Aryaman Kakkar's Archive

  The first time I felt like this, I was in the 7th grade. In a tent in a national park, surrounded by tigers and cricket warnings of the night and what lurked in the bush. I had an analog phone for emergencies and I called up my parents, crying quietly about wanting to be taken home. I didn't want to wake the others and let them see me like this. The second time I felt like this, it was a different 7th grade, and I was being left in a boarding school. They're an object of pride where I come from so take it with a pinch of salt, yeah? It was my first night alone in a dorm of nine other boys, and all of us could hear each other sniffling in the dark. We pretended we couldn't hear each other. The illusion shouldn't break, at all costs. I still called, crying, hiding, wanting to be back home. Until one day the tears stopped. Then the feeling ebbed away like paper boats in a rainstorm, crushed by the water and swept downstream. I still hid everything. Words leave scars and ...

  Aligarh is a deeply nuanced yet confusing film. As it follows the story of Professor Siras, it does so through the investigative lens of court proceedings and a journalist - Deepu Sebastian of the Indian Post. It is filled with powerful moments of pathos, where Prof. Siras’ anxieties, fears, and traumas are palpable and grip you through the screen, capturing the anxieties of the LGBTQ+ community. At the same time, a majority of the movie takes the form of a self-congratulatory, masturbatory narrative as heterosexual men are lauded for their work in fighting for gay rights, all the while not explicilty showing any scenes of queer solidarity on screen. In this paper, I shall attempt to explore how the straight male gaze dilutes the queer storyline of Aligarh, instead turning it into the story of how cis-het men have a saviour complex, and require validation about the same at every stage in the film.  The “male gaze,” a term coined in 1975 by film theorist Laura Mulvey, descri...

P urab aur Paschim firmly establishes itself as the opposition and antithesis to Katherine Mayo’s Mother India . By consistently linking Western culture and Western nationalism with symbols of ‘debauchery’, Purab aur Paschim demonises Western culture and valorises Indian nationalism. To see how the movie’s nationalism is an exercise in narcissism, we must first establish two things - the demonisation of the West, and the valorisation of India.  The beginning of the movie establishes the trope of demonising the West. Set in the fight for Independence in 1947, the initial scenes are monochrome, representative of Britain’s oppressive rule over India. This oppression is transformed into an agent of Western corruption as Harman betrays a beloved freedom fighter at the opportunity of winning reward money, concretising Britain and - metonymically - Western’s culture corruptive effects on Indians. Harman running away with Omkar to London seals the corrupt deal.  For the next one and ...

I first travelled to Varanasi in 2015. We had flown in to Kashi as group of music students on 8 th April to witness the Sankat Mochan Sangeet Samaroh, one of the oldest music festivals in India. My teacher, who had grown up studying music in Varanasi, showed us the city through local eyes: rasgullas at a corner shop in a gali; international tourists gawking at dilapidated havelis as we made our way to the mandir; boat rides at the ghat where we would see the Ganga aarti from the water, hundreds of diyas and their wavy reflections glimmering in the dark.  This is the Banaras that Simar Preet Kaur speaks of in her Nat Geo Traveller article “The Musical Sounds of Varanasi”. She regales her story of meeting many musicians and her interaction with sound and music wherever she went. It never transformed into a cacophony for her. Rather, each musician remained a vacuum universe from step to step as Kaur made her way down to the ghat.  My Varanasi was full of smells, not all of them ...

I feel homesick for you. I don't want to tell you this because I'm afraid you will call it emotional dependency. That you will not feel the same way.  I have felt this way since yesterday, the moment you left my nani's home and went back to your own. This ache in my heart that I felt only twice before: the first two times my parents left me at a boarding school in the hills which would become a gated hell in the years to follow.  I lie. If it was a hell, then I felt it everytime. I learnt to numb the pain I don't want to numb it this time.  Is this what love feels like? Finding home in another? Feeling it in their laugh and the way you touch me like I'm perfection. You wrote it in words. You called me perfect. Ink has touched me so deeply and i can see it taking the form of your scrawl which I saw for the first time with those words. "You're perfect. " What a way to be introduced to the hand writing i want to see for the years to come. On post it notes...