independent Documentary. CineAction, 23 (Winter): 2839.

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2002

I Sleep behind You: Male Homosociality and Homoeroticism in Indian Parallel Cinema. In Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. Ruth Vanita, ed. Pp. 193206. New York and London: Routledge.

FILMOGRAPHY Amar Kanwar 2001 The King of Dreams. 28 min., Mini DV, bw & color, N 14 A Saket, New Delhi 1100017, Tel: 6516088, 6513556; e-mail: press@vsnl.net Anand Patwardhan 1995 Father, Son and the Holy War. 120 Min., color. Neeraj Bhasin 2001 My Friend Su. 55 min., Mini DV. color, Digital Talkies, 21 K.G. Marg, Akashdeep Building, New Delhi, India 110001; www.digitaltalkies.com Rahul Roy 2001 When Four Friends Meet. 43 min., Mini DV, A-19 Gulmohar Park, New Delhi 110049, India, Phone: 91-11-6515161 Fax: 91-11-6960947; e-mail: aakar@del3.vsnl.net.in Jyotsna Kapur Department of Cinema & Photography Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL, U.S.A.