For me, an iconic scene in Hansal Mehta's biopic on Professor Srinivas Ramchandra Siras, titled Aligarh, is a fleeting snapshot of Siras' démodé dressing table with a distinguishable blue jar of what can only be coconut oil sitting on top of it. It is only natural to associate routine objects we encounter on a daily basis, to personal experiences, people, and places. Spotting the blue jar of coconut oil instantly transported me to a shoebox corner of my ancestral house that belongs, exclusively, to my grandmother. In particular, it conjured the image of my grandmother's soaring mahogany cabinet where a host of items of daily use sit proudly, commanding a space they know is off-bounds. Among these items, below a rack of neatly stacked siparas and a tin box of cookies that now house knitting supplies, is an identical blue jar of coconut oil; it stands in stark contrast to the bashful peach tint of the cough syrup and the unobtrusive yellow of the petroleum jelly, pale in front of the greasy, blue, plastic frame. As I walk back home from the theatre, I fixate on that scene which is, admittedly, just one among the many passing visuals in a drama that produces far more compelling and profound vignettes from the kaleidoscope of one human's experiences. I think about the blue jar, my grandmother, a woman mired by loneliness, and by that association, a woman, perhaps, in a far better position to understand Siras' anguish.
Siras' solitary hours spent singing along to the tunes of old Hindi songs hit home, finding a parallel in my grandmother's imagined conversations with the politicians on TV who leave her largely unimpressed. On any given day, you can pass her by, lying in her signature foetal position on the sprawling divan in the living room, wagging a frail finger at the TV screen split into six boxes, asserting her political agency. On the surface, both these scenes generate a laughter born out of endearment – a cursory reaction from otherwise well-meaning individuals. After all, who wouldn't love an old man smitten by antiquated love ballads, or an old woman bursting with opinions on the latest parliamentary debate? It's the stuff of tea-break conversations, points of reminiscences for the next grand family get-together. However, if one were so inclined to do a deeper character study, they would find the veneer splitting to expose pitch-black isolation. Siras' song sessions, and my grandmother's parley with her political adversaries are, after all, coping mechanisms to stave off loneliness.
And so, in being able to associate an artefact from Siras' home, an inanimate object representative of his simple life preoccupied with music and poetry (and hardly any activism of any sort, as one would expect in a stereotypical narrative), with my own grandmother's struggle with loneliness, I was, perhaps, able to reach the heartfelt message the movie tries to convey all along. The sympathetic portrayal of the homosexual professor who was caught in an act of consensual sex in a 'sting' operation, suspended from his job, reinstated and finally died in a suspected suicide, has been termed a conspiracy to malign the reputation of a city, home to a renowned university, and the values and traditions held sacred by both. The spokesperson of the Millat Bedari Muhim Committee (MBMC), a fringe group, has in true chest-thumping style, declared that a protest carried out by members of his organisation deterred local cinema halls from running the movie, and it's true, an "unofficial" ban on the movie was instituted in the city. In a letter written to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, members of MBMC expressed their concern over people permanently associating the city and the university with homosexuality, which, they said, would discourage future enrolments and tarnish the international image of the city. Another voice particularly loud within this backlash is that of the mayor of the city, Shakuntala Bharti, who, earnestly devoted to protecting "cows from slaughter and Hindu girls from love jihad" and sincerely petrified of the Mughal Raj resurfacing in India, has also voiced her concern over the title of the film. Regurgitating a done-to-death argument, the mayor spoke of the "tameez" and "tehzeeb" intrinsic to the moral fabric of the city, that would be stained should the world learn that "people like" Siras live in Aligarh, unrepentant and in brazen disobedience to its social mores.
On February 19 2016, hardly a week prior to the controversy surrounding the movie, the mayor, flanked by several right-wing activists, demonstrated in front of the office of the Senior Superintendent of Police demanding to file an FIR against the contractor of the canteen at the AMU medical college for, allegedly, serving beef biryani. Beef is banned in the state. While the proctor and other official representatives of the university have jumped to the institute's defence and blamed internal politics for these rumours, the local leaders of the BJP were quick to fan the flames of the controversy and use it to strengthen their propaganda against the status of AMU as a minority institution, part of a targeted, nation-wide campaign to saffronise education. The University takes the battle of protecting its minority status extremely seriously and is devoted to resisting the right-wing forces of the ruling government that seek to bring it down. However, Hansal Mehta's movie has unwittingly forged a curious comradeship between these two erstwhile warring factions, which have now allied to cry themselves hoarse against the title of the movie. Beneath the political antagonism, the hardliners against Aligarh, whether adherents of the saffron brand of fanaticism or the green, have a lot more in common than they care to admit. They both imagine a world purged of 'moral turpitude' in all its forms, and homosexuality is pretty high up on their list.