Dealing with Being HIV+ In India
By Shanti Wesley

My Brother Nikhil, filmmaker Onir’s directorial debut, is a simple yet groundbreaking movie. It's groundbreaking for mainstream Hindi cinema because its main character, Nikhil (Sanjay Suri), is a gay man diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. The movie does not ridicule or vilify Nikhil’s sexuality, and it does not completely define Nikhil by his sexuality or his HIV+ status. What is does, in a straightforward yet ultimately moving way, is present Nikhil as a complete person – a brother, son, friend, lover, athlete, not just a tokenized gay man – who is experiencing a crisis in his life.

Set in Goa in the late 80s/early 90s, the movie is framed as a mock documentary. It begins with interviews of Nikhil’s family: sister Anamika (Juhi Chawla), mother Anita (Lillette Dubey), and father Navin Kapoor (Victor Bannerjee). Nikhil’s story as a star athlete and a loved and loving family member unfolds through the reminiscences of his parents and sister. Dubey and Bannerjee expertly capture the parents’ grief, their guilt about their rejection of son, and their reluctance to talk publicly about what is still a difficult topic for them - their son’s illness. Their performances are subtle and heartbreaking and serve to ground the movie in a sense of non-filmi reality. Chawla, while warm and endearing, retains too many of her filmi mannerisms, and so doesn’t quite blend with Dubey’s and Bannerjee’s naturalistic acting.

	My Brother Nikhil Website

The film succeeds in large part thanks to Sanjay Suri’s performance as Nikhil. Suri does not play Nikhil as a one-note character defined by his sexuality, but as an affectionate, ambitious young man who also happens to be in a relationship with a man. He never resorts to clichés or insulting stereotypes about gay men, but offers instead a nuanced, compelling, performance. Suri’s performance and the film itself quietly challenge myths and stereotypes, not by hitting us over the head with a trite “gays are people, too” message, but by getting us to care deeply about Nikhil as an individual, not as just a symbol.

The movie follows Nikhil as he is diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, a disease that is barely understood and largely feared in the late 1980s. The consequences are swift and painful: Nikhil, a championship swimmer, is kicked off the state swim team (in a chilling moment, his teammates quickly scramble out of the pool as soon as he gets in to practice), and his parents, driven by shame and ignorance, reject him and kick him out of the house. His father actually beats him severely, and his mother says that she would have preferred that he’d died at birth.

Within three days of his diagnosis, Nikhil is arrested and forced to live in isolation. These are the film’s most harrowing sequences, perhaps even more painful than the scenes of Nikhil’s eventual decline with the onset of full-blown AIDS. According to the existing laws, Nikhil is confined to a rat-infested, decrepit shack; we can only imagine how his desolate surroundings exacerbate his hopelessness and grief.

Thanks to the constant support and organizing efforts of his sister Anamika and his partner Nigel (Purab Kohli), Nikhil wins a landmark court case and is released from isolation. The rest of the film charts Nikhil’s decline as his disease progresses. His parents Navin and Anita eventually overcome their anger and confusion and ask Nikhil to move back home. Onir spares us any melodramatic speeches, offering instead a quiet reconciliation between Nikhil and his parents that’s all the more powerful for its understatedness.

It’s interesting to note that we never find out how Nikhil becomes HIV+. We know that he did not contract the virus from his long-time partner Nigel because, after Nikhil is diagnosed, Nigel tests negative for the virus. Nikhil could have contracted the disease from another sexual partner (possibly a woman – the film doesn’t definitively rule out the possibility that Nikhil has had sex with women), through drug use, or from a tainted blood transfusion.

The director Onir claims that the ambiguity is strategic – he does not want to distract from the issue of what happens to someone after they’re diagnosed with HIV/AIDS by getting caught up in a discussion of how he or she contracts the virus. Onir wants to avoid common reactions to the “how did he get AIDS” question: if Nikhil contracted it from another sexual partner, perhaps a sex worker, it would negatively color our perception of him; we’d be able to blame him for his sickness. If he contracted the virus from a blood transfusion, it would make us view him more sympathetically, as an “innocent” victim.

Coming years after works like Philadelphia and Angels in America, My Brother Nikhil does feel a bit dated at times. But it is nevertheless a milestone for mainstream Indian cinema and an effectively moving film. Without becoming preachy or didactic, Onir makes us care deeply about Nikhil, not just because he’s a gay man or an AIDS patient, but because we recognize something of ourselves in Nikhil’s love for his partner and family and in his struggles to live and die with dignity.

All images courtesy My Brother Nikhil website