The Romance of Siblinghood in Bombay Cinema

Abstract

Bombay cinema endows non-sexual relationships, such as friendship and siblinghood, with a passionate intensity that equals that of sexual relationships, thus resisting a complete takeover of the emotional realm by heterosexual coupledom. Choosing sibling, friend or community over a spouse need not be seen only as retrogressive self-sacrifice; it can also be seen as choosing stronger, longer-standing relationships over newer, more flimsy ones. Films such as Naam, Bombai ka Babu and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham explore the joys and costs of different types of romantic feeling, many of which are not sexual, but are just as powerful.

Keywords:

• Sibling
• Bombay cinema
• adoption
• Naam
• Bombai ka Babu
• Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Shohini Ghosh, Jyotika Virdi and the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

Notes

  ¹ Sangita Gopal, ‘Sentimental Symptoms: The Films of Karan Johar and Bombay Cinema’, in Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari Pandharipande (eds), Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation and Diaspora (London: Anthem Press, 2011), pp.15–34, 20; Gopal summarises this position before making her own more complex argument.

  ² Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp.87–8.

  ³ Of this film and Chal Mere Bhai (2000), Shohini Ghosh remarks that ‘the implicit homoeroticism of these films is evident not only to queer subcultures but even to sections of the mainstream press’. See Shohini Ghosh, ‘Queer Pleasures for Queer People: Film, Television and Queer Sexuality in India’, in Ruth Vanita (ed.), Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (New York: Routledge, 2002), p.209.

  ⁴ Thus, the early nineteenth-century poets, Insha and Rangin, became brothers by exchanging turbans. See Ruth Vanita, Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry 1780–1870 (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2012).

  ⁵ Frances Burney, Evelina (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp.314–5.

  ⁶ Thanks to Shohini Ghosh for bringing this film to my attention.

  ⁷ A rakhi is a symbolic thread that a sister ties on a brother's wrist in Hindu families.

  ⁸ A chawl is a kind of lower-middle-income neighbourhood typical of Mumbai, characterised by overcrowding. These were houses where factory workers were accommodated in colonial times.

  ⁹ A gurudwara is a Sikh temple.

¹⁰ An aarti is a Hindu prayer.

¹¹ Vinay Lal, ‘The Impossibility of the Outsider in Modern Hindi Film’, in Ashis Nandy (ed.), The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.228–59.

¹² Patrick Colm Hogan, Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition and Cinematic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), pp.191–2.