How 'LSD' makes us rethink honor killings in Indian cinema

In India’s first major digital film "Love Sex and Dhoka", aka LSD, which is currently in cinemas, young director Dibakar Banerjee, "lets his rather maverick lens witness the honor killings of two young lovers, something that hasn’t usually been depicted so starkly in a film culture where miles of film-reel have otherwise been dedicated to 'izzat' or 'aabroo' and complications thereof," writes Vikram Phukan, on the topic of honor killings in Indian cinematic history.

He's talking about a practice that's still alive but hasn't been squarely addressed by film till now, because it's been shaded under poetic notions of respect and honor in the narrative.

Honor killings, in which people murder their own relatives to protect the family name because of "bigotry, condoned by clan elders, or panchayats, or parents, or by the power-consumed political class," are the subject of Phukan's interesting essay. 

His article traces cinematic honor killings in Indian film -- from TV soap opera sensationalism to Indian film classics such as Abrar's "Alvi’s Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam," "Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak" and more recently a Vishal Bhardwaj favorite called "Omkara," based on Shakespeare's Othello but set in rural India.

Phukan wants to remind us that "although ours is a cinema that’s self-righteous and indignant over many things, it never actually pushes the envelope when it comes to the kind of reality that would make us squirm in our seats... It is impossible to take these films seriously or even feel any kind of moral umbrage at what can only be termed 'exploitation flicks'."

This is where "LSD" scores, he thinks.

"The apologists for mainstream cinema do not think that Bollywood can affect social change, maybe only spark off a candle-light vigil or two. Maybe 'LSD'’s trailblazing is just grist for the mills as we waft in our cosmopolitan bubble, and watch our films in plastic multiplexes, wolfing down giant vats of fake food (called popcorn). Sometimes when you think of all this talk of izzat and abroo, Indian cinema has nothing to show for it, naught. Zilch. All we get are sugar-coated ‘all izzz well’ multi-vitamin doses or candy-flossed tales of jehadis.

"India is a country with an underbelly, and cinema doesn’t dare venture into that orifice which makes Mr Banerjee’s work here remarkable, which is not to say the film itself is a masterpiece, but that it is a significant work of art that must find its audience, and provoke, not titillate. He’s going to grab the so-called stalwarts of mainstream cinema by the scruff of their necks and teach them a trick or two. Maybe the new film "Land Gold and Women" (from the Urdu expression zan zar zameen -- considered closely linked to the perception of a man’s honor) set in an Indian Muslim context in Britain will add to this new paradigm shift. Or not. The director Avantika Hari is yet to find a distributor in India."

Vikram Phukan blogs at FilmImpressions.com; watch the "LSD" trailer on YouTube.