Interview with Dr Shoma A Chatterji, Author of The Female Gaze

A thought-provoking conversation with Shoma A. Chatterji on queer narratives, representation, cinema, and how storytelling can challenge silence and create space for marginalized voices.
on Jun 14, 2026

Frontlist: The Female Gaze reclaims looking as a political act. In the context of Pride Month, how do you see the queer gaze the act of queer people looking at and telling their own stories, as a form of claiming space that mainstream media has historically denied them?

Shoma: I have personally interacted with some leading members of the queer community. However, I feel sad to state that though they always complain about the mainstream not accepting them in their identity, they clam up the minute a mainstream journalist or ordinary citizen tries to go close to get into their real story. So, the queer community cannot complain about their avoidance by the mainstream. We mostly consider them as ourselves, completely mainstream with exceptions among senior citizens who find it difficult to accept them on the misconception that their sexual identity is not genetic but self-acquired. So, mass education is called for to educate the mainstream addressed by academic scholars and active members of the organizations that have been founded to give them a ‘voice.’

Frontlist: Your essays examine what you call the "systemic silence" of women. Do you see a parallel architecture of silence around queer identities in Indian society and media and if so, what does it take to dismantle it from within storytelling?

Shoma: This “silence” I have discussed many times in different ways over time in different media continues till this day because we, women are socially conditioned to remain silent right through our lives. This screcy specially with regard to queerness extends to children growing up in nuclear and joint families, in cities and villages, who find it impossible to confide in other family members about their alternative sexuality. I personally believe that if the media begins to either begin a magazine/paper completely dedicated to LGBT communities with members contributing their own experiences of crossing the ’borders’ of the universally accepted heterosexual identity as “normal” and anything outside it not only as “abnormal” but also “criminal”. Television programmes and social media outlets can also contribute in numbers and belief to taking the movement forward to social and professional acceptance.

Frontlist: You've written extensively on Indian cinema's treatment of gender bending, transgender lives, and queer themes from Bengali art cinema to Bollywood. In your assessment, has Indian cinema evolved from using queerness as comic relief or tragedy to genuinely claiming space for queer subjectivity?

Shoma: This is correct. We no longer use the queer identity as a comic sub-tract or a joke but many filmmakers, some of them openly queer themselves, are making full-length feature films., short films and documentaries focussed entirely on the gay and lesbian identity.
The late Rituparno Ghosh, himself a person with alternative sexuality, has made at least three films entirely focussed on queer characters and their stories. Hindi cinema is now openly making films on the queer identity and these films are being accepted with awards at international film festivals.

Ashok Row Kavi, the most vocal gay activist in the country, estimated two decades ago that there are over 50 million homosexuals in India. He goes by the Kinsey formula, which says that five per cent of the sexually active males in a country are permanently practicing homosexuals. Projected figures indicate that India will have around 2.3 million men alone who have sex with men. Gays argue that the law gives policemen the excuse to harass, assault and even blackmail them. When Debonair magazine conducted a survey in 1991 among 1424 male respondents, nearly 37 per cent said they had had sex with men while 8 per cent said that their first sexual encounter had been with a man. The same year, a survey of four lakh people in Calcutta revealed that two per cent of the city’s population was gay while 160 of the 22, 000 women respondents admitted that they were involved in lesbian relationships. Another study conducted in Kerala read out at the World Sexology Congress in 1985 said that nine per cent of adult males in Kerala were practicing homosexuals.

Frontlist: Your work sits at the intersection of gender, class, and media representation. When we speak of queer narratives in India, do we risk centering only urban, upper-caste, English-speaking voices? How do we ensure the stories we celebrate during Pride are truly intersectional?

Shoma: The answer is simple. It is easier to access the urban, educated, middle-class masses to get their stories because those who live in semi-urban areas, villages and hamlets are panicky about going “open” because they are scared of being thrown out by their immediate families and boys or girls, they have nowhere to go. I have actually watched a shocking film of two young girls who were charred to death allegedly by their own parents for fear of social ostracism.Even the police is shown as very cruel to the girls during the investigation into their deaths.

The seeds of hate in addition to society that has ghettoized the LGBT community as the “Other” is reinforced by the legal statute the credit for which lies squarely on the shoulders of Lord Macaulay, who drafted Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 1883. Much of the legal curbs were drawn from King James Bible where Leviticus warned, “Thou Shalt Not Sleepeth with a Man as Thou Sleepeth with a Woman.” The Code reads thus:

“Whosoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life or imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years or liable to fine.”

Frontlist: As someone who has spent four decades documenting stories that the mainstream overlooked, what does it feel like to watch certain narratives queer, feminist, Dalit slowly move from the margins toward visibility? Is visibility alone enough, or does it risk becoming a new form of containment?

Shoma: There are just too many things happening right through the world including at home which almost ensures that marginal identities like the Dalit and the Queer will never get more visibility than it already is getting. But of course, things are looking up in many ways that reveals a tendency across the Indian and even International media to focus towards stories surrounding these identities with a humane perspective and NOT with antipathy.

Frontlist: Your scholarship has engaged with Freud's ideas on fluid gender roles and bisexuality as innate. How do you think Indian literature and film have reckoned or failed to reckon with the fluidity of identity, particularly at a time when legal frameworks like the post-377 world are still being negotiated in lived experience?

Shoma: “Homosexuality is a part of the human experience. Anthropologists have found that homosexuality existed among primitive tribal cultures. It is not as if modern society has created it. One has to accept it rather than look at it as normal or abnormal. As a doctor I would look at it more from the point of view of human suffering. Homosexuals are made to suffer because of the prejudice. There is nothing wrong with them,” says psychiatrist Dr. Dayal Nihalani. He adds that on a scale with heterosexuality on one end and homosexuality on the other, 70 per cent would fall at the heterosexual end. “But most people have the capacity to be aroused by either sex. It is our cultural conditioning that makes us feel it is wrong since homosexuality is still stigmatised in our country. Most of us will not allow ourselves to get aroused while the rest would not even entertain the idea,” he sums up.

Around more than a decade ago, the US National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Biochemistry came up with strong evidence of homosexuality being partly genetic. This theory got a boost when American biologist Simon LeVay claimed that a tiny part of the brain of homosexual men is more like that in women. This brain part is located in that area of the brain that regulates sexual behaviour. Besides those who are biologically homosexual, homosexuality is said to develop among people who are forced by circumstance – occupational,

cultural and religious– to live and work in conditions of extreme sexual segregation. Thus, single-sex institutions like prisons, boarding schools, sex-segregated conditions of living, often lead to homosexuality among men and women.

Frontlist: If a young queer writer or filmmaker in India came to you today asking how to tell a story that claims space without compromise without softening it for palatability or packaging it for a festival audience what would you tell them?

Shoma: I am NOT, repeat not a filmmaker at all. Besides, my age, 82, somehow stops me from advising or suggesting filmmakers of today how to make films on the queer identity as there are many youngsters who are already going about it the right way. It is a tremendous struggle to make a film on alternate sexual identities. Specially in the Indian cultural ambience where heterogeneous relationships across communities, regions, languages, faith and education have been the rule for thousands of years. None of our epics, have hinted at same-sex relationships ever.

In October 2003, Queering Bangalore became the first public film festival in Bangalore focussing entirely on queer rights. Featured at the festival were award-winning documentaries and features, commended for their portrayal of life stories and issues facing lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, hijras,kothis and others identifying as queer.

The brochure went on to state, “At a time when we are surrounded by shackling definitions of the ideal family, ideal husband, wife, daughterin-law, it is very challenging to recognize and highlight these alternatives inherent in our society, specially through mass entertainment media like cinema” states the press release of the Queer Film Festival organized jointly by Pedestrian Pictures, Scorus and Swabhava Trust, three NGOs committed to different agendas but united in this space. This happened 22 years ago and today, all metro cities organize Queer Film Festivals almost annually.

Today, the short film format with young directors are going across the world making some wonderful films featuring the queer identity and queer relationships. Among fictions films is Onir’s My Brother Nikhil (2005) which explores the collapsing world of a talented swimmer Nikhil, when he is diagnosed as HIV Positive and is thrown out of his swimming group. His once loving parents throw him out and the only solace he finds is in his elder sister and his male partner Nigel, who stand by him through his struggle to survive in an unfriendly and unsympathetic world.

In literature, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Shobha De’s Starry Nights have touched upon the homosexual mindset. Films like Sholay and Subah have subtly acknowledged the presence of the gay and the lesbian psyche much before Fire made it to the Indian screen. Bolder statements came across in Rahul Rawail’s Mast Kalandar and K. R. Reddy’s Veeru Dada. Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Mondo Meyer Upakhyan has three prostitutes openly state that disgusted with men, they might become each other’s lovers in course of time. Mahesh Dattani’s play, On A Muggy Night in Mumbai, premiered in Mumbai in 1998, describes the anguish of men who love men, especially if they are married and also lead heterosexual lives. Art dealer and critic Ashish Balram Nagpal made a film based on a homosexual pair called Adhura while Cassell published Thadani’s Sakhiyani, a book on lesbianism, in 1996.Rajit Kapur and Rahul Bose did an intense play with homosexual suggestions called Are There Tigers in the Congo more than a decade ago. In his autobiographical work Trying to Grow, Firdaus Kanga has written about growing up gay in India. Celebrated author Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) who was convicted for homosexuality was publicly rehabilitated some years ago. His statue has been installed in Trafalgar Square bearing the inscription: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Frontlist: After 34 books and a lifetime of watching, critiquing, and championing stories what is the queer or marginalised Indian story that you feel is still waiting to be told? The one that cinema, literature, and media have collectively looked away from?

Shoma: Right now, I am happy with things as they are what with very young directors across India are coming out with some wonderful films on the queer identity and queer relationships and are gathering accolades and awards right across the globe.

Indian cinema, mainstream and slightly off-mainstream, regional and Bollywood is reflecting the change from total rejection to total acceptance by shedding social inhibitions on expressing sexual desires both in the case of heterosexual and homosexual relationships on screen. The stereotypes, the clichés, the lampooning and the satirizing of gay and lesbian identities are fading away with time, to mirror the acceptance of the ‘other’ as just another – one of us.