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The Nachya in Natrang: queer(ing)

bodies in representations of Tamasha in
Marathi cinema
a
Shalmalee Palekar
a
Discipline of English and Cultural Studies, University of Western
Australia , Perth , Australia
Published online: 15 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Shalmalee Palekar (2012) The Nachya in Natrang: queer(ing) bodies in
representations of Tamasha in Marathi cinema, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies,
26:6, 859-870, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2012.731260

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2012.731260

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 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Vol. 26, No. 6, December 2012, 859870

The Nachya in Natrang: queer(ing) bodies in representations of

Tamasha in Marathi cinema
Shalmalee Palekar*

Discipline of English and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

In this paper, I read the key character of the Nachya (effeminate male performer) in
representations of Tamasha in the Marathi film Natrang, in order to interrogate a
productive ambivalence in this character one that is simultaneously heteronormative
and queerly transgressive in its regional Indian context. The Nachya is coded as
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homosexual in Marathi cinema, through his exaggeratedly effeminate appearance,

gestures and high-pitched singing voice. He traditionally functions as a comic, wrong
body by emphasizing the difference between real and fake femininity. However, he
also accrues subversive value and serves as a queer, cultural point of identification.
Therefore, by focusing on Tamasha song and dance sequences (specifically, the Lavani
as a site of Marathi cinemas sex and gender play), I argue that representation which is
normative in the context of the films production and target mainstream audience can
be reclaimed and re-coded through the lens of what could be termed a dynamic, queer,
regional viewing practice.

Film synopsis
Natrang (Trans. Theatre Artiste 2010) is a Marathi language film written and directed by
Ravi Jadhav, based on a novel of the same name by Anand Yadav. Winning a national
award for best Marathi film, it was critically and commercially successful (Screen India
2010), especially impressive for a film made in Marathi rather than the much more
mainstream/popular Hindi. Natrang is set in the early 1970s in a small village in the state
of Maharashtra. Guna (Atul Kulkarni), the central character, is a farm labourer in financial
trouble who decides to set up a Tamasha1 troupe along with his friend and mentor,
Pandoba. Pandoba insists that the project cannot be a success unless it has a Nachee.2 After
a difficult search, Pandoba finds Naina (Sonalee Kulkarni), who agrees to dance for the
company on the condition that it has a Nachya,3 for comedic effect and novelty. As no
one is willing to take on the role, Guna ultimately agrees to do it himself. He is coached in
the role by Naina and undergoes an extreme physical transformation to convincingly play
the part.
Economic realities force Guna to take his show on the road where it continues to be
successful. However, the troupe gets caught in a power struggle between two local
politicians who wish to use its success for political mileage. In a violent climax, rival
political gangs attack Gunas play, torch the stage and kidnap him. Guna is then gang-
raped in a correction of his insult to one of the politicians. The shock of the rape and the
attendant shame of being completely un-manned leads him to quit the business but he
returns to a locked house. His family has abandoned him. So Guna returns to his stage

*Email: shalmalee.palekar@uwa.edu.au

ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online

q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2012.731260
http://www.tandfonline.com
 860 S. Palekar

career, where he is joined only by Naina. The film ends with an aged Guna winning a
lifetime achievement award at a major awards ceremony.

Introduction
This paper aims to unpack the intense layering and queering of meaning around the
Nachya character in Natrang. However, my analysis rests on significant cultural axes that,
in a marvellous play of intertextuality, are used self-consciously and strategically by the
filmmaker. They contain overt clues and embedded, underlying ideas that are reflected and
refracted throughout the film. The paper begins with an explication of these cultural axes,
focusing first on theatre and film, and then on the various identity markers through which
the film invites us to view the action and Guna himself. The paper will outline their queer
theoretical significance and the discussion will then focus on the intertextuality and
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deliberately queer potential of their use in Natrang, where the very constructedness of
categories of identity is foregrounded.

Theatre, film and Tamasha

The theatre, specifically the folk form of Tamasha, is a framing device foregrounded in the
film. Its traditions and specific theatrical practices, the way men and women operated
within its bounds and, specially, the figure of the Nachya, are essential to understanding
the positionality and intertextuality of the film.
Scholars of Indian theatre such as Singh (2010) and Naregal (2010) have located the
decline of rural folk forms like the Tamasha within colonialist discourses of indigenous
theatre as . . . an uncivilised activity. (Singh 2010, 16). The increasing influence of the
cinema was also a factor, and Singh (2010) points out the dialectic that began operating
between the forms:
Cinema had been one of the mediums where simultaneously the appropriation and othering
of popular performance had been taking place. It drew its raw materials from oppressed
caste artists of popular forms and converted it into saleable goods and took it back to the
audiences in the towns at double the price . . . Many films constructed the popular theatre
dancer as the repository of native, wild and rustic sexuality to be tamed and reformed by the
hero (always upper caste). (Singh 2010, 21)
Tamasha and, to a degree, its representation in Marathi cinema, was indeed, as Hansen
elsewhere astutely maintains, a
cultural space that valorised cross-gender role play and its associated spectatorial pleasures
. . . Theatrical transvestism not only enabled actors to transform their own gender identities; it
sustained and eventually reworked viewing practices predicated on interest in transgender
identification and the homoerotic gaze. (2001, 59)
Other such cultural spaces include the Parsi4 theatrical female impersonator that has
left a particular kind of trace on the conventions of Marathi cinema, as well as the prolific
film industry of Bollywood a presence in any viewing and reading of Natrang. While it
may be argued that Marathi cinema is a different beast from the mammoth industry that
grew out of it, it is undeniable that the same influences especially Parsi, Gujarati and
Marathi theatre have been key shaping forces for both. Geographical confluence is also a
factor. Bollywood, of course, resides in Mumbai and the production of Marathi cinema is
also centred there. I contend that there is enough continuity in Marathi and Hindi
cinematic tropes, remakes and crossover filmmakers and stars, to be able to analyse
common elements, while rigorously scrutinizing regional specificities and differences.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 861

So the theoretical frames that scholars like Shohini Ghosh (2002) have brought to bear on
Bollywood are relevant to my analysis that queers Marathi film waters, as it were.

Queering identities in an Indian context

There is a matrix of identities constituent in any idea of male homosexuality in India.
Overarching identity labels such as homosexual, gay or men who have sex with men
(MSM) are not useful in the Indian context, as these terms are not totalizing identity
categories by any means (Khan 2000; Vanita and Kidwai 2000; Reddy 2006). Rather, a
variety of terms kothi, panthi, dost, laundebaaz to name only a few all have their
unique cultural connotations and markers that are mobilized in specific ways within and
without the loose communities they designate. The kothi and the hijra the latter
frequently framed as a third gender in academic inquiries (Reddy 2006) are particularly
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significant in my analysis of Natrang. They are part of the matrix of identities that Guna
must navigate, yet these categories are in themselves far from stable. Articulating the
constitution of these idioms kothi and hijra both in terms of self-identification and as
socially applied categories (especially pejoratively in the case of hijra), is essential to
understand exactly what lines or boundaries Guna transgresses, how his movement
between them becomes the threatening gesture the film depicts and how crucial is the
process of self-fashioning Guna undertakes as the Nachya.
To characterize the Nachya merely as a man who impersonates women on stage is too
simplistic a clubbing together of very different representations and histories. There is a
much more complex confluence of cultural knowledge around queerness. Clearly,
identities such as the hijra and the kothi were already in circulation and did have a
significant impact on the evolution of characters like the Nachya, as did older forms,
including the classic Marathi Tamasha films that were being reinvented in new ones,
including Bollywood characterizations of the effeminate man. Thus, Guna (and the film)
present their audiences with a crucial question Who/What are you? which cannot be
interrogated without understanding the specific regional contexts of MSM in India.
Muraleedharan articulates the particular difficulty faced by scholars approaching the
category of MSM in India. He stresses, citing Halperin (2005), that gay/lesbian
identities, as they exist in some of the Western metropolises of today, are a very
contemporary phenomenon rather than being universal, timeless and stable. He also
points out that comparable identities have emerged in metropolitan urban spaces in
contemporary India, but that these are not necessarily seen in non-metropolitan
locations. He points out, however, that the seeming absence of such identities elsewhere
in India does not in any way indicate the irrelevance of queer politics to those regions.
(Muraleedharan 2005, 76).
Murleedharans position arises from the challenge that Vanita and Kidwai (2000)
issued to the Western-centric conception of homosexuality as they attempted to disprove
the argument that same-sex desire was a category invented by nineteenth-century
European sexologists. They pointed to the existence in pre-colonial and ancient India of
complex discourses around same-sex love and also the use, in more than one language,
of names, terms, and codes to distinguish homoerotic love and those inclined to it (Vanita
and Kidwai 2000, 10). As Parmesh Shahani points out, this was an important intervention
as it made a space for these ancient discourses . . . from which a large number of non-gay-
identified sexual minorities in contemporary India . . . derive their sense of identity, and
this identity is very different from that of the urban gay identity that attracts attention
(2008, 153).
 862 S. Palekar

It is instructive in this context that the Naz foundation (an organization involved in
HIV education) maintains that:
In South Asia . . . often sexual relationships are framed by gender roles, power
relationships, poverty, caste, class, tradition and custom, hierarchies of one sort or another.
Here for many men/males we have gender identities, not sexual identities. [Thus MSM]
. . . is about recognising that there are many frameworks within which men/males have
sex with men/males, many different self identities, many different contexts of behaviour.
(Khan 2000)
Khan also argues that the most visible of these MSM networks are men who identify as
kothis (meaning they are positioned as not men who are sexually penetrated), and men
who identify as panthis (real men who penetrate kothis). These roles enable panthis to
maintain their manliness and blend into (hetero)normative societal structures. For self-
identified kothis then, the distinction between themselves and their male partners is based
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on gender identity and not sexual identity.5 (Khan 2004)

As a note of caution to any possible totalizing of categories, Reddy complicates this
position in her influential analysis, With Respect to Sex (2006). She contends that:
. . . while performative aspects of bodily praxis are extremely important in theorizations of
gender difference . . . the differential axes of kothi identity(s) preclude an easy understanding
of gender difference in terms of sexual performance alone. (2006, 45, emphasis added)
In terms of coding or identification processes within and outside these signifying terms,
Akshay Khanna also points out that kothi as an identifying category is one that has
emerged partly out of an effort to document the body of the penetrated male (2009, 49).
Khanna maintains that this engendering is not a translation or a reading of what the
body offers up, but rather a leap across a huge ontological disjuncture of a particularly
gendered embodiment into an epidemiological category, a sexuality type . . . (2009, 49).
The coding of suggestive behaviour is a key idea here, even as the stability of that
identification process is questioned. This formulation is significant as the performativity
of sex/gender/sexuality is distinctively and clearly foregrounded in Natrangs depiction
of the transformation of Guna into the Nachya. This transformation is frequently
associated in the film with the term hijra, used pejoratively to describe what Guna has
become.
Reddys formulation is productive here and she maintains that:
Hijras are . . . easily identified in public places [and] are stigmatized figures, marginal
mockeries of a normal Indian man (and woman). But, like many other marginalized cultural
identities, they embody and engender much of the ambivalence that surrounds issues of Indian
sexuality and, for that reason, remain a potent and enduring cultural identity in the Indian
universe . . . (2006, 55 8)

A queer lens to view Indian cinemas

The universe alluded to above includes cinema as a cultural identity production ground.
In a cogent critique of academic queer-ies into the Indian film industries, Muraleedharan
points out that, unfortunately, some people [have] consolidate[d] their assumption that
Indian cinema is fundamentally addressing straight [sic ] viewers. He also points out
that an otherwise useful critique such as Gayatri Gopinath (2005) in Impossible Desires is
sited in a queer diasporic framework, who argues in this and an earlier work, that
cinematic images which in their originary locations simply reiterate conventional
nationalist and gender ideologies may, in a South Asian diasporic context, be fashioned to
become the very foundation of a queer transnational culture (Gopinath 2000, 284).
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 863

However, the focus on the transnational and diasporic is an uneasy one for him and others,
and leads to asking astute questions such as:
Are we then merely inscribing and then reading marginal desires (which appear not to
signify for the rest of humanity) on and of a seemingly innocent screen that is sincerely
catering to heterosexual instincts? Is same-sex desire fundamentally foreign to Indian
cinemas arbitrations with pleasure? Is the pleasure that self-identified queer [non-diasporic,
non transnational, Indian] viewers seem to derive from Indian cinema fundamentally
superfluous and, by all means, unintentional? (Muraleedharan 2005, 72)
Muraleedharan goes further in opening up methodological approaches to queer film
studies in an Indian context, saying:
. . . queer empowers a mode of enquiry that refuses the grid of sexual/non-sexual divisions in
conceiving pleasures. In other words, it repudiates conventions that classify pleasures as
innocent and sexual or even corporeal and spiritual, highlighting zones of fluidity and
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blur such distinctions, in order to generate fresh perceptions of human intimacies and
corporeality. (2005, 71)
This analysis can be fruitfully applied to certain types of Marathi cinema as well. Indeed,
there are a remarkable number of zones of fluidity that function as liminal spaces
within the narrative of Natrang. Crucially, I argue that the film deliberately foregrounds a
queer audience within it, depicts a particularly queer portrayal of the Nachya and recognizes
the figure of the Nachya as a generator of queer eroticism. It therefore disrupts any
normative formulations of the natural equivalencies between correct bodies and
correct desire.

Song sequences queer significance

In an interesting analysis of Bollywood cinema and queerness, Shohini Ghosh maintains
that:
Popular films enjoy an iconic status among gay and lesbian subcultures in India even though
explicit references to homosexuality have been largely absent from mainstream commercial
films. A spectators engagement with any cultural text is complex and is negotiated variously
through a multiplicity of identities. [For example], it has often been suggested that queer
people have a special relationship with cinema . . . (2002, 207)
Shahanis analysis of the Mumbai gay scene also lends support to this formulation.
In his part memoir, part analysis of two queer Bollywood short films Bomgay and
The Pink Mirror (Gulabi Aaina), the first and only portrayal of Indian drag queens)
Shahani intersperses his critiques with anecdotes that fade in and out with Bollywood-style
flashbacks. In the first flashback, he recounts his experience at a club he has been hesitant
to enter in Mumbai:
. . . Why was I so scared to come here all these years? Needless to say, the dances are
spectacular theyre all my favourite mujra6 songs. The crowd is going crazy, hooting and
whistling with every swirl of hips, every lowered glance, every twitch of the lip. I recognize
the movements and mannerisms . . . It is mesmerizing the vocabulary of the erotic dance.
I feel that I have always known it and I have, in a way, having grown up on Bollywood.
I suddenly realise that this is my first real contact with Indian drag queens I have seen quite a
few in the US while on vacation, but here, the connection is much more immediate. There are
my songs, my music, my people . . . (2008, 149, emphasis added)
The moment of recognition here is powerful. A self-identified gay man, seemingly hesitant
to participate in obviously queered spaces, suddenly discovers his community through a
language he has always lived within but never recognized the queer potentiality of the
erotic song sequence.
 864 S. Palekar

I use the term song sequence very consciously here as it is not just the music and the
lyrics that have come together to provide this sublime moment of recognition but also
intimately familiar movements and mannerisms. The swirl of the hip, the lowered
glance, the twitch of the lip are all instantly recognisable gestures, which have gone
through an intense accrual of meaning through the years. The Bollywood song sequence is
a uniquely powerful location of cultural meaning creation and popular memory. For
example, a gesture made up of the lowering of the face and a graceful raising of the hand to
the brow is not only a customary greeting of a courtesan dancer to her audience, but also a
homage to the ada (beauty/attitude of grace) of legendary actresses such as Rekha, whose
portrayal of the most famous Indian courtesan of fiction, Umrao Jaan, has transcended
mere details of character and turned into a cultural reference point.
The subversiveness of Natrangs song sequences is mobilized not only by all this queer
multiplicity but also in the songwriters conscious use of the erotic genre of the Lavani.
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Further, these song sequences do not only function within the films narrative but they also
mobilize a variety of other referential features gesturing to mythological references,
cultural practices and gender play. Thus, Shohini Ghoshs (2002) conception of the film
song as a carvinalesque space is particularly informative while looking at Natrang.

Discussion
It is within this unstable and permeable matrix of intersecting definitions and
identifications (self and societal, and cultural) that Gunas physical transformation and
attendant psychological journey is located. Clearly, when talking about the figure of the
Nachya as homosexual, it is crucial to understand which identities at multiple levels are
being put into play by the narrative. The Nachya is firstly considered an effeminate man
and therefore seems to be performatively coded as a kothi. This coding/recognition within
the MSM subcultural relationships/dynamics portrayed in the narrative seems to function
as a means of recognition, expectation and finally negotiation for sexual contact.
This particular element is vital when opening up the queer potentialities, as the films
narrative implicitly recognizes an already present queer audience of the Nachya. In an
inversion of the classic Bollywood trope of the genre, and of the traditional Marathi film
Lavani the nautch-girl who must seduce the wealthy client it is Guna (while
consciously performing as the Nachya) who is Pandobas ace when it comes to currying
financial/political favour with Shinde. The entire scene is explicitly detailed and follows
the script of the usual dance of seduction played out in a heterosexual context countless
times in these film traditions. The gesture of offering of pan to a favoured patron is a
classic gesture of the tawaif, or the courtesan, and the fact that Guna enacts it as the
Nachya is extremely crucial. In the film narrative, this bleed over from the onstage persona
to behaviour expected by other characters offstage leads us to the recognition that while
the figure of the Nachya ostensibly functions primarily as a comic figure in the world of
Tamasha as a not-woman and therefore a stock figure of caricature this expectation
works very much alongside a recognition of his erotic potential in the film as a whole.
Relatedly, the figure of the hijra is also a constant presence in the presentation and
more importantly in the reception within the narrative of Gunas transformation. The
Nachya, while on stage, is referred to by the female pronoun, is called Maushi (maternal
aunt in Marathi) and presents parodic markers of femininity such as exaggerated hand
gestures and a particular modulation of the voice. However, there does not seem any
concerted desire to pass as female, as the makeup and costume seems to be lending itself
to gender bending rather than impersonation. There is no foregrounding of the mimetic
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 865

and therefore realistic function of cross-dressing seen in other Indian folk forms. But
rather, the jokes that the Nachya participates in, within the narrative, are predicated
precisely on making the not-right-body visible. For instance, in the second play performed
by the troupe, the humorous exchange between the policeman and the Maushi plays out as
follows:
Policeman: Where were you Maushi?
Maushi: You know . . . I was (giggles coyly)
Policeman: No I dont know! What were you doing?
Maushi: I was . . . I was shaving! (Laughter)
Policeman: You have a beard? But how?
Maushi: I look like my father! (uproarious laughter)
The joke functions on the very recognition that gender markers are unstable. The comedy
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here stems directly from a foregrounding of difference within sameness, much in the same
way that the hijra body is framed. Like that body, however, the disruption caused is
fundamentally dangerous to a patriarchal machinery that must police desire and
representation into normative formulations.
The body of the hijra occupies a particularly contested and unstable space, as it is at
once an embodiment of the sexless/asexual body and a locus of desire by the panthi.
Further, the social unease surrounding the actual body of the hijra seems to come from its
confusion of markers. As Reddy points out, hijras are usually identifiable on the street
and further announce their presence with instantly recognisable clapping gestures and,
when faced with non-compliance to demands for money, threaten an exposure of their
unnatural bodies. The making visible of difference while also enacting femininity is
clearly the source of societal unease. This analytical framework is productive when
looking at the figure of the hijra, the character of Guna, and the connotations that accrue
around his physically changing body. It is precisely those performances that deliberately
expose the constructedness of gender that result in a proliferation of queerness.
For the source of unease around the figure of the hijra seems to focus primarily around
the presence/absence of his/her body and the fact that it is simultaneously outside the
normative in terms of operation and production of queer desire. So also it is clear that
the larger societal interpretation of Gunas transformation, particularly sparked off by the
changes in his physique, is that of a symbolic castration repeatedly articulated in his new
characterization as a hijra. Guna moves from a position not just of masculinity, but of a
clearly defined and impenetrable hypermasculinity as a bodybuilder, to the position of
the slender, penetrable Nachya.
This movement is tracked visually both in performative terms and his physical
presentation. His body, being the clearly defined object of female desire as framed in the
opening song, suddenly becomes unstable as the markers are shown to be largely
performative and changeable. Society, however, demands fixed bodies as functional
units, operating in recognizable ways. Once Guna steps into the role of the Nachya, his
body becomes simultaneously un-manly and so un-fixed and dangerous to the social
order. The stage used by the Tamasha troupe is itself a liminal space in this context,
allowing these figures to exist within its scope. In the film, the plays audience overtly
reacts with laughter but the laughter does not quite defuse the palpable sexual charge that
the presence of the not-man, not-woman body brings with it. Guna, in his self-fashioning,
finds a new mobility and access to power (his seduction of Shinde, the resultant award to
his play, and his consequent rejection of Shindes rival are telling episodes). And in doing
 866 S. Palekar

so, he also destabilizes these fixed hierarchies and must be re-inscripted via rape and
shown his proper place.
Both Shinde and the troupe drummer are framed as manly men, with Shinde
especially framed as very much implicated in the structures of power that have an impact
on Gunas life. It is interesting also to note the different attitudes towards desire that the
two figures exhibit in relation to Guna. While Shinde is clearly framed as the classic
powerful grahak (client) of the dancer/prostitute, the troupes drummer approaches sexual
contact in the frame of mazaa (or fun, another idiom that is frequently used to describe
male same sex encounters in an Indian context). Further, Gunas relationship with Naina is
an interesting site of sexual exchange as well. It may be argued that the relationship
functions as a normalizing trope, assuring the films audience that Guna is indeed actually
heterosexual. However their sexual encounters only happen after his transformation,
which is key here. The eunuch/kothi, by being not-man, is constructed as incapable of
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having sexual relationships with women, hence his/her historical function as guardian of
the harem. This is also in line with the figure of the Nachya who in Tamasha traditionally
comes in to save the woman from the lascivious attention of the policemen. But the
eunuch also carries a homoerotic charge by his/her participation in the inner world of
women that is completely unavailable to men in a traditional Indian context. This
homosociality, with its erotic potential, can also be seen to inform Naina and Gunas
relationship, particularly as she is his guru (teacher/mentor) in the processes of becoming a
woman.

Nachya, film and intertextuality

The category of the Nachya, an already established theatrical role, is being reformulated in
terms of what happens in the movies. When the topic is first broached, the following
conversation occurs:
Naina: There should be a Nachya. Else there is no fun.
Pandoba: Those days are gone. In earlier days when women didnt participate men
used to dress up like females. Is that what youre talking about?
Naina: No. Isnt there a man gesticulating like a female in the movies? We can
do without the mimicry artist but not the Nachya. Then the Tamasha will
be like one in movies and we will draw large crowds. (Emphasis added)
Guna: There are plenty of Tamasha shows without a Nachya.
Yamunabai: And there are plenty that shut down. People come to watch the show only
if you offer them novelty. Forget everything if you dont have a Nachya
It is here in the film that we see a connection and exchange between the urban and the rural
popular imaginations as a product of Bollywood impressions of the queer. We also see
representations of the Lavani in Marathi cinema, being re-circulated within old frames
having their own connotations. The film then is self-reflexively underlining the idea that
any radical break between these two imaginations would be erroneous, as the two frame
and reframe each other.
These Lavani song sequences are especially evocative in opening up decidedly non-
normative formulations of masculinity, leading to a collectively queer, regional viewing
experience. The sequence of Gunas transformation itself forms one of the most interesting
parts of the film and is also the first time Naina and Guna interact with each other for an
extended period. Even without its particularly pleasurable, queer play, the set-up itself is
non-normative from the start, with a young, single woman taking up the more authoritative
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 867

role of the guru and having the freedom to spend long periods of time alone with a man,
seemingly touching and directing him as she pleases. The music is mostly instrumental but
with a heavy percussion beat, perhaps foreshadowing the thunder of the approaching storm
in the narrative, which then fades in to the traditional Lavani dholki.
The sequence charts Gunas transformation painstakingly, from the first clumsy tries to
a gradual perfection of the gestures that tellingly have their own term in Marathi: haav
bhaav. The camera moves from long shots of Guna learning how to behave like a woman
by imitation, to close ups: first of the two hands (of Naina and Guna) repeating the same
classical dance gesture until at last he is as graceful as she, and then moving onto the
movements of neck, waist and hips. The last is especially important as we have seen that
performative markers of the kothi and the hijra also mobilize the lachak (swinging hips).
A highly evocative image here is the shot of Guna framed from the back as he practises his
neck movement. The contrast between the muscled, masculine body and the delicate
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feminine movement of the neck is a delightfully and lovingly crafted image, full of
subversive energy. The film audience, which is embedded in the referentialities of each
gesture, would be immediately aware of the famous courtesans that they call up, as well as
the famous Lavani sequences of older Marathi cinema and that specific intertextuality
only deepens the potential for a queer viewing.
The sequence also follows his physical transformation from the moustachioed,
muscled bodybuilder to the gradually slighter and finally shaved figure of the Nachya.
Indeed, the moment of shaving is obviously crucial, framed almost as a symbolic
castration, something shameful that cannot be witnessed, first by his son and then even by
the audience, as the mirror he is using shatters. From then on, we only see Guna in
fragments, first from the back where he is almost unrecognisable physically, and then as he
builds up the constituent parts of his new persona through make up. His skin is
smoothened, his eyebrows are shaped, his eyes lined with kohl. He is also seen putting on a
necklace, earrings and finally a bindi. It is only then that a new, whole mirror is allowed to
appear, reflecting him as Maushi, the Nachya.
This song sequence foregrounds the performative, as each gesture that makes up the
feminine is elegantly deconstructed as exactly that a series of culturally embedded
gestures and markers. It is a masterful stroke that also introduces the idea of self-
fashioning, something that Guna will continue to attempt through the narrative.
Moving on to the song that comes directly after this sequence, we see Guna and Naina
together for the first time on stage. He is introduced as a Gopi (a milkmaid besotted with
Krishna in the Hindu mythos) and the female pronoun is used but there is no attempt to
really pass. His dance may be seen as purely parodic and a foil to the true eroticism
that is to come with Nainas dance performance. However the audience is shown to be
quite appreciative and while Maushi provokes laughter she also gets her fair share of
catcalls. This foregrounding of the audience and the establishment of the performance as a
primarily male spectacle (Gunas wife is the only woman present and she is shown to be
extremely uncomfortable and to leave) is important, especially in terms of what is to come
in relation to the sexual experiences of Guna as the Nachya. The catcalling queer
audience is already present within the frame, and its implications for viewers are
deliberately heightened.
This is not the first Lavani song performed, as the film opens with one, but it is the only
time that Guna sings onstage. The song starts after a typical Tamasha bantering scene
between the Gopis and Krishna. The frame story is of course very relevant here and the
audience (both within and outside the film narrative) would know about the atmosphere
attendant on this situation. It is also intriguing to see that the sexual banter before the song
 868 S. Palekar

starts is exchanged between Maushi and Krishna. It is played off as comedic, but again the
very fact that such exchanges are present at all is significant, especially between a not-
woman and a divine being. The question arises as to why the banter has to be erotic at all
surely the correct body would be that of the Nachee. The ambiguously framed body of
the Nachya however is also sexualized. The lyrics of the song are, of course, very
suggestive but, as I have pointed out earlier, the sensuality and sexuality of the situation
come from the interplay of highly skilfully crafted lyrics and the grace of movement
imparted by the classic roots of the Tamasha style of dancing, including the sensuality of
the sari, rather than any kind of overt bodily exposure. Ultimately, it is framed as an erotic
art rather than mindless exhibition.
I now move on to one of the most popular songs in the film, Apsara Aali (The Celestial
Nymph Descends). It is a masterpiece of sensuality, with Naina taking on the role of
Mohini, the celestial nymph into which the God Vishnu morphed to steal a pot of
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Ambrosia from the demons (to give to the Gods) in an episode of the Mahabharata
(Doniger 1999, 261). What it is important to note here is that the mythological references
combine with the plot in certain intriguing ways. Firstly, in the context of the plot, this is a
new play that the troupe is performing, one that Guna is hoping will allow him to claim
back some of his lost dignity and self-respect. The play is bringing together several
mythological narratives of gender bending, fluidity and eunuchhood in a self-conscious
fashion, with Guna hoping to use their sacred, transgressive energy to validate his own
new sense of self as articulated to Pandoba, There is some woman in every man, and some
man in every woman. Also, the sari that Naina as Mohini is wearing during the song is one
that Guna has given her as guru dakshina (or teacher fee): thus we see that he is looking
back to his first steps in his ultimate transformation and seeing it as a positive
development. It also reminds the film audience of the first time that Guna and Naina
danced together, Guna ultimately mirroring Nainas movements and turning into Maushi.
The dance itself is filmed in an ethereal setting with blue light and smoke. While only
Naina is dancing, the song foregrounds the fact that it is Mohini who has come down to
earth and therefore also the gender-bending Vishnu is dancing on stage as well. However,
as Mohini is an illusion so too is the sacredness of the stage and Guna is about to be
violently inscribed back into the hegemonic structures of patriarchal society.

Conclusion
When looking at Natrang, what is particularly striking is the intense layering of references
to sexual identities, popular culture and earlier theatrical traditions. Guna, in fact, very
self-consciously tries to channel this transgressive energy into the narrative of his own life,
trying to perhaps validate his new way of being through those sacred, and therefore to him,
powerful tales. What Guna is shown to not understand is that the same colonial structures
of power and morality that forced Tamasha to the rural landscape also dictated the way in
which firstly reformers, then the freedom movement and finally the Hindu Right decided
to radically recast divine masculinity. Any forced confrontation (such as another play he
writes about Arjuna and his eunuch alter-ego Brihannada) between the older versions of
Hindu gods, with their slippery forms, and the newer visions of the same, formulated and
put into circulation by the propaganda machine of right-wing Hindutva, does not end well.
When the constructedness of both Guna as Brihannada and Guna as Arjuna is finally
presented to the audience, violence erupts. It is precisely in this clash of old, new and
contemporary interpretations of the ancient mythologies that make up the cultural cosmos
of a lot of young Indians, that Guna is also placed. While deprived of any modern
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 869

identity models by virtue of his social and economic position, Guna can and does craft
those models for himself using his own cultural tools in a sense. It is his tragedy that
those formulations (as with most marginalized identities) cannot be allowed to function by
hegemonic discourses. Gunas crime is not just that he dared to bring his audience face to
face with the illicit pleasures they had been enjoying up till then, but it resides also in his
identity as simultaneously a kothi and a hijra, daring to oppose and indeed raise his hand
against the real man, and therefore against the larger hegemonic structures of patriarchy.
I have argued that the body of the hijra is an absent presence within the narrative, but
instead of functioning just in its pejorative aspect as intended by those that use it to insult
Guna, I see it also functioning as an already recognisable symbol of queer, taboo desire.
Natrang, and its use of the Lavani, in allowing both the overt and suppressed cultural
connotations of the hijra and the kothi as loci of same sex desire to be expressed, is inviting
both the queer audience within the narrative (the audiences at the performances, the
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character of Shinde) and the films audience to share in a particularly collectively queer
viewing experience a narrative-based enactment of seduction that is a hallmark of both
the Nachya and the Nachee in Tamasha.
Some of these representational strategies may not be explicitly named queer within the
context of the film, and are sometimes overtly heteronormative in their intentions vis-a`-vis
the audience. However, it is instructive to return to Muraleedharans formulation of a
queer approach that repudiates conventions that classify pleasures as . . . corporeal and
spiritual, highlighting zones of fluidity . . . in order to generate fresh perceptions of
human intimacies and corporeality (2005, 71). Then, we may see that Natrang functions
to invite a dynamic, carvinalesque dance of multiple desires and becomes productively
ambivalent. It constructs a space that is at once sacred and profane, simultaneously
heteronormative and queerly transgressive. In other words, its representational strategies
can be reclaimed and re-read through the different lens of what could be termed as a
dynamic, queer, regional viewing practice.

Notes
1. Tamasha is a folk performing art primarily performed in the Marathi language. There are two
kinds of Tamashas: dholki phad and sangeet bari. Sangeet bari troupes represent an older style
that emphasizes songs and dances, which punctuate the raucous humour in the Tamasha . . .
Sangeet bari is also centred on the performance of the Lavani. In fact, the Tamashas popularity is
partially due to Lavani, which is a kind of rural, erotic song, articulating female desire in
explicitly sexual terms . . . Until the end of the nineteenth century, it was sung by male singers
dressed as women but sung by women in later times . . . Plots and characters of the plays are
exaggerated, with elements of burlesque and masala: the mixed spice blend of romance,
ribaldry, melodrama and passions running riot. Tales taken from mythology, epics, popular
folklore and legends, historical events and contemporary society are played, laced with satirical
incidents and broad slapstick humour (Singh 2010, 6 7).
2. Female performer.
3. Effeminate male performer.
4. A commercially successful nineteenth-century theatre tradition started in Mumbai by Indian
Zoroastrians. Professional Parsi theatre companies staged shows in Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu and
English and catered mostly to the middle class, unlike Tamasha. Women were allowed to attend
special shows as audience members, but all female roles were enacted by male actors.
5. This gendered identity framework of male-to-male sex appears to primarily exists among low-
income and rural populations. For English speaking middle and upper class MSM, the term gay or
queer would be used.
6. Mujra is a form of dance said to be created by the North Indian tawaif (courtesan) during the
Mughal era.
 870 S. Palekar

Notes on contributor
Shalmalee Palekar is an assistant professor in the Discipline of English and Cultural Studies, University
of Western Australia. Her research areas are transnational literary and cultural theories and practices;
South Asian writing in English and in translation; translation theories and practices; Indian cinemas;
and queer/transcultural formations. Shalmalee is also a translator of Marathi poetry, a screenplay
consultant, and performs with three women and a cello, collectively called Funkier than Alice.

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Filmography
Natrang. Directed by Ravi Jadhav. Mumbai: Zee Talkies, 2010.
The Pink Mirror (Gulabi Aaina). Directed by Sridhar Rangayan. Mumbai: Solaris Pictures, 2003.
Bomgay. Directed by Riyad Wadia. Mumbai: Wadia Movietone, 1996.