Interrogating masculinity

Two recent documentaries explore Indian masculinity with diverse subjects and approaches

OF MEN AND OTHER MATTERS A still from "Being Bhaijaan"

It is early 2014 and in a theatre in Nagpur, a group of men are watching the newly-released Jai Ho . Unlike the civility of a multiplex, the theatre is suffused with a combustible energy that surfaces with practically every gesture of Salman Khan. As the film ends, a group of men greet their beloved ‘Bhai’ with a bare-bodied salute.

This is a sequence from Being Bhaijaan , a new documentary by Samreen Farooqui and Shabani Hassanwalia that examines Indian masculinity through the prism of Salman Khan’s fans. Screened recently at PSBT Open Frame Film Festival, the film has at its core a trio of fans — Salman lookalike Shan Ghosh and his friends Balram and Bhaskar — who have moulded themselves in the image of Salman. They dress like him, talk like him, and even answer their phones with “Jai Salman”.

“Like any star, what Salman Khan gives the boys in our film is a sense of strength and in many ways, an alternative way of life also. There is a kind of a success that globalised India asks of them, but then there is Salman who still stands as a small town hero, who still has a name like Chulbul Pandey and he protects their world,” says Shabani.

It is a world whose male inhabitants — frustrated at having fallen off the economic grid, as also by the growing self-confidence of women around them — are characterised by a great deal of vulnerability. And the mythical machismo of Salman Khan is a source of solace for them, a way of belonging.

Shabani and Samreen have previously made, among others, Online and Available , on online living in India, Out Of Thin Air , on the film industry in Ladakh, and worked on a segment of Bombay Talkies . “We’ve been doing a lot of work on gender and sexuality, but mostly with women. But along the way we…realised that there is no understanding of patriarchy without understanding men… Men suffer as much under patriarchy as women do.”

A similar understanding guides

Mardistan/Macholand by Harjant Gill. While

Being Bhaijaan shows how masculinity is constructed in imitation of a star,

Mardistan/Macholand features the life stories of four men “whose definitions of masculinity differ radically from the stereotypical definitions we read about or see on TV or in our movies”.

The expression “life stories” is pertinent here, since Harjant is an anthropologist by training. While a film had been on his mind since he started his anthropological research on Punjab and Indian masculinities, it was triggered by recent reports of sexual violence and the media/popular discourse on gender that followed these reports. “Even though I started with the intention of deconstructing the status quo by investigating normative Indian masculinity, I met lots of men along the way who do not fit into that normative definition,” Harjant, an assistant professor of anthropology at Towson University in Maryland, USA, says.

For Samreen and Shabani, who come from the somewhat unusual position of women making a film about masculinity, the experience was similar. “It was very comfortable. I think there’s a human connection you form with people you shoot with…” Being women filmmakers need not have added value, but it didn’t prove a roadblock either, they say.