The curious contradiction of male muscularity in queer movies, from Dostana to Badhaai Do

Queer Gaze is a monthly column where Prathyush Parasuraman examines traces of queerness in cinema and streaming — intended or unintended, studied or unstudied, reckless or exciting.

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It is a curious contradiction to see how muscularity is insistently present in some of the landmark queer movies —  Dostana, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, and most recently, Badhaai Do.

Rajkummar Rao portrays Shardul — a gay man, a closeted police officer who had to let go of his dream to be a body builder in order to take up a safer job with pensions and protection, one that his family could materially hack at and live by. But he keeps the protein-powdered lifestyle going on the side, his masculinity burnished by being the only man in a household of homebound women, his police uniform taut over his bulging biceps.

The lithe Ayushmann Khurrana, the swole Ayushmann Khurrana, the tight underwear wound around John Abrahamn’s sun-soaked body emerging from the Miami shore — this image of the muscular, toned gay man is writ large on the queer genre.  

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This is not an unusual trend, and certainly is not endemic to India. The “men’s physique” magazines, for example, were a space for producing softcore in the US of the 1950s and 1960s, disguising homoerotic desire as bodybuilding, avoiding the moral censure of the censors. This explains how a gay photographer, filmmaker, and later pornographer,   James Bidgood cut his teeth in magazines like Muscleboy, The Young Physicque, and Demi Gods. There is something seething under the surface — desire. It is also why these magazines would later go to great lengths to hetersoexualise the muscle by adding women models on the side, dictating whose gaze the muscles are meant for.  

In India, this took more time. “The lean, muscular, ideal body type, has emerged among middle-class Indian men” in the last decade, argues Michiel Baas in his book Muscular India: Masculinity, Mobility & The New Middle Class. Based on interviews with bodybuilders, he notes Om Shanti Om, and Shah Rukh Khan’s “freshly baked abs” unveiled in the satirical item song ‘Dard-e-disco’ as a culturally important moment for masculinity in India. This was bolstered by Men’s Health magazine which launched its Indian edition the same year, platforming ripped non-celebrities as cover models. There was a sudden spurt in gym memberships. Another spurt followed after the release of Aamir Khan’s Ghajini the following year.    

But when this muscularity is utilised in the context of queerness, suddenly, the tension inherent in it is made apparent. That Shardul in Badhaai Do is a cop — the same institution that before the repeal of Section 377 were involved in exhibitions of harassment like the Matunga Racket — makes his muscularity doubly tense. He confesses, “Humari phatti hai police se" [We are scared of the police].

The writer and director of Badhaai Do have noted in interviews that in the initial drafts of the film, the character of Shardul was a generic male character. His obsession with his muscularity was added later to make his character more unsteady — they wanted to give him the markers of heterosexuality and strength, but also contradict that by giving him a sensitive personality, one without agency, one whose muscle is mere armoury. That Shardul acquired this desire to go to the gym from a former, older lover is also telling — the cascading notion of the “gym gay."

When you see Shardul flexing his arms, staring at the mirror as his muscles emerge taut from under his oiled skin, you can see he is beaming in the cocooned afterglow of desire.

Here is a man who loves watching wrestling matches, and wanted to become a bodybuilder. This desire — to watch toned men pummel — is complicated, or made exciting, by queerness. It is a show of strength, a testing of the limits of the body but suddenly, when you bring sexuality into it, it can also become a site of producing desire. When Shardul sees his young nephew watching wrestling on television, his first instinct is fear — that his nephew, too, might be gay. Because in his head, he is unable to separate viewing wrestling for desire from viewing wrestling the way one does cricket or any other desexualised sport.  

As a course correction, perhaps, Baas notes in his book how the personal trainers insist on the gym being a desexualised space, uncomfortable around questions sexualising their workplace — which shows like Four More Shots Please!, Sex/Life, and Hunting Season do not help with — because the moment desire is inserted, complications arise for them as their job is to glare at the cuts of the muscles, touch the body till it forms the necessary shapes, flexes with the necessary intensity.  

Desire, that fickle thing, is embedded in the very body that both provokes and provides desire. You cannot yank it out of the body and place it in an airtight container as per your will. It bleeds, leaks, and flows out of the smaller pore, like a slippery octopus. All we can then do is “linger, pause, and explore” in its shadow, as Baas notes, waiting for the queerness to reveal itself. For where there is desire, queerness has already unfurled its raucous flag.  

Badhaai Do is playing in cinemas.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a critic and journalist, who writes a weekly newsletter on culture, literature, and cinema at  prathyush.substack.com.

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