Fire in Diaspora

According to Gayatri Gopinath in her article, Deepa Mehta's Fire is attacked by both main stream media and the Shiv Sena, a Hindu right wing organization that forms the nationalist government currently in power, for its ‘inauthentic’ presentation of India, and hence, denied the film’s queer content and diasporic origin. In India, woman and lesbian are considered mutually exclusive categories--while feminist women are acknowledged, the idea of queer and lesbian are unacceptable. As such, the status of woman is only recognized in the domestic sphere, at ‘home’, by the community and the nation, while lesbian is outside the visible public sphere. Gopinath also states that the ‘gendered and sexualized discourses of bourgeois and religious nationalism are reproduced in diaspora’ and she suggests that the immigrant communities in the diaspora are ‘connected, interdependent and mutually constitutive’ and the idea of diaspora should be considered in relation to nation. Gopinath proposed that ‘queer diasporic’ positionality can challenge the concept of fixed and essentialised national and diasporic identity. This queer diaspora framework ‘situates the formation of sexual subjectivity within transnational flows of culture, capital, bodies, desire’; contest that ‘queer’ and ‘diaspora depend on the originality and authenticity of heterosexuality and nation; and ‘marks a different economy of desire that escapes legibility within both normative Indian context and homo-normative white Euro American context.

Deepa Mehta, as an Indian Canadian female director, challenges the tradition of Indian religious convention, the expectation of women in particular, by narrating the homosexual/ homoerotic desire of two (sexually) suppressed women, Sita and Radha. (The inclusion of the memory of Radha, of her ability of see without looking/ seeing in a different away, even seems to suggest that her homosexuality is rooted genetically). Nonetheless, the characters are also seen reflecting upon their ‘unruly’ behavior. Though Sita appear to be rebellious, every time she crosses the line she is cautious, for instance, she ponders in front of the mirror and checks before changing into man’s wear, and she seeks approval from Radha after kissing her. The depiction of their intimacy and emotional sustenance out of adherence to tradition and recurrent mentioning of expected duty (of wife/ being a chaste woman) challenge the public/ religious view and at the same time draw audience’s sympathy for them. (The last scene of the movie attempts to be emotionally appealing, while the final reunion seems forced out to align with the movie’s message, the way that Ashok display humiliation is wield.)The film challenges the framing of queerness (and diaspora) as inauthentic. By placing such relationship within the domestic space, before the eyes of the traditional (yet dumb) Biji, hinting at a sense of forced acceptance, Mehta legitimizes (and celebrates) homosexual desire as a means to leave the confinement of the tradition. By tracing the root of their homosexual desire (while it is contradictory to the heterosexuality and nationalism of India) and exposing the absurdity and invalidity of the men’s desire, the relationship between Sita and Radha is made more than authentic—this is what we can expect, only that they are not visible.

The film itself literally travels many places, well received and criticized to different extent; enabling it to transcend geographical and national boundaries with the emotion appeal of woman emancipation. It should also be noted that the film resist the ‘tradition’ and binding convention only by relying on it (be manifesting the absurdity).