Queering the rom-com: the rise of same-sex love in Bollywood

Abstract

This paper examines how same-sex love reconfigures the narrative and ideological structures of Bollywood romantic comedies, foregrounding the strategic function of humour as both a protective mechanism and a mediating device between cultural conservatism and anxieties around Western influence. Within a social world where queer desire is often cast as a threat to the moral structure of the Hindu household, humour provides a way to broach the subject without rupturing norms. Bollywood romantic comedies have historically functioned as tools of moral instruction, perpetuating dominant hierarchies even as they intermittently gesture towards alternative possibilities. Since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India in 2018, three films, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (Citation2019), Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (Citation2020), and Badhaai Do (Citation2022), have moved queer desire from the margins of this genre to its centre. Through close textual and scene-level analysis, this paper argues that none of the three departs meaningfully from the rom-com’s inherited conventions, the domestic tableau, the family opposition arc, the ritual scene, and the climactic speech, but instead rewires their moral architecture from within. Drawing on queer and postcolonial theory, the paper further shows that this acceptance is unevenly distributed, extended chiefly to protagonists who are upper-caste, Hindu, and affluent or aspirationally middle class, a pattern the paper reads as Bollywood’s Bollywoodisation of queerness rather than a queering of Bollywood, conditional inclusion offered in place of structural change. In doing so, the paper reflects a gradual reorientation of the genre towards more emotionally textured, if unevenly extended, portrayals of queer relationships within contemporary Indian cinema.