A RAINBOW-TINTED VIEW OF BOLLYWOOD

90s actor Aditya Pancholi, known for his negative roles, is seen in a different light in this oil painting.

An artist took a closer look at photos of Bollywood actors from the 90s and noticed that there's more than meets the eye.

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Mili Sethia, Founder of Esqueer

I was working as a graphic designer at a market research consultancy when in late 2014, my boss found a picture of the actor Shakti Kapoor wearing a blue sarong. She found it really incredible that Shakti Kapoor was posing like a pin-up model and asked me to make an oil painting of it for her bedroom wall. 

I tried to avoid her for a couple of days. Around that time, I’d moved into a new apartment in Mumbai and my boss overheard me telling someone that I wanted a minibar in my house. She said she would get me that in return for the painting. So we made a deal.

When I finally did the painting, I got some really interesting responses from my colleagues. They enjoyed it and were grossed out by it in equal measure. I also think it made them feel liberated. 

For starters, you never see men in a painting. Secondly, when you’re the subject of the painting, you also become the muse and it’s a space that men don’t usually get. When it comes to the pin-up model culture, someone is an object. In this case, Shakti Kapoor was offering to be that object. It made me feel powerful and made me think of him as a person having feelings, being the victim of the male gaze.

Mili Sethia, Founder of Esqueer

I’ve studied art formally, including a course abroad that looked into incorporating cultural understanding into design. I always look for the underlying queer theme in anything I do because I’ve been an LGBT activist since 2010. 

A couple of years before that, Harry Potter author JK Rowling revealed that one of the main characters, Albus Dumbledore, was gay. That mattered a lot to me because it made me think that in everything around us that is mainstream, there are layers beneath them that we don’t see. It made me reimagine Dumbledore. It’s like when you find out something about your favourite actor and reimagine their entire life.

In Bollywood, for example, take the friendship of Jai and Veeru from Sholay. I’ve always imagined it could have been a homo-erotic story. I feel like the whole LGBT community lives off imagination because they have to be invisible. They have to seem heterosexual, but in actuality, there is a whole other layer of meaning to how they dress and communicate. I feel like Bollywood is full of things like that. It comes from a much freer time when we didn’t have a proper definition of anything, so there was a lot of space for ambiguity. 

Right now, we’re going through a wave of revamping what Bollywood means to us. We’re meme-ing it a lot. It means we grew up consuming so much Bollywood and now we’re in a world where it’s become almost irrelevant, kitschy and farce, so we are reusing it to express ourselves.

Akshay Kumar from the 90s: You have a rainbow between your legs, don’t hide it.

Reimagining popular yesteryear villain Ranjit.

When someone in Bollywood is objectifying men or looking a bit ‘LGBT-like’, it speaks to our generation in a double meaning. It can be used to express our true identities, no matter how false Bollywood itself is. That was the intersection I was really interested in.

My boss grew up in the 80s, so Shakti Kapoor was an even deeper part of her identity. The villains have always been a cult by themselves. With Shakti Kapoor, there was also this element of nostalgia. 

It’s not like I wanted to feel powerful, hate on him, objectify him – it’s not so black and white. I really wanted to celebrate the fact that Shakti Kapoor took time out and posed like this, the fact that he likes to think of himself as beautiful, thinks that his collarbone should be shown off. It’s different from the definition of masculinity that we’re exposed to coming to us from the West. Their male ads are very grungy, macho and muscular. But in India, men are used to crying at the feet of their mothers, and that was still indisputably considered masculine. There’s a re-routing to our own definitions through it.

After Shakti Kapoor, I started a series with 90s Bollywood actors that was originally called the ‘Be Yourself’ series, and came to be called Esqueer today. I give a letter with each painting that as a funny note enclosed. The idea was that if these people could have the courage to be themselves, then everyone should have that courage.

Jackie Shroff: You have an eagle in your chest, let it soar.

A Sunny Deol still.

I believe that the unique quality of painting as a medium is that what can’t be said can be drawn. Sometimes it is the safest way of expressing something that is too contentious to be said. If I said that Shakti Kapoor has something not very masculine about him, people will be furious at me for thinking he’s gay. But I don’t want to say anything of that sort. I just want to portray what it seems like and celebrate it. A painting does this for me.

I’ve seen a lot of old videos where there are two girls dancing around a tree in the 70s, and I saw it in a way that they were in love.  It’s been going on for centuries and no one speaks of it. All our focus is on heterosexual romantic love, and we don’t give credibility to other forms of love. People think of it as a taboo, but it’s a celebration of friendship and love.

For me, the main idea was expanding love, expanding identities and expanding people’s perceived role in the world – be it men being able to cry or women being able to be strong. And when I saw the same potential in Bollywood, I couldn’t ignore it.  

AS TOLD TO MEHA DEDHIA

P.S You can find out more about Esqueer on Facebook and Instagram.

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