From Marginalization to Mythologization: Navigating Androgyny in Navarasa

Abstract

This research examines how Indian cinema has depicted androgyny with a particular focus on Navarasa (2005) directed by Santosh Sivan. It places the movie within the broader framework of gender and sexuality, questioning the role of cinematic texts in working as cultural apparatuses in the stabilisation and destabilisation of normative identity constructions. It is in this context that Navarasa is important in terms of foreshadowing androgyny as a spectacle or as an aberration, but as a lived-in reality. This research explores the ways in which the movie disrupts categories of gender in their normativity and the politics of recognisability through critical discourse and thematic analysis. It attracts attention to the interdependence of mythological practices and modern experiences, highlighting the fact that cultural discourse may legitimize and marginalize non-normative identities at the same time. The reading also takes into account how silence, erasure, and acts of recognition within the movie reflect wider social processes involved in the acceptance or denial of gender variance within Indian society. The results show that Navarasa presents a unique form of cinematic ethics in refusing to domesticate androgyny into binary categories and tokenistic acts of inclusion instead of providing more inclusive and empathetic portraits. The research confirms that Navarasa represents androgyny as lived experience, not spectacle, and not exception, but subversion of binary thinking that dominates Indian cinema. The study proposes the relevance of the cinema in the display of shared imaginings of gender and sexualities and the necessity to take on more encompassing methods of representation that are not tokenistic but transformative.