As a queer text, Deepa Mehta’s Fire discusses the taboo issue of

lesbian desire in Indian film. The liberal, universalizing reading of the

film would be to read it as a pioneering lesbian love story “from the Third
World”. We must, however, go past this liberal, universalizing reading of
the film so to find a space that transcends Western assumptions, a space
of (postcolonial) female intimacies, a space for queer intimacies of colour.
We must find ways of situating this widely circulated, highly scrutinized
filmic text as a commentary on feminist queer subjectivity, one that
challenges the critical spaces of domesticity, which are often shamed for
“suppressing” women’s desire. We need to reimagine these homosocial
arenas, instead, as quietly, secretly nurturing female intimacy rather than
suppressing it. In other words, we must ask how the depiction of queer
womanhood, cultural intertextuality and narrative and visual aesthetic in
Fire complicate the White liberal feminist assumption of the middle-class
home as a disciplining, hetero-normative site, and the image of homemakers
as highly stabilized and controlled female subjects, often ‘unable’ to articulate
queer desire. Through considering such questions, we are left to ask: can the
“Third World” queer female subject, thus, ‘speak’ on screen?
At one point in Fire, the character Ashok watches a theatrical
performance of the Ram Leela, the Hindu mythological epic, depicting the
life and exile of Lord Ram, Prince of Ayodhya, and his spouse, Goddess
Sita. In this scene, Ram has rescued Sita from her abduction by Ravana,
the ruthless villain of the upper-caste Hindu epic. He, bound by duty,
demands her to walk through fire to prove to him her sexual, and thereby
spiritual, purity and chastity. A distressed Sita, shocked that Rama would
question her faithfulness, stands the ‘test of fire’ successfully, unmarred in
her wifely devotion.
Sita here, is not a goddess, of course, but a stage actor, a traditionally
male figure dressed as the devoutly feminine and aggrandized goddess
so adored and virtuously upheld in popular upper-caste Hindu literature
and cultural iconography. Her body, unintentionally gender-fluid in its
presentation underlines the historical regulations that prohibit women

9
 AADityA AGGARWAL

from performing in Hindu religious theatre. In the actor’s trail through

fire, the goddess’ womanhood is both erased and queered. The symbolism
of fire is rife, echoing familiarity with the saffron hues embellishing the
film’s every frame: the subdued tones of earth, sun and clay burning on
Sita’s afternoon wear and the religious significance of the element of fire to
Hindu womanhood, especially in the seemingly ordinary lives of its two
pivotal characters, Sita and Radha. This particular scene is only one of the
several theatrical performances; one of the meta-theatres, in which the
characters create, performs, and views these performances within the film.

The Quilt and Fire

This paper seeks to imagine Fire as a ‘diasporic woman’s film.’

Directed by Deepa Mehta, a first-generation Indian filmmaker living in
Canada, Fire is loosely based on famous Urdu novelist Ismat Chughtai’s
1941 short story Lihaaf. Set in colonial India, Chughtai’s narrative situates
itself around a bourgeois Muslim household, with the pivotal character of
Begum, the “lady of the house” married to a rich aristocrat. His absence
from Begum’s life, and his fascination with young men, creates a sexual rift
between Begum and her husband. She shares a deeply intimate dynamic
with her foremost companion, and caregiver/masseuse, a woman called
Rabbo, as observed by her little niece. Through Rabbo’s regular massaging
of Begum’s body, her niece narrates the story of their erotic, sexually coded
rituals under “the quilt”, beyond which no one else, but Begum and Rabbo
could see. Fire highlights this aspect of “queer female pleasure and desire” 1.
Additionally, this ‘quilted’ intimacy that Fire highlights transforms the
space of the household, from a nationalist hetero-normative trapping, into
a homoerotic site of expression.
Mehta’s film, Gopinath claims, was “funded largely with
Canadian festivals” 2 all over the world, and enjoyed a “lengthy art house
release in major US cities”3. Facing immense outcry from Hindu right-
wing religious groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), its
distribution and exhibition was banned shortly after a brief run in India.
Attacks from these groups stated the film’s alleged ‘corruption’ of Hindu
womanhood, and its queering of Hindu women’s otherwise sacralized
bodies in dominant culture. It is this ‘queering’ of the characters in the
film that counters dominant Western imagery of queer lesbian sexuality.
It is indeed the very ‘alternative’ sexual practice of the female Hindu
characters in the film that appropriates queer models of the Hindu text,

10
 CAMéRA Sty Lo

and thereby does not reject, but embraces religious myth as a possible site
of queer female sanctuary.

Sita and Radha: Queer Stories, Queer Looks

Much of Fire draws from the art of storytelling and performance,

rooted in the cultural specificity of the rural, and working-class, Hindu
demographic. In the expositional scene of the film, a demure child, Radha,
sits with her parents in an expanse of beaming mustard fields. Her mother
lovingly tells her, “What you can’t see, you can see; you just have to see
without looking”. Her mother tells her to try to look for the ocean, as
described in a tale about a peoples living in the Himalayas attempting to
locate a water body they could physically never really see. Radha’s father,
the male figure of their family, sits silent watching the women converse
one moment, looking out into the horizon another. Her mother’s story, her
call to ‘see’ without any visual cues might be easily misunderstood, and
Orientalized as cryptic, mysterious, and magically endemic to indigenous
visual practices. In fact, Fire seeks something deeper here, a generational
connection, a women’s ancestral inheritance of ‘sight’ one could somehow
locate as ‘queer’ and secretive through Radha’s silent father’s absent
presence.
A grown Radha banks on this very transformative, innate sense
of ‘knowing’ that is part of her self-knowledge, when she tells a newly-
wed Sita, her recently introduced sister-in-law, to prick up her ears for
Biji’s (the muted, disabled, aging matriarch figure) bell, which she rings in
times of need. In response, Sita asks, “How will I know what she needs?”
“You’ll know”, Radha responds, almost channeling her mother’s words:
“You just have to see without looking”. She will know, then, it seems. In
the very first verbal exchange between the two lovers-to-be the audience
hears the echo of a secretive knowledge, a comfort with ‘not knowing’, a
sense of confidence in carrying the lack of familiarity in their own bodies.
As Radha shuts the door, the viewer discovers a narrative transformation
that has already moved the plot forward. The location of the bedroom,
first and foremost shared physically and sexually between newlyweds
is disrupted by Radha’s commanding, quiet entrance, telling Sita she’ll
‘know’, a radically prophetic choice of word sharing between queer women
themselves. Sita’s husband Jatin’s immediate departure on the other hand
looms large in the missing male desire, and the directing gaze of the scene.
Stories transfer between Sita and Radha as queer texts,

11
 AADityA AGGARWAL

functioning as channels for homoerotic desire and possibility. At one

point, Radha and Sita look out into the city from the balcony, in the dead
of night, as the latter exclaims her desire to “see the ocean”. “I want to
see the ocean,” Sita tells Radha, her gaze directed in a medium over-the-
shoulder close-up shot towards Radha. Radha responds, looking into the
distance, “I tried to see the ocean once.” While this is a common dramatic
trope in thoughtful conversations between characters in film— i.e. one
character speaking to the other, who in turns speaks away from them—
one must also read this aspect in conjunction with how loaded the symbol
of the ocean is in the film’s thematic. Radha, in her subdued shades of
clothing, does not ‘look back’ often but sees ahead, ‘outward’, searchingly,
calmingly, in conversation with herself. Conversely, Sita adorns blazing
ceramic “shades”, reflecting the youthful, passionate fire associated with
the Goddess Sita. She is constantly seeking answers from Radha, repeatedly
asking her questions. In this context the ocean becomes a mysterious site
of possibility. After all, Radha has “tried to see” it, and Sita has desired “to
see” it. We must then reimagine Sita and Radha as characters that reflect
not just their childhood histories, and the visual of an oceanic future that
the viewers can never locate, but also as versions of the goddesses they are
named after.
The role of naming in the film received significant attack from
right-wing Hindu groups in India. Radha is named after the consort of
Lord Krishna, an intelligent and pragmatic god, known for his flirtations
and war strategy in Hindu tales. Sita is named after the Goddess of Earth,
who braved exile to wilderness, abduction and stood the test of fire, all
to prove to Ram her chastity, loyalty and devotion. Both goddesses are
read as paramount symbols of heterosexual female virtue in upper-caste
Hindu families, as benchmark standards of expected Hindu womanhood.
The discourse established by Hindu women assuming these names,
mouthing them lovingly to one another with their desiring, queer tongues,
encapsulates disruptive “queer desire in the home” 4 . Queer desire then,
between goddess-women in many ways, threatens the very “Hindu
nationalist project” 5 that these names and images aim to uphold. When
both goddesses are imagined as sexual beings, desiring one another, we
come to conceive of these characters as both embracing and debunking
religious myth through a queer reclamation of naming itself.
Radha’s acknowledgement of Sita’s desires comes to the forefront
when she embraces the “ocean.” “I can see the ocean, I can see it”, are
words spoken cathartically from Radha’s mouth, as the viewer begins to

12
 CAMéRA Sty Lo

understand its queerly metaphorical underpinnings. It is this unspoken,

ritualistic storytelling, the mere act of sharing words that seem jarring,
alien and strangely incomplete to even the viewers, that transforms Sita
and Radha’s religious, traditionally feminine occupation of the domestic
space as radically ‘queer’. What operates between the two characters
in these exchanges is an undercurrent of viewer curiosity, a lingering
autonomy of the plot itself to let certain subtexts remain known to the two
women, but unknown to the spectator, at least for the time being.
There are, however, certain visual motifs in Sita and Radha’s
intimacies that gauge recognition based on hyper familiarity with certain
viewers, specifically South Asian national and diaspora audiences. For
instance, one of the many tales Sita and Radha share with each other in the
film is that of the unconscious king, whose queen picks out needles from
his body, until she tires and orders the maid to pick out the remaining
few. He wakes only to see the maid, and therefore thinks she is the woman
laboring to bring him back to good health. In order to regain her status,
the astounded queen, tries to win back her king’s love, and attention.
Traditionally a tale about women’s dutiful devotion to their husbands,
Mehta places it within a context of Sita and Radha’s relationship; bored
wives fasting for their husbands at home, narrating a mundane household
myth as to entertain themselves. After Radha recites the tale, Sita
dismisses it as being overrated, blaming the king for his pomposity, and
the queen for her blind faith. While Sita’s mouthpiece for “modernity over
tradition” can largely be seen as problematic of, and somewhat inscriptive
to, Western Orientalist definitions of a “liberating” white lesbianism.
There is something to be said about the overturning of the religious
myth, in light of two homemakers having a sincere conversation. Mehta
transforms the act of speaking in this scene when Radha laughs heedlessly
at Sita’s distaste. An over-the-shoulder close-up shot, reversed to Sita’s
questioning, quizzical face, initiates interaction and an onset of domestic
intimacy between these women.
The satiric dramatization of Mundu’s working-class domestic
male servant imagination is interesting when framing male desire in the
text. A sexually deprived Mundu imagines himself as the king of the story,
Radha as the queen, and Sita as the maidservant. As Mundu cultivates his
imagination, a desire to sexually control his mistresses, through goddess
names, develops. Mundu’s heterosexist conception of the tale does not
simply interrupt the queer looks exchanged between Sita and Radha as
they make light of the story, but also contributes to the disruption of the

13
 AADityA AGGARWAL

domestic space these women readily reside. The ‘lower-class male desiring
his mistress’ is a trope that is overused, ridden with class anxieties, in
popular South Asian bourgeois culture. Alternatively, Mehta uses the
same classist trope for the purpose of expanding the possibility of
homoeroticism between Radha and Sita. While Mundu’s gaze is staged
behind Radha’s spatial placement in the frame, there is an interaction
of male desire as undermined and subverted by an ongoing, mutual,
queer mockery of this religious myth shared between the two women.
In this light then, how can we aspire to read Mundu’s lower-class desire
as furthering Sita and Radha’s homoerotic love, and thereby, potentially,
strangely, as ‘queer’?

Male Celibacy, Women’s Desire and Queerness in the Postcolonial Family

There is a hypervisibility of Sita and Radha’s desire for one another

in the film. Amid abstinence, sexual deprivation, and male celibacy, the
character of Jatin through his extramarital affair with Suzy, and the
characters of Mundu and Ashok, through his spiritual vow, respectively
embodies this hypervisibility. While scholars have acknowledged this
framing of queer desire as partially insidious, since it promotes the
homophobic idea that lack of heterosexual male attention and desire
causes women to “turn” to one another, Fire complicates traditional
Hindu domestic space as one that must also be seen beyond its restrictive
mode of hetero-normative sexuality. Gayatri Gopinath explains that the
film places female homoerotic desire “at the center of multiple home
spaces.” 6 This challenges the White feminist notion of ‘the household’ as a
space to suppress female sexuality. The very act of chance and intimacy in
conventional middle-class domesticity is what enables and creates a space
for Sita and Radha’s “alternative models of female homoerotic desire.” 7
Through this thought process, the home is seen as being disputed and
transformed, reclaimed queer space. At the end of their religious fast, Sita
tells Radha how thirsty she is. Radha immediately offers her a sip of water
from the cup, a ritual traditionally specified for the husband, who breaks
his wife’s fast in the festivity.
Mehta appropriates this ritual in a single shot, with Sita’s back
facing the camera, and Radha approaching her, placing the steel cup next
to her mouth as she takes a sip of water. Mehta uses tradition, and ritual, to
excavate a space for queer religiosity. Their gender identity, as assumed by
both Sita and Radha, prides itself on their feminine attire, their comfort

14
 CAMéRA Sty Lo

with ‘domestic work’ and classically feminine modes of exhibition.

Radha gifts Sita a bracelet that she adorns on her wrist while Sita makes
Radha up with a bindi and a sari to enact a comical, entertaining musical
performance. Therefore, this fasting ritual Hindu women practice for their
husbands’ longevity, or Karva Chauth, must be read as a way of employing
the domestic space - the balcony where wives search for the moon to pray
for their husbands - as a site of homoerotic touch, ‘thirst’ and desire.
Gopinath claims, with queer female desire “squarely at its center, the space
of home is reworked and transformed from within.” 8
This queering transformation is subverted by certain modes of
male surveillance that, for the most part, are considered asexual in the
film. While there is something to be said about what the male members
of the family ‘see’ or do not ‘see,’ the female homo-social spaces become
transformed to homoerotic ones, ironically due to the very gaze of
patriarchs. When Sita massages Radha’s feet as an act of intimacy, Jatin
and Ashok approve by encouraging it as a display of sisterly affection.
Similarly, Radha massaging Sita’s hair sensuously completely transforms
the heterosexual image of female companions, or direct family members
engaged in self-community care of their femme/feminine loved ones. Self-
care here is evoked queerly, in a medium-long shot of the mirror. Both Sita
and Radha gaze at each other, a knowing look where they ‘see’, without
spelling the nature of their relationship. These mistaken cues become
crevices that queer female subjects can sliver through, Mehta seems to say,
in order to exercise their desires and pleasures.
Whether it is the productive gendering of women’s labour in the
kitchen, where Sita and Radha remain ‘confined,’ or the domestic spaces
like the balcony or terrace, where they must go to complete chores like
drying and washing clothes; the queer female subject enacts desire through
the currency that male rejection, compulsion, and absence often affords
them. Against a glowing backdrop of a deep orange dupatta, gleaming
like a sunset behind them, Sita and Radha impulsively embrace each other
by the clothes-drying line, not simply as lovers, but as women sharing
pain/trauma inflicted by their spouses. This scene represents something
beyond the realm of the queer homoerotic thematic of physical exploration.
We envisage two women shedding their trials and tribulations in the
afternoon heat, a trope that is easily coded as a heterosexual expression
of homemakers’ sharing ‘female’ grief. Mehta exploits the variety of
conflictingly queer and domestically feminine texts to ‘queer domesticity’,
not just sexually, as is often the case, but through womanly affection, that

15
 AADityA AGGARWAL

many heterosexual women could also picture themselves performing and

practicing with one another.

Women Start a Fire Behind Mosquito Nets: Queer Walls and Queer Sex

In the previous case, the “fire” hues of the clothing line, the
crinkled linen of Sita’s dupatta, offer the film a visual palette and elemental
character. One can also witness the embodiment of fire in a conventional
sense. The lovemaking scene of Sita and Radha, where Sita lifts open the
mosquito net shrouded over Radha’s bed and enters this quiet, private
space of nighttime that it seems only she and Radha have access to. In the
dimly lit setting, an establishing shot of the bedroom, from a high-level
and an overlooking oblique angle, offers a portrait of two beds obscurely
hidden in suspended mosquito nets. An oil lamp oozes sunset saffron by
Radha’s bed. Here, then, Mehta engages the viewer in Sita and Radha’s
experience of pleasure, but Mehta does not invite the viewer into the often-
voyeuristic visuals of the experience.
Drawing from Chughtai’s 1941 short story The Quilt that Mehta
garners inspiration from, this scene is not merely a stylistic choice, but
one that has serious implications on framing the ‘postcolonial queer
female’ subject’s desire. In Chughtai’s story, the little girl viewed the quilt
turn into strange shapes and sizes. It also generates bizarre sounds and
smells, which are replicated as an intertextual, powerful performance of
homoerotic intimacy in this instance. Much like the quilt, the romantic
haunting mosquito nets in Radha’s room, that she painfully lifts to gain
proximity to her husband, transform into guarded boundaries of queer
sexual communion and satisfaction. A lot of what takes place under the
quilt between two female bodies is both invisible and hyper-visible. The
mosquito nets seem to contain a fire, projected by the well-placed lamp, in
the frame.
Furthermore, Mehta employs rather conventional and traditional
tropes of producing visual pleasure, typical to hetero-normative imagery.
Such as the oil lamp symbolizing fire and passion, in order to block out
the viewer’s gaze to queer homoerotic making of love under the ‘covers’.
Additionally, the bedroom exists as a space to exercise heterosexual
desires, established as broken and hollow through Ashok’s celibacy. The
two separate beds, only to later be reinforced or rather, reclaimed by Sita’s
sexual, loving presence in the bedroom further represent the disruption
of sexuality. These models of bourgeois hetero-patriarchy are thus both

16
 CAMéRA Sty Lo

appropriated and destabilized to transform the domestic space as a site

of homoerotic femininity, and consequently, dwell on the film’s ‘queer’
voices that ‘see’ “without looking”, so to speak.

The Goddess Performs For You: Watching Queer Bodies Dance

What becomes intensely evident in Sita and Radha’s homoerotic

imagery and ‘stolen’ moments of affection is a transformation of home from
counter-hegemonic space to a space of queer desire. This transformations
allows for the expand possibility of a sincere queer performance. Much
like storytelling, the art of performing is central to Mehta’s thematic
concerns in “Fire”. It could be argued that Sita’s entrance in to the
domestic space initiates a queer discourse of performance, enjoyment
and recreation. During her first visit to her bedroom, she takes off her
petticoat and sari, puts on Jatin’s trousers, turns on the stereo to play a ‘90s
pop music number, pretend-smokes Jatin’s cigarette and dances joyously
in front of the mirror. We must stray away from defining this moment
as “liberating” simply because she sheds “traditional” wear and accesses
a “Western” presentation. Nonetheless, it is compelling to see the mischief
and humor that the queer characters themselves associate with potentially
queer presentations. Sita’s performance is a result of enjoyment, a need to
entertain her, and experiment with jeans. Jeans were a fascinating novelty,
especially for middle-class female consumers in the 1990’s India.
Similarly, queer presentation is suggested again by Sita’s character,
this time as she dons a suit and hat, and dresses Radha up as a ‘damsel’ in
a sari, to perform a dance together on a popular Hindi film song. As she
presents herself as the hero, and Radha, as the heroine, there is a comical
sense of camaraderie and enjoyment that both the queer characters and
the audiences feel. There is nothing astoundingly radical here. However,
this performance driven queer text also contains viewers of the household:
Biji, the mute, ‘immobile’ and aging maternal head of the family, and
Mundu, the domestic caregiver. Both parties enjoy this instance of queer
performance in the living room. As Sita and Radha engage in a comical
display of theatrical romance typical to women’s gatherings, and female-
exclusive celebrations in middle-class South Asian circles, there is a
recognition of how the meta-theatre guards and reinstates their ‘secret’,
‘real’ queer lives from others.
Under this garb where androgyny meets hyper feminine
presentation of the body, and voyeurs like the disciplining figure of the Biji

17
 AADityA AGGARWAL

as the mute feminine presence of the household, one can situate the living
room, and women’s recreation as critical acts of safeguarding their secret
spaces of homoerotic desire, while ascribing to a legitimized, normative
homoerotic performance in an acceptable, laughable way. Yet there seems
to be an out-of-body understanding that the queer female subject has about
how this simple act of play and dance is somewhat like Radha’s cryptic
idea of “seeing the ocean”. The cultural markings are visible, but intensely
loaded and bruised with humour, and hence, there is a comfortable denial
of any possible sexual attraction between Sita and Radha. Hence, Biji and
Mundu can ‘look’, but Radha and Sita actively “see”.
The retreat into performing as ancient images of lesbian art
that the women of Khush engage in is therefore surprisingly similar to
the comically queer dance of Sita and Radha in Fire. The critical question
of queer sexual practice in the film remains: how safe is home, and for
how long? In what seems like a haunting replication of the Goddess
Sita’s test of fire, Radha’s assertion of her queer desire and independence
to her husband Ashok follows a kitchen accident where her sari catches
fire. An emotionally wounded, distraught Ashok retreats and lifts Biji off
the ground, watching Radha’s destruction take place. She looks to him
for help, but he watches her ‘stand the test of fire’, almost approvingly so,
in accordance with his spiritual beliefs. The performance he once viewed
of a male body enacting Sita’s ‘test of purity’ is replicated insidiously in
the burning of Radha’s sari. As both mother and son “rightfully” gaze at
the “performance” of Radha’s purity being tested, much like Goddess Sita,
what comes to mind here is the criticality of queer women in domestic
spaces. When does performance— liberating, transformative, powerful—
become soul bearing? When does it kill you? And how far can Sita and
Radha really “see without looking” and therefore ‘speak without saying’
inside and outside their bodies, inside and outside of their ‘homes’?
When do you then, ultimately, extinguish the fire you started?
The queered home, it seems, is so safe for its subjects, until it’s
devastatingly unsafe.

18
 CAMéRA Sty Lo

1 Gayatri Gopinath, “Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational

Trajectories of Fire and The Quilt,” in Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas
and South Asian Public Cultures, (Durham:Duke University Press, 2005), 133.
2 Ibidem, 140.
3 Idem.
4 Ibidem, 158.
5 Idem.
6 Ibidem, 133.
7 Ibidem, 134.
8 Idem.

19
 AADityA AGGARWAL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fire. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Perf. Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, Kulbhushan
Kharbanda, Javed Jaffrey. Seville, 1996. Film.

Khush. Dir. Pratibha Parmar. Channel Four Television, 1991. Film.

Project Bolo: A Collection of Oral Histories of Indian LGBT Persons. Dir.

Sridhar Rangayan. Prod. Vivek Anand. The Humsafar Trust,
2011. Film.

Chughtai, Ismat, and Tahira Naqvi. The quilt and other stories. Women’s
Press, 1991. Print.

Gopinath, Gayatri. “Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational

Trajectories of Fire and The Quilt.” Impossible Desires: Queer
Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005. Print. 131-160.

Burton, David F. “Fire, Water and the Goddess: The Films of Deepa
Mehta and Satyajit Ray as Critiques of Hindu Patriarchy.”
Journal of Religion & Film 17.2 (2013): 1-22. Print.

Arora, Poonam. “The production of third world subjects for first world
consumption: Salaam Bombay and Parama.” Multiple Voices in
Feminist Film Criticism (1994): 293-304. Print.

White, Patricia. “Deepa Mehta’s Elemental Feminism.” Women’s Cinema,

World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2015. 76-88. Print.

20