Interview by Paul Salfen and Anya Ahuja
Naveen Gavaskar is a self-effacing, soft-spoken doctor with a boisterous mother, Megha, seemingly perfect sister, Arundhathi, and quiet father, Archit. The Gavaskars are outwardly accepting of Naveen’s sexuality but have never had to confront it in practice. While worshiping at a temple, Naveen meets Jay Kurundkar, a white man adopted by two Indian parents. Naveen is slowly charmed and softened by Jay’s sincerity and confidence. They fall in love—even as Naveen avoids telling his family about Jay.
One afternoon, they run into Arundhathi’s husband, Manish, and an embarrassed Naveen describes Jayas a “friend”. The encounter precipitates a discussion in which Naveen admits that he, like Jay, dreams ofhaving a big Indian wedding. Now, Jay, who has no family of his own, must meet the Gavaskars. Thiscauses a collision between the family, Jay—who has his own insecurities—and Naveen, caught betweenwho he is with his family and who he is outside of it.
After comic misunderstandings, frank fights, and emotional revelations, the family falls apart, questioning everything. Naveen and Jay’s hard-won love makes each of the Gavaskars face the reality of their own relationships. And through a sweetly-woven reconciliation, they come together again to plan Naveen & Jay’s own big, Indian wedding.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
A NICE INDIAN BOY follows a gay Indian man who both dreams of – and fears – the big Indian wedding, the lavish and unashamed expression of love. It’s personal. After years of struggling to come out, I myself am getting married to a man. I’ve dreamt of it for a long time. Sadly, my family continues to resist. They’re scared and a little bewildered. A Hindu marriage ceremony between two men is inconceivable to my mother. But, as it turns out, we filmed one just a few months ago. We built a mandap and we guided two men around a fire. It is, to my knowledge, the first time a ceremony like that has been portrayed in a movie.
I grew up on larger-than-life straight weddings in Bollywood. I loved them desperately — and have grown also to resent them for their narrowness, for the fact that I was obsessed with stories I could never be part of. What do we get from participating in a culture that doesn’t entirely want us? Isn’t it a little embarrassing, anyway, the Bollywood version of love? Is it too fanciful to be truthful?
But the tug remains – because culture is a formidable anchor, especially when you are the child of immigrants. And Indian culture is centered in love, often on a grandiose scale. There are three different words in Hindi for love and literally every Bollywood movie is a romance. Characters in these movies fight their families and villains to protect their love. It’s a national preoccupation.
It was also illegal to be gay in India until 2018. When we planned the wedding ceremony in the movie, we reached out to Hindu priests across North America for help with the details. We were rejected by many, including one local priest who texted a slur. Making the movie meant we were facing my mother’s worst fears. We discovered why she was afraid and why we needed to do it anyway.
Despite everything, we decided to make this movie with humor, pluck and even a certain frothiness. Bollywood movies classically follow the “masala” formula — they make you laugh, cry and dance. We’ve dipped into this unrestrained aesthetic at certain points in the movie, as if to say: this is ours too. It was, in the end, so simple to ask an actor playing a Hindu priest to look at two men and say, “you are now one soul.” It was just play-acting in costumes — like any wedding.
I’m getting married in a few months. For now, my mother has asked me not to proceed. But the movie ends in a different, more fanciful way — it ends in my personal dream of family acceptance and belonging. – Roshan Sethi, DIRECTOR
SCREENWRITER’S STATEMENT
I read Madhuri Shekar’s play A NICE INDIAN BOY at the exact right time. My longtime boyfriend and I had just embarked on wedding planning. Gay weddings seem so enfolded into our society that it’s hard to remember that they are, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon. There are only so many examples on which we could model our own nuptials. And for James and me, two men of faith who hoped to wed in a traditional religious ceremony, there are even fewer. Picturing what that day might look like took imagination. We were asking our parents to stretch their own understanding of the possible. There were funny questions. “Is that allowed?” “Who comes down the aisle first?” But there were haunting questions too, moments when internalized homophobia made me wonder whether the whole undertaking was indulgent or silly or worse. Madhuri’s play depicted two men of a different faith from my own – they Hindu, me Christian. But she had captured something so specific and resonant to my own experience. Her characters asked the same questions, faced the same doubts, and finally, gave themselves the celebration they deserved. She lit a path forward for me.
I wrote my first draft of the screenplay adaptation in the early months of COVID lockdown. I was writing a film about a family meeting their gay son’s partner for the first time, trying their very best to adjust. I spent those months, coincidentally, sheltering in place with James’s parents and brothers in his childhood home. It was a material-rich environment, to say the least. Those months were an unsteady, scary time. But in our little bubble, there was a lot of laughter, too, and a lot of warmth. My in-laws were folding me in, and in getting to know me, they were coming to understand their own son more fully. It was a joyful, moving process. And I infused those feelings into the screenplay.
On a sunny day in New York City two years ago, James and I had our big, traditional gay wedding. And a few months later, on a set in Vancouver, my characters did, too. The movie that has resulted is about two men creating something new – making a model where there wasn’t one before. And it is about a family doing its best to stretch itself to include one more. It was Madhuri’s story first. Then it became my story, too. And now, I hope, so many others will recognize their own family and their own story in the film we made. And for those that don’t, hopefully we have lit a path forward. – Eric Randall, SCREENWRITER
PLAYWRIGHT’S STATEMENT
When I wrote the play ‘A Nice Indian Boy’, I was 25, and my parents were anxious to see me get married. Like, really anxious. Honestly I was kind of shocked. Why were my progressive parents suddenly so obsessive? So traditional? They wanted to set me up with all of these Nice Indian Boys, and as much as I hated that idea, I didn’t really know how to say no. After all, I did want to fall in love and get married one day – so why not trust in what worked for my parents?
But I couldn’t do it, and it made us fight. And fight and fight. So I did what I usually do when I can’t figure something out. I wrote a play about it.
Naveen, dear sweet Naveen, was the first character to enter my heart. I fell in love with Jay from the moment he appeared to me, much like Naveen did. Arundhathi sprung from my deepest core – my fears of what would happen if I “settled.” And the parents, Archit and Megha, were essentially my parents. I wrote them to understand them, to honor and defend their point of view, even as our daily phone calls dissolved me into tears. Writing this play helped me reconcile with my parents. When my Mom saw the first reading of the play, she cried, and promised me that she would stop looking for boys for me. (That promise lasted about a month. Bless her, she tried!)
I am so thrilled to see my play turn into this incredible feature film – one that captures everything I was trying to do, and makes it more. Better. Stronger. Richer. More breathtaking in every way. Eric and Roshan have infused so much of their personal histories, their values, and their passions into this adaptation. And how fortunate are we to have the most incredible cast in the world? To have two beloved queer actors embody our leads – roles that somehow were meant for them before any of us even knew it – is the most meaningful thing I can imagine.
And there’s something even more fitting about the play’s journey into a feature film, because I wrote it as an homage to one of the most iconic Bollywood films ever made – Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (or DDLJ.) DDLJ is the modern South Asian romance. The first 90 minutes of that 3-hour epic is about how the two leads fall in love. Most Hollywood movies would end there. But for Indians, falling in love is merely the start of our troubles. The second half of the film is the real heart of the story. The plot goes to extreme emotional highs and lows, as the lovers battle desperately to win the approval of their parents. For most desis, there is no real happy ending without the support of your family, and your community.
So taking DDLJ’s structure and making it queer was wholly intentional from the start. And I could not be happier to see A Nice Indian Boy firmly situated within the filmic legacy of DDLJ, to have these two movies in conversation with each other. Seeing Naveen and Jay sing “Tujhe dekha to ye jaanaa sanam…” to each other is shocking, subversive, delightful, and, if you know the context, the most romantic thing you can imagine. – Madhuri Shekar, PLAYWRIGHT
