The criticisms can be broken only with Queer and anti-caste narratives

For a big part of Maja Ma, Amazon Prime Video’s modern-day function film, Tejas Patel (Ritwik Bhowmik) is worried about his mother’s recognition in society, and a way to defend it — due to the fact she’s a lesbian. In Pa Ranjith’s Natchathiram Nagargiradhu, Arjun (Kalaiyarasan), an upper-caste guy in love with a Dalit woman Rene (Dushara Vijayan), is threatened together by his mother’s suicide. They joined a canon of Indian movies which have all started to critique the Indian own circle of relatives and the use of queerness and anti-caste politics. It’s different from dramas approximately dysfunctional families — wherein the latter leaves the systems inherent in dysfunctionality intact, a queer and anti-caste studying allows us to perceive the sources: inflexible heteronormativity, and caste homogeneity. Early on in Maja

Ma, Tejas’s mother, Pallavi (Madhuri Dixit) is discovered to be a closeted lesbian. She admits it in a communique together with her daughter, a second that receives filmed without her information after which aired in public. However, rather than treating the problem with sensitivity, Patel and his family participants are worried together along with his engagement and their family recognition, insisting that Pallavi’s comments had been made in jest and will never be true. Even after they do understand otherwise, they react with disgrace and disgust — asking how Pallavi ought to ever do such an issue to them. 

Maja Ma is one of the handfuls of films on queer reports and expressions offering mainstream stars which have peppered Bollywood in a previous couple of years. Along with Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To Aisa Laga, Shubh Mangal Zyaada Saavdhaan, Badhaai Do, and internet tv indicates like Four More Shots Please and Made in Heaven, depict

how queer people face violence and aggression — which includes physical, mental, and sexual harm — from their families, stifling their self-assurance and faith even if they circulate out of such systems. This is a departure from how Indian cinema as an entire has frequently upheld the family as sacred, unquestionable, and specifically scrutiny.

Activism develops and is continued by erotics and intimacy. The intensities of being in the collective area with others—laughter, flirtations, and silent disappointment prove how politics land on/affect the body and the way our bodies form and make themselves when it comes to political structures (Gould 2009; Howe 2013).

Queer activism in India is simultaneous “critique, invention, and innovative practice”: “Acts of same-intercourse love aren’t acts of resistance—they may be skilled as acts of social and cultural invention.” (Dave 2012:14). Moses involves recognizing himself as an activist and artist thru “the erotic,” the conjoining of sensuality and activism (Lorde 2007; Gill 2014). His candid method of sex is a treasured reminder of the erotic opportunities of South Asian LGBTQ network and activist spaces, opportunities which have been effaced to be able to present extra first-rate visions of gayness, riding to the margins casual sex cultures, drag queens, and trans people, operating magnificence queers, and non-English speaking folks (Gopinath 2005; Rudrappa 2004; Shahani

2008). While I attention to a single character who has emerged as a critical queer best friend in the anti-caste motion in Hyderabad (Tellis 2016), Moses’ narrative facilitates us suppose through the productivity of erotics inside activism, even as additionally drawing our interest to more than one structures of global and country surveillance he, and people round him, need to navigate to find sex and share joy. 

Speaking at a digital occasion remaining month organized by Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, a coverage organization primarily based totally in Germany, and English and South Asian Scholars and Activists Solidarity (SASAS), a collective of students, researchers, and activists, Akunth said, “Ambedkar weaponized his imagination for the duration of his profession to combat the caste device and its social evils. By tying the proper belongings at once to caste and gender in a country in which the majority of the land is owned by feudal castes, he argued for the proper of ladies to inherit properties, and for land to be made to be had to Dalits who nevertheless rank lowest in its ownership.”