PAPER TITLE

Chandni Bahar: Body, Performance, Space and Censorship

PAPER PRESENTER NALINI KANNEGAL MASCARENHAS  (Bangalore University)

PAPER ABSTRACT

Ankur’s choice was a popular Hindi film song, and his performance mimicked the actress’s every move. He embodied the titillating actress with sensual movements and clothes inspired by her costume.

The complexity of the issue surfaced when ‘liberal’ students decided to ask Ankur, who had already transformed into Ankur the performer, to change into Ankur the ‘acceptable’ gay artiste.

The body, the clothes and the representation stood challenged in the minds of the assessors. The assumed power of the students censored the process to make the performance “sufficiently” acceptable for an audience, overwhelmed by their social, cultural and political preconceptions, amidst formed identities of predetermined, mediated, gender norms.

The performance took place at ‘Chandni Bahar’ (’Chandni Bar’ is a landmark Hindi language film from 2001 directed by Madhur Bandarkar. It tells the story of a small-town girl who is sold to one of Mumbai’s local dance bars, following her life and its tribulations as she crosses paths with the underbelly of Mumbai and the police. The film was one of the first realistic portrayals of Mumbai dance bars. Chandni Bahar was named after this film, in the spirit of the popular culture project that it set out to be). This cocktail bar was open to all visitors of the fair (The Faculty of Fine Arts of the Maharaja Sayyajirao University, Baroda, is one of India’s more progressive institutions known for its liberal atmosphere and radical intelligentsia. In a radical move, the MA students of the Art History Department organized live dance performances of gay artistes in their 2003 biannual fair.)

The paper focuses on a debate that gained momentum among the guardians of the university: the students whose assumed liberal selves adopted a censorship role which chimed with the conservative conventions of sexual discourse, transforming performers into objectified, analyzable bodies.

Challenging and reassessing the intervention, the presenter tries to address the questions of the self and the assumed other; the politics of the body, its representation and the issues of gay identity, performance and space. This radical project was mounted on the premises of a university, and this very fact disputes the belief that the merging of the classroom and the world outside takes place on real territory rather than in a hypothetical sphere.

The course and the outcome of the performance raise the question of how its (mis)reading and misconstruing interestingly opens a dialogue aimed at assessing the reasons behind the criminalization of sexual minorities in India, where homosexual intercourse has remained outlawed to this day (Indian Penal Code, Article 377 – introduced in 1860 – Of Unnatural Offences).

PANEL Queer Performances 2