Badnam Basti (1971): A small-town milieu in a ‘new cinema’ style

Abstract

ABSTRACT Badnam Basti (Prem Kapoor, 1971) has a legendary reputation as a lost queer classic from India. The movie was located at the Arsenal Film Archive in Berlin in late 2019 and has been seen by a wider audience only a few times (all online). This essay offers a close analysis of the movie. I argue that Badnam Basti depicts a distinctly local and regional culture of North-Indian homosociality in which the movie’s same-sex relation is only one component of erotic and kinship ties that include prominent space for a female character and encompass the gamut of gender roles. As such it has a unique place in histories of South Asian queer cinema. Stylistically, the movie departs from Hindi commercial cinema as well as the long take/long shot oriented, (neo-)realist-influenced Indian art cinema, forging a challenging film style with an allegiance to Hindi literary modernism, and to the ‘new wave’ experiments of its time. I conclude that Badman Basti invites the prospect of a new research agenda centered around several Hindi films released between 1969 and 1971, at the time referred in shorthand in film criticism simply as the ‘new cinema’. These films included those made with a commercial intent as well as those now canonized in histories of the Indian new wave as formally innovative Together these films constitute an interstitial moment in Hindi cinema criticism and practice when definitions of art, commercial and new wave cinema, were all in flux.