Thank you, queer icon
NEW DELHI: For Delhi-based poet Akhil Katyal, Sridevi was a childhood icon. “Her’s was the first song I ever danced to. She was camp and excessive on camera, she did comedy and googly eyes. Her femininity was not just beautiful,” he said.
He is not the only one. Many among India’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community said the actor was an icon whose memorable dance, comedy and acting sequences on screen represented a freedom they were denied. “Sridevi represented a freedom that many LGBT people were denied. In her dance, costume and acting, a new imagination was opened up for some. For a moment, you could be glamorous and sexy even without the clothes or stardom, which your family or society denied you or you couldn’t afford,” said Dhiren Borisa, a doctoral candidate at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Sridevi starred in more than 200 films but some of her roles remained etched in the minds of many LGBT people. These include her iconic dance sequence Hawa Hawaii from Mr India, her serpent dance in Nagina, and her electric moves in Chandni. “I remember as a child thinking how Chandni was so full of pink and was greatly inspired, at a time when wearing pink was considered unmanly and even forbidden for many of us,” said Raja, a Delhi-based lawyer who uses one name. Sridevi’s untimely demise also shocked many people, for whom she represented a break from the everyday violence of being queer. “Every time I saw her on screen dancing like I never could, I felt a surge of happiness. It lit up my life, otherwise filled with violence,” said a transgender woman from West Bengal.
For Delhi University professor Debolina Dey, Sridevi displayed a versatility that few of her contemporaries did. “Sridevi’s trilogy of double roles — Chalbaaz, Lamhe and Khuda Gawah — was part of my growing up years in the 90s. She could be funny and fierce at the same time, do action and chiffon sarees with equal ease. She showed the victim could also be the rebel, she could be as feminine and she could be fierce on a horse in a movie like Khuda Gawah.”
But building an icon also has it pitfalls for women, one that Katyal says men should be more aware. “After all, directors have locked women in only two roles, beautiful or tragic. We should stop making her a queer icon because it doesn’t let women be anything else.”