Why I Made a Film on Inter-Caste Love Between Queer Wome

GEELI PUCCHI IS A QUEER INTER-CASTE LOVE EXPLORATION.

Being gay is a daily act of defiance in a place like India. The persistent sense of being "the other" might become much more pronounced if one also identifies as a religious or caste minority.

The Netflix anthology Ajeeb Dastaans (Strange Stories), which was released in May 2021, included Geeli Pucchi (Wet Kiss), which was directed and written by Neeraj Ghaywan. Ghaywan made his directorial and writing debut with Masaan (Fly Away Solo), which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Geeli Pucchi examines the dynamics of a lower-caste person falling in love with an upper-caste person in a manner similar to Masaan.

At the factory where they both work, Bharti, a Dalit worker, falls in love with Priya, a wealthy Brahmin data operator. When Bharti tells Priya she is an outcast, she learns that Priya is fundamentally casteist and would rather maintain her caste privilege than acknowledge her queerness.

When Ghaywan was working on Masaan, "the idea of Geeli Pucchi came to me," he told VICE. "I was trying to develop a character who has to deal with the nihilism of life and is dissatisfied with everything else around her," the author said.

Ghaywan developed this persona throughout time using the perspectives of caste and gender. Geeli Pucchi, according to him, was initially intended to be depressing. It was influenced by the angst of the stories in the films of Finnish screenwriter Aki Kaurismäki, such as the 1996 movie Drifting Clouds, in which a couple loses their jobs but is too proud to ask for assistance from the social welfare system.  

The nexus of casteism and queerness in Geeli Pucchi affected Ghaywan because "I've always been moved by subjects of intersectionality and we don't have many traces of it in mainstream Indian cinema." Fundamentally, we all have intersectional lives and experience several forms of marginalization simultaneously rather than one particular kind of marginalization in isolation.

Ghaywan spends a lot of the movie exploring the concept that someone might associate with someone because they are gay but still hold backward beliefs about other things. "You may have a left-liberal who keeps a different cup for their housekeeper. Although many people may have grown up seeing their parents or grandparents engage in it, caste is the root of it all.

Even at work, Priya is plainly given preference by her superiors despite the fact that Bharti is ineffective because of her lower caste. 

Why do individuals like Priya constantly put their caste privilege before their queerness? According to Ghaywan, this can be due, among other things, to years of societal conditioning. He said, "A higher caste homosexual man who feels marginalized will naturally gain a great deal of cultural and social capital by virtue of his caste and would want to cling on to it. Such individuals can separate their social beliefs from their queerness. 

Because of how he views love, Ghaywan chose to utilize a "love story" to illustrate the interaction between caste and queerness.