As part of the public output component of their 4th semester evaluation, the students of the 4MAECS Queer Ecologies project organized the screening of the critically acclaimed film, Aligarh, which was released in 2016 worldwide. The screening was followed by an informal interactive session of thoughtful interventions and opinions.
Among the major takeaways of the discussion was the issue of private versus public, in the context of what conservative Indian values deem immoral and vulgar. The film centers around the struggles of Professor Siras as he is subject to humiliation and plain cruelty, in a situation where his rights to privacy have been violated. The petition filed in court, in favour of re-instating him in his rightful office in the Aligarh Muslim University, brings to light the intersecting themes that underlie and accompany queerness vis a vis the politics of public and private space, the state, language, social conventions and most importantly, institutional morality.
Through the lenses of these major intersections, the students found themselves delving into questions of heteronormative gender constructions, along with its effects on the conception of a family or a couple. From here, the discussion morphed into a critique of the Indian censorship committee whose oversight concerns itself with production of films more palatable to the heteronormative ideology in the country.
With respect to such a queer-phobic as well as queer-erasing culture present in the process film production and consumption, the director's consistent use of isolation throughout the movie, seemed significantly noteworthy to the audience. In a society where any public expression of a person's queerness is considered downright immoral, Professor Siras prefers the solitude of his books and music. Isolation, then, becomes the proverbial closet, as many of the students pointed out.
Social conventions, public morality and state control converge together in the court proceeding scenes, where even a person of law refuses to regard a legal precedent of decriminalizing homosexuality to uphold the constitution of a single educational institute at the expense of the constitution of India. Interventions on this theme brought out interesting observations like the othering of queerness as a recent imposition of urban immorality.
The discussion took shape through a healthy to-and-fro of such perspectives and deemed Aligarh a text worthy of significant academic consideration. The session reached its successful conclusion with a realization of the impact of caste politics that affected the lower class Muslim partner of Professor Siras much more than it affected him, an upper class brahmin.
