New Delhi: A remarkably progressive panel of National Film Awards jury on Thursday picked an intimate documentary exploring the contradictions in Indian society on the contentious subject of sex and featuring several steamy sequences, for best film on family values award.
Director Kaushik Mukherjee, or Q as he is popularly known, explores sensuality through India's curiously chequered history that marks both fantastic progression and violent repression in his film 'Love in India' that won the Rajat Kamal and Rs 50,000 at the 58th National Awards.
How do Indians have sex? Very silently, says the director as he speaks to friends, relatives, his live-in partner and mystics, and charts the course of what is a sensitive journey in India's heartland to unravel the complicated correlation between love and sex and people's changing perception about it over thousands of years.
Indians were the first to kiss on the mouth. Their romances are intertwined with their physical expressions. India is also the place where brides are burnt to death and sex education is a taboo before marriage and conjugal life is often repressed under layers of sheets in dark rooms in crowded homes.
A dancer curls her eyelashes, a man dressed as Lord Krishna touches up the blue paint on his face, a woman narrates a scarring experience as a weather beaten aged couple exchanges solemn vows of love before bursting into a fit of shy giggles – there are many scenes that define the film.
Rii, the live-in partner of Mukherjee, who plays a prominent role in the documentary, watches a video of herself making love to him as the film seeks answer to the degeneration of the art of sensuality from open expressionism from the time of the Kamasutra to a shadowy, wife-burning taboo in modern society.
"It’s good if you fall in love before marriage but it’s better if you fall in love after marriage," a woman interviewed by the director said.
At a time when the Indian film feature industry is locked in a battle of ideology with the Censor board over cleansing Indian films of vulgarity, the National Awards jury, that is traditionally more encompassing and liberal, has put its stamp of approval on the film by awarding it the best film on family values.
Mukherjee, a musician and former advertising professional, delves deep into the Indian psyche to expose the confusions that lodge there about sexuality and revives through narrative the ultimate Indian icons for eroticism – Radha and Krishna.
The film is also the director’s personal narrative and he treats it like a relationship. It had a world premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto in 2009 and Q, who put the film’s trailer on the Internet, quips "I'm like really worried. We are close to 300,000 hits for a documentary trailer, man!"
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