Queer Gaze is a monthly column where Prathyush Parasuraman examines traces of queerness in cinema and streaming — intended or unintended, studied or unstudied, reckless or exciting.
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The singer Girija Devi would often say about the late Birju Maharaj, “I can’t think of any woman dancer who can be a better Radha.”
The scholar Yatindra Mishra echoes this sentiment, “Mard hoke, nayika bhava ke saath, streeyon ke roothna, manana, chidh jaana, sharmana, aankh neeche karna, sankoch mein padh jaana, hairat dikhana — jo ek typical heroine-oriented feeling hai — woh sab Kathak ke bhaav mein dikhana… Birju Maharaj ka kamaal tha.” That his excellence lay in his capacity to express the “feminine” — in coyness, reluctance, annoyance, shame, indulgence, and shock.
Kathak, a dance form that came to a boil during the Vaishnavite Bhakti movement in the 15th-16th century, bolstered by the Mughal courts where it was both patronised and performed, trickled into the 20th and 21st centuries with an uneasy contradiction that was best expressed in Vishwaroopam. In the 2013 film, Kamal Haasan is introduced as a Kathak guru, with the song ‘Unnai Kaanadhu Naan’ choreographed by Birju Maharaj [for which he won the National Award]. Haasan’s gait, reflective of Birju Maharaj, is expressly effeminate, his wrist amply limp, easily able to inhabit moments in the song that require the feminine lasya or grace — he calls out to Krishna, performing anger, frustration, and affection as his Radha, removing bangles and necklaces in lovelorn sickness, and then holding the hand to the heart in joy at being united. Andrea Jeremiah, who plays one of his students, becomes the Krishna to his Radha, surprising him by grasping him from the back.
We find out later that Haasan’s character is a R&AW agent who is using this effeminate gait as a mask that calls attention to his unthreatening weakness. When this reveal happens in an action sequence where he turns the enemy to pulp, the shock is both of the characters around him and us. Grace and bravery are now seen as two ends of an uneasy binary that maps itself neatly onto the gender divide.
Birju Maharaj’s name — Brijmohan — was given to him as a gesture. He was the only boy born in the hospital on a wintry day in 1937. One of the men commented that he is like ‘Brij ke Mohan’ (Krishna), surrounded by his gopis. The name and the mythical allure of it stuck. He would, over the years, spin this gesture on its head, using the liminal space between the mythical lovers, Radha and Krishna, as his camping ground. [It also must be noted that disturbing allegations regarding Birju’s Maharaj’s alleged sexual abuse have been made.]
Part of this ease with the performer’s shape-shifting across genders belongs to the tradition itself. Like Bharatnatyam and Odissi, Kathak too is performed with ekaharya abhinaya — where Kathak performer and scholar Purnima Shah in her paper Transcending Gender in the Performance of Kathak notes, “[A] single Kathak performer portrays all the characters within a selected episode, enacting one, impersonating another, effortlessly switching gender portrayals as the roles appear in the narrative without any extraneous use of costume, makeup, props or technical effects.” She ties this to the philosophical idea of non-dualism or Advaita. Indeed, many Vaishnavite strains believe that Radha is not separate from Krishna but is actually the rapturous, blissful part of him, which he cleaves off, creating a separate person to romantically joust with.
At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, there is an 18th century Kangra painting, where Krishna and Radha are walking by the Jumna [Yamuna], lit gray in the creamy moonlight, after having exchanged clothes — what we might call today "cross dressing." A Call Me By Your Name gesture of love — take what is mine and make it yours. Male members of the Sakhi Bhava sect of Vaishnavism even dress as women as an act of devotion. Vrindavana Sthala Purana is abound with stories of Shiva — the rugged masculine ideal — dressing up as a woman in Mathura to be regaled in Krishna’s Raas-Leela.
Swerve to the present moment, and think of how pop-culture markers of cross-dressing from ‘Kajra Mohabbat Wala’ to Jackie Shroff in Radhe are often a gesture of humour. We laugh. Or we are shocked. But what are we laughing at, shocked by?
An ease with fluidity is often perplexed by rigid binaries. Dance becomes a battleground for this. For example, in Levan Akin’s burning, buoyant, queer Georgian film And Then We Danced (2019), the craft and tradition of dance is at the center of both the character’s sexual identity, and also the country’s masculine ideal. Tbilisi’s National Georgian Ensemble in the film was trying to revive the Georgian ballet as the idealised heterosexual space, though completely cleaved off eros [“There is no sex in Georgian dance”], alongside the Georgian identity which was crumbling in the aftermath of the 20th century. This is the kind of ballet that has folded within it centuries worth of folk dance. Masculinity needs to be palpable. Chemistry needs to be minimal.
So when the male dancer, then, is associated with lasya — grace — it becomes a gendered, sexualised idea of grace that makes it easy, even unconsciously so, to consider them queer. It is in this context that Birju Maharaj and Odissi exponent Kelucharan Mohapatra’s enticing, shape-shifting grace becomes all the more pronounced. For these were men, married, with family, who also had the audacity of grace. The charm to move into and out of genders under the soft spotlight.
Scholars have noted that the gender binary was never so rigid. Madhavi Menon, in her book Infinite Variety: A History Of Desire In India, notes that in ancient Indian texts, “Both men and women … used to walk around with red lips, eyes darkened with kohl, hammered hands and feet, and a red mark on their foreheads.” Variants of the word “beautiful” were, in fact, used for both men and women.
In a world where we use markers to assert gender — the length of hair on the head, facial hair on the face, the existence of breasts, make-up — how do we interpret gender when the same body is producing both the masculine and the feminine? Usually in Kathak, there is a palta, or a circular movement to signal transition between characters, where the male stance is usually erect and broad, while the female stance is relaxed and drawn inwards. But what happens in that transitional moment? Who is the dancer then?
If we move back a few more centuries to Chalukya sculptures in Aihole, we see the most fiercely masculine gods — Veerabhadra, Bhairava — standing in Tribhanga, where the body bends at the knees, hips, and neck, a pose of grace, a gait that is considered feminine today. Their hands are on their hips. It is a cruel joke, really, for I remember I used to stand like that as a child, a habit that I would hack at, over time, because what came easily to my body was not what was easily understood by those around me. I remember conversations with friends where we would zoom into each of my gestures and try to refashion it in the stifling shade of the time. These were the years before metrosexuality. The broad chest was preferred. The clenched fist. It is easy to wonder, looking at these sculptural marvels, these ancient texts, these paintings tinted saffron and green, when did things change so rapidly, so rabidly?
Prathyush Parasuraman is a critic and journalist, who writes a weekly newsletter on culture, literature, and cinema at prathyush.substack.com.
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