Badnam Basti

Nitin Sethi, Amar Kakkad, Nandita Thakur

Originally believed lost and only rediscovered in 2019 (by accident!) in the archive of Berlin’s Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, Prem Kapoor’s pioneering melodrama was India’s first queer film. A key work of the Indian New Wave, it recently screened in the Barbican’s ‘Rewriting the Rules: Pioneering Indian Cinema after 1970’ season curated by Omar Ahmed.

Adapted from a 1957 novel by Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena, Badnam Basti (which translates to ‘neighbourhood of ill repute’) revolves around a complex love triangle between two men and a woman – truck driver and ex-bandit Sarnam (Nitin Sethi), Bansari (Nandiat Thakur), a beautiful woman Sarnam saved from assault, and Shivraj (Amar Kakkad), who works in a temple and is later hired by Sarnam. Defying norms, the story subtly but daringly addresses the characters’ bisexuality, a progressive theme that had to be smuggled into the narrative to pass through the strict censorship laws of the time.

Emerging at a time of profound political turmoil and cultural change, Badnam Basti reflects a shift towards modernity in Indian cinema, and pointed to the iconoclasm of Parallel Cinema and its ground-breaking unconventional representations.