Memoirs/ autobiographies by the Indian LGBTQI+ community are a growing field, including Siddharth Dube’s No One Else: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex,'' Sunil Gupta’s Wish You Were Here: Memories Of A Gay Life, Hoshang Merchant’s The Man Who Would Be Queen, Vivek Tejuja’s So Now You Know: A Memoir of Growing up Gay in India and Laxminarayan Tripathi’s Me Hijra, Me Laxmi (translated from Marathi). Onir’s book is a welcome addition. “Imagine growing up in a world where you never heard stories about yourself... never present in cinema or TV, apart from being ridiculed,” Onir writes. His sensitive cinema is partly devoted to making the voice of gays and other marginalised people heard. He writes about how My Brother Nikhil, I Am and Shab, all with key LGBTQIA characters, were made when homosexuality was criminalised by law; ironically, after the Supreme Court decriminalised homosexuality in 2018, Onir’s We Are (on a gay former army officer) was refused an NOC by the Ministry of Defence. Yet, he is now making Pine Cone, “which is not seeking acceptance or approval from the heteronormative world.” He also discusses the challenges of making independent cinema, including nightmarish censors and distribution.

His first crush in Calcutta, at 17, was followed by a series of relationships and heartbreaks with men, some brief, some with men who betrayed him, others with men who had girlfriends or were soon to marry a girl. Although the false accusation (later withdrawn) of him molesting someone in 2011 scarred him deeply, his parents, sister, Sanjay Suri and his wife Ambika, his landlady, and many friends stood squarely by him. He felt vindicated when he won the National Award for Best Hindi Film for I Am in 2012. I would have traded a few of the relationships, to learn more about how his family dealt with his homosexuality; how Suri came to be his rock-solid producer, and the challenges of representation, casting heterosexuals as gays—but perhaps publishers deem otherwise. Certainly, a worthy book.

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 'Disclosure: Onir was a guest at World Cinema Amsterdam’s Soul of India, for which I was Curator in 2011, screening I Am.
'' I was Researcher on HIV for Siddharth Dube’s book No One Else: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex, 2015

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist. 
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com