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Karan Johar Is ‘The Man Who Let India Out of the Closet’, Reads An American Daily

byRachna Srivastava
17th February 2017
4 minute read
Karan Johar

Karan Johar ‘The Unsuitable Boy’ of tinsel-town is the biggest newsmaker and filmmaker in Bollywood film fraternity. His candour and quirk are a combo that make him super-entertaining. He might’ve never uttered out loud that he’s gay, but succinctly said it all.

According to a New York Times op-ed by Aatish Taseer, Karan — the most ubiquitous man in Bollywood — is said to be ‘the man who let India out of the closet’.

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K’Jo has a massive fan-base and is a self-professed maker of “popcorn, bubble gum and frivolity” cinema. But more than his films, Karan’s sexual orientation always piqued interests among Indians. The writer pens,

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“An ocean of innuendo has always surrounded Mr. Johar’s sexuality. He has done more than anybody to introduce the idea of homosexuality into the Indian home. It would seem no closet door was better primed to spring open than his. And yet when he tries the latch, he finds it sticks. ‘The only time I’m tight-lipped is when I’m asked about my sexuality,’ he writes in his recently published memoir, ‘An Unsuitable Boy.’ ‘It’s the only part of me I feel I’ve caged.'”

 

 

Aatish further writes,

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“What makes Mr. Johar’s case so much of a piece with this particular moment in India is that while he has been circumspect on his sexual orientation, he has, both in his life and his work, been breathtakingly explicit about sex: In 2013, he gave the Indian screen a smoldering gay kiss in “Bombay Talkies”; two years later, as roast master in a comic event that millions saw on YouTube, he joked before a live audience, with his mother present, of being the recipient of anal sex; in his new book, that same curious mixture of reticence and candor pervades. Mr. Johar will not use the male pronoun, but he writes openly and often movingly about everything from the pain of unreciprocated love to the aridity of having to pay for sex.”

 

It is kind of impossible not to see Mr. Johar against the background of the Indian society. The Supreme Court reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which places homosexuality, alongside bestiality, as “against the order of nature.”

 

But, Karan never said those three words out loud and got thrashed by the gay community. He’s also accused of stereotyping them on the celluloid.

“He is not popular among activists and the intelligentsia. They accuse him of reducing gay characters to effeminate parodies.”

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Apurva Asrani, the script writer of ‘Aligarh’, wrote in The Wire: “Sadly Karan’s public image reeks of the very same gay stereotyping that Bollywood infamously propagates — the frustrated sexual predator, the comic relief, the closeted ‘butt of all jokes.”

 

He pinpoints how Karan is far more subversive than his critics admit and how he’s introduced the idea of homosexuality by stealth into the Indian home as he knows the limitations of his family audience. Citing an anecdote, Aatish writes,

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“I’ve known Mr. Johar over the years, and when I ran into him in New York this winter, the impression I had was of a man who had quietly been pushing the edge of the envelope for years. He was a long way from ‘Dostana’ (Bromance), his 2008 romantic comedy in which two men — both major stars — pretend to be gay so that they can rent an apartment with a pretty Indian girl abroad. Last year, he produced ‘Kapoor & Sons,’ a film about the golden boy of a middle-class Indian family living a secret gay life abroad who eventually comes out to his distraught mother.

 

Karan told Mr Taseer that no major actor was willing to play the role Fawad Khan played in ‘Kapoor & Sons’.

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 “I went to eight or nine stars and they all said that if the character is gay in the end, then no.”

 

At a recent party, at Karan’s place, Aatish observed the producer closely,

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“As I watched the producer among his friends, now a star lovingly nurtured, now a hero, aging but still handsome, I became acutely aware of his solitude. He is of that generation that came of sexual age maybe five or 10 years before the freedoms of this recent time burst upon us. That meant that Mr. Johar, though he has tried actively to find love — even, as he writes in his memoir, resorting to an agency that deals exclusively with the ultrarich and famous — faces the prospect of growing old alone. It’s a theme he returns to again and again in the book, as does his desire to have children. I hope he does.”

 

The article ends by pointing that Karan ‘may not have uttered the three magic words, but his life and his work are a portrait in courage’.

News Source: The New York Times

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