Trans in the City

Two movies with two trans women, each, as protagonists, Ektara Collective’s fictional feature film Ek Jagah Apni set in Bhopal and Leena Manimekalai’s documentary short Is It Too Much To Ask? set in Chennai, have similar preoccupations. They ask why it’s so hard to find housing as trans women? In Is It Too Much To Ask?, this question is inflected by caste. When Smile, a protagonist of the documentary, is going through the apartment listings in the newspaper, she underlines “Brahmins/Veg”. In Ek Jagah Apni, too, caste is an essential trigger in the story. One of the protagonists, Roshni (Muskan), is from a lower caste. From a pile of books to buy from, she picks “Jaati Ka Vinash”.

In both films, a decision is made to craft and stage a story of trans women where gender (and sexuality, peripherally) is muddled with caste. It frames the issue itself as “intersectional” — and this would, then, mean that the solution must be “intersectional”, too. This intentional intersectionality is, however, not common in queer representation. Queer films in India tend to be intensely tied to their protagonist’s social class and caste, unwilling perhaps unable to look beyond it. This is not a criticism, as much a characterization — one that can end up feeling like a criticism when the blindspots of the protagonists are mirrored by and inherited from, the filmmaker. 

Pay attention to Ek Jagah Apni’s vision of the city of Bhopal. The film wants to show the passage of a night. To depict this, it shows a montage of the city. A statue of Maharana Pratap astride his Chetak, foregrounded by a Supremo water tank. A masjid. A golden statue of Buddha. The city pockmarked by lakes. A gully. Someone is on the phone, walking, when a moving car’s headlamp casts a mobile shadow on the many shutters. People on cycles after a day of selling balloons. A garlanded Ambedkar statue. Men asleep — inside cars, on the footpath. Another mosque. The many tracks of a train station, a horn blaring. The night has ceded to dawn. In its background score, too, the film invokes Ravidas’s fictional Begumpura, casteless, classless, a city with neither grief nor darkness. 

As much as it is cruel — full of men who throw barbs and punches — the city is also a space for mobility and progress. In Is It Too Much To Ask, we see the two trans women, Smile and Glady, seamlessly navigating the city using trains, cars, autos, buses, and finally, a small truck with all their luggage. Throughout, we see the two of them, perched at the back. They move between neighborhoods where advocates stay, demanding only vegetarian subletters — vegetarian being a signal for being Brahmin, much like “IT professional” — and ones where many trans women live alongside each other.  

Both films also embrace queer performativity. There is a theatricality, a very patient sing-song way of speaking, almost a hyper visibility — the way they say ‘no’, the way they hold their pose, the way they wield silences, the way they look into the distance. The performance of being a trans woman and the performance as a trans woman are inextricable. This theatricality has been theorized as a shield, as an ongoing construction of the self’s identity. At one point in Ek Jagah Apni, when a broker threatens Laila (Manisha Soni), she steps back, but her gaze holds his, straight and unwavering — fear and strength residing side by side. In Is It Too Much To Ask, Smile keeps arguing with people who try explaining why they won’t give her an apartment, and Smile’s response keeps wavering between satire and sincerity. She is performing — she is a performer, that is her job. It also becomes the way she cuts through the world. Every sigh is loaded. Every dialogue is spoken with intention and awareness, as though she knows she is being watched while speaking.

It is easy for films on marginalized people to parcel their pain as a virtue and sell these wounds in the marketplace of ideas. In Ek Jagah Apni, when Laila and Roshni are invited to be part of a panel, they are asked to speak of their “chunauti aur sangharsh”, challenges and struggles. When you are constantly asked to narrativize your life in these terms, the self image, too, can become deformed. It is seductive to think of yourself as the archetypal hero. Queer joy, queer desire, then, holds that space where the identity can be expressed as that which doesn’t slip comfortably into the grip of a trope. “What are you going to do here?” a neighbour asks Laila and Roshni when they finally find a place to rent. “Live, just like you do,” they reply, and after a beat, all the women laugh. 

Is It Too Much To Ask is streaming on MUBI.