Badnam Basti — India’s first film about gay love
1 min readNov 21, 2019
Lost since 1971, found in 2019.
India’s first film about queer love — Badnam Basti, made in 1971, and lost since, has been found in an archive in Berlin.
What a story to remake/revisit perhaps, and give it its due in the canon.
In 2016, when I wrote this story for Scroll.in, “The untold story of ‘Badnam Basti’, possibly India’s first gay movie,” there was no hope of ever finding it.
I had read both the Hindi novel एक सड़क सत्तावन गलियां by Kamleshwar and its English translation A Street With 57 Lanes as part of the research and found the narrative of homosexual love bristling with unspoken emotions.
Unfortunately, upon release, no one went to see Badnam Basti. Now the task of watching it, and bringing it to India is something worth trying for.
