Aligarh: Understanding Homosexuality

I’m aged 19 years, 4 months and 8 days old when I’m writing this, and I cannot argue with the fact that I still am not aware about what LOVE actually means. Infatuation for me is like cold and cough, something that repeats so frequently and recovers so easily, that I doubt my understanding of the actual differences that exist between love, and sexual attraction, if there are any. The sad reality is that sometimes I feel too exposed to certain brutalities breathing around me, things that are too complex for me to comprehend, questions whose shallow answers I’m constantly reminded of when I dig them out again. One such issue did linger in my mind for quite a while after I watched Aligarh. Directed by Hansal Mehta and written by Apurva Asrani, the biographical drama stars Manoj Vajpayee and Rajkumar Rao, both legendary artists. This piece isn’t about the plot of the movie, or the narrative structure or the character graphs; rather I want to speak about what I thought the movie had to say.

We’re so used to finding similarities and developing analogies and simplifying the way we see things right from the moment we start knowing how to learn, that our mind just cannot digest any difference that exists around. The power that majority vote gets, is what gives us the reason behind doing so. A simple sway, away from the equilibrium, isn’t taken in the essence normal things are taken.

As I’ve earlier stated, I don’t know what love is; but for a moment I could develop a simple analogy to help you with understanding this. Say a Shahrukh-Kajol DDLJ romance is the ideal side; a Salman-Madhuri ‘Hum Aapke Hain Kaun’ stands on the same side and so do many other romantic dramas. I used to love these movies as a kid and I never really had a problem in digesting them, because all of them were similar in terms of sentiment and morals, solidifying that- the right would always have people on its side. And then as a teenager I discovered newer truths, some dark, most necessary, and quite a few justifying the queries I had about the society and myself. My friends teased a guy who once said in the classroom that he loved a boy. While travelling in the railway, my uncle mocked a person referred as ‘Hijra’, who was making out with another friend of his. All this and much more that seemed ODD was labelled as WRONG in front of me. 

But as time progressed and I grew to what I am, shifting paradigms in my thought process with every inch of info I received to feed my brain, I noticed that the actual truth was trapped somewhere and that reality was really a puzzle. Certain ideals I believed in, were so fickle, I even felt remorseful over entertaining them in my past. But then I was at that age where it is so easy to be influenced by anything. The problem that worries me, is that many of us don’t grow up to assimilate notions properly. We still believe in what we were taught blindly without searching for reasons and a whole generation is built on this ideology. That is why the second side appears to us as immoral or unethical, the side that we see in Deepa Mehta’s ‘Fire’ or Kalki’s ‘Margherita with a Straw’ or Hansal Mehta’s ‘Aligarh’; the side that many of us don’t really approve of, or don’t want to discuss about.

I really love the scene in which Manoj Vajpayee sadly states that he dislikes the way his intense and uncontrollable urge is described in a 3-letter word by everyone. The movie on the outside is about a scheme to which Vajpayee falls a trap, but there is more to it than what meets the eye, as they say. And that more asks us to debate, question and pester the overtly simple-appearing definitions we are handed with and think beyond to comprehend the differences and move towards that absolute frame of judgement which would do justice to every individual existing around us.