India’s first queer film is a thirsty love triangle drama from 1971 & was once thought to be lost forever
Badnam Basti—translation: “Neighborhood Of Ill Repute”—a musical melodrama about a male-male-female love triangle based on a controversial 1957 novel by Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena.Its story centers on Sarnam Singh (Nitin Sethi), a former bandit who now earns a living as a truck driver in the northern city of Mainpuri.
After saving a woman named Bansuri (Nandita Thakur) from a mugger, the two quickly catch feelings for each other, but their courtship is cut short when Sarnam is jailed for a petty crime.Some time later, he’s released and unable to find Bansuri.
That’s when he meets the handsome young Shivraj (Amar Kakkad) in a temple, who he eventually hires to help clean his truck. The more time they spend together, the more intimate their relationship becomes—emotionally and physically.
And that’s when Bansuri stumbles back into Sarnam’s life, now married off to an old associate of his. Harboring clear feelings for Shivraj but still holding a candle for Bansuri, Sarnam finds his heart in two places.As Britney Spears once said, “One, two, three / Not only you and me.”In a new piece on Badnam Basti, The Guardian reports the film screened at a few European festivals back in the early ’70s, then disappeared into obscurity, only for two curators to accidentally stumble on an original 35mm print while researching in a Berlin film archive in 2019.One might assume Badnam Basti‘s queer themes are a big part of the reason it was lost to time, bucking against tradition in India, though it’s worth noting a number of LGBTQ+ focused features were beginning to break through onto the international scene in that era.Instead, some historians think it was more about the film’s experimental style and structure, which jumped around in time and employed a number of flashy visual techniques like crash-zooms and freeze-frames.
