You May Have Missed Watching Indian Television's First Lesbian Romance In Years

 

 

Sharmistha could be your average girl-next-door. The kind who will throw a withering look at aunts pestering her to get married and storm out of the room. One who will warily dismiss the mother's 'chosen' boys as just 'okay'. Then one day, her one great love will waltz into her life as an embarrassingly cheesy ballad starts
playing in the background and an unaccounted for gust of wind blows her hair into a messy circle.
Have you come across a Sharmistha on an Indian television channel?

Well, of course. They are there by the dozens, modelling dupattas and great shampoos, and propagating the great benefits of overnight eye shadow, karva chauth, the north Indian male and virginity.


Now what if we told you, this great love of Sharmistha's life is a woman?
You can hear half the TV-watching country go, "What? Why can't these Americans ever show a proper Indian? You know, not a nerd who can't get laid, a suspected terrorist or now, a lesbian?"
If the morality of Indian television is anything to go by, the hero or the heroine can only have a same sex partner if the serial's budget can no more afford the five-centuries-old dadiji and the writers have to make her die of a conceivable tragedy.

But hey, no one died, no ears were damaged in ear-splitting wailing and we got to watch a 45-minute show which had two women struggle with their attaction for each other, concluding with them ending up together. And that strange thing happened - when you watched an Indian serial and didn't want to put most of its protagonists on a plane to Bermuda in order to protect sanity and good taste in the human world.

Huffpost India.