Karan Johar tweeted a link (restricted link, so I can’t embed it, but you can find it through the Times of India here) to the first trailer to Aligarh this morning.  It looks like a great movie, but the trailer, and the fact that Karan tweeted it, raise some interesting questions.  Related both to Indian film and Indian society.

First, the film itself!  Very exciting!  It’s been bouncing around film festivals for a while, but now it is finally being promoted for semi-wide release.  Directed by Hansal Mehta who previously made Shahid and Citylights.  Both of those starred Rajkumar Rao, who also stars in this (and who you may know from Queen, Dolly ki Doli, or if you are very unlucky, Humari Adhuri Kahaani).  Joining Rao is Manoj Bajpai, who has been the king of raw realistic Indian acting since he burst on the scene playing the charismatic don in Satya in 1998.  But I am most excited by the director, actually.  I haven’t seen any of his other films.  I have no excuse, because they are fairly easy to get access to.  I think Shahid was even streaming on Netflix for a while, and I am pretty sure they are both on Amazon streaming.  But even without seeing them, just from the descriptions, I really really appreciate the topics Mehta chooses to focus on.

Shahid is about the lawyer Shahid Azmi, who was shot in his office in 2010, presumably because he was defending someone accused in the 26/11 bombing case.  “Shahid” was his first name, it also means “witness” in Arabic, and “martyr”.  So just the title alone has all kinds of layers there.  Most importantly, Shahid Azmi’s actions got him killed.  It takes a gutsy filmmaker to shout his approval for those actions on screens through out India.

This film looks similarly radical and potentially dangerous.  Again, it is based on a true story, a professor at Aligarh Muslim University who was caught having consensual sex with another man, was suspended, went to court, won his case, but eventually killed himself (well, probably killed himself, the death was investigated but no conclusions were reached).  There are all sorts of juicy contradictions to dig into here, the biggest being that his defense rested on the fact that Section 377 had been struck down, meaning homosexuality was no longer illegal in India, and the school had no right to terminate his employment.  But that was in 2010, today of course 377 is back in effect, meaning if the same story happened today, the school would be legally within its rights to fire him.  And that’s not getting into the whole thing about a Muslim University trying to fire a Hindu professor of Marathi literature, showing how prejudice cuts across religious lines.

But let’s go back to the title again.  It’s not called “Ramchandra” after the professor, it’s called “Aligarh” after the school.  The weight of this issue, of the conflict, of the problems, is going to be put on the school, not on the professor.  Therefore, on society, not on the person.  This is going to be a film that calls out what society is doing, that most likely will be calling for Section 377 to be struck down again.  Very radical!

And Karan Johar tweeted a link to the first trailer.  Hmm.  With Karan, for years now, the question has not been whether or not he is gay, but whether or not he will ever come forward and actually say he is gay.  Is this film about a man who loses his life when he loses his privacy going to be his soapbox for finally coming out of the closet himself?  Or is going to be his explanation for why he steal needs the slight protection afforded by not actually coming out and, well, “coming out”?  After all, if in 2010 a man was made an example of by his peers, persecuted by society, and finally driven to suicide, EVEN THOUGH homosexuality was not illegal at that time, imagine how much worse it could be in 2016 when you can suffer all of that, and a jail term.

I would lean towards the second interpretation, Karan reminding us all how much more powerful and helpful he is to his community while he is still in power, able to promote films like this, to speak out against intolerance, instead of sitting in a jail cell.  Only, the last shot of the trailer is the image at the top of this post.  Which makes me wonder, is Karan going to send out a tweet one day soon with that hashtag?