‘Papa, I am gay, please, love me’: Politics of censorship and queer representation in Bollywood

Abstract

The article explores the problematic issues that arise between Bollywood films projecting homosexual relationships and the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) filtering their contents. Queer popular cultural representations in India face challenges to get release certification because of their inherently debatable contents including ‘non-normative’ sexual relationships which are largely identified as a potential threat to the existing heteronormative, majoritarian culture. By giving reference to two queer films, Unfreedom and Angry Indian Goddesses, this article explores the politics of censorship in the light of Foucauldian power relations and the discourse of knowledge production. I argue that by proscribing representations of queer sexualities in films, the CBFC has acted on behalf of the state in decelerating the formation and proliferation of a counter cultural movement to balance homophobia discursively and to peddle majoritarian power politics, and thus the notion of heterosexuality as compulsory form of sexual behaviour is popularized and consolidated in Indian society.