Falguni pathak gay

With her floppy boy-cut, boxy jackets and virtuous high pitch, Falguni Pathak was the queer icon we didn’t know we needed. And if her personal style was my first encounter with androgyny, her music videos were my initiation into non-normative sexuality. She is also recognised as a ‘Queer Icon’ and referred to as the “Indian Madonna” an outcome of her unconventional dressing style (androgynous) and her attempts to destigmatise homosexuality in the early s.

The following article looks at Falguni Pathak’s musical career and her rise to fame. In her musical career, two aspects are considered. She wore a white pant suit for one of her videos! She used gender neutral terms in most of her songs to identify her (symbolic) lovers like Piya / Sanam etc. Talking about some unknown facts, Falguni is extremely private about her personal life and likes to keep it hush-hush.

She is reportedly involved in philanthropic work, like raising funds for various organisations through her performances. Despite being the “Queen of Dandiya,” she never wears “Ghagra Choli” costume. In , Mangal Entertainment, and 3rd Rock Multimedia signed her for a huge amount of ₹ crores for Navratri. She has made appearances in TV shows like- Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah, Kaun Banega Crorepati, Star Dandiya Dhoom, and Comedy Nights With Kapil.

Our listening practices are discursively constructed. In the sonic landscape of India, in particular, the way in which we listen and what we hear are often normative, produced within hegemonic discourses of gender, class, caste, region, and sexuality. Complementing these posts, the accompanying photographs offer glimpses of gendered community formation, homosociality, the pervasiveness of sound technology in India, and the discordant stratified soundscapes of the city.

This series opens up for us the question of other contexts in India where sound, gender, and technology might intersect, but, more broadly, it demands that we consider how sound exists differently in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Afghanistan. How might we imagine a sonic framework and South Asia from these locations? To read all of the posts in the forum, click here.

The late s was a pivotal time for activism around queerness in India. A tomboyish singer with a high-pitched voice, Pathak shot to fame with her debut album Yaad Piya Ki Aane Lage in the same year that Fire was released in India. Her performances mobilize disparate, even contradictory, signs of gender and sexuality at once, inviting us to examine the relationship between visuality and aurality in constructing queerness.

The s boom in the music industry was facilitated by the spread of satellite television, which gave non-film singers a new platform and a new set of audiences. The singer-as-pop-star was a common trope in early Indipop music videos Kvetko. But Pathak dressed very differently than other pop stars. She is the most sought-after vocalist for Navratri festivities in Mumbai each year.

The women in her audience dress more conventionally and more elaborately, in saris, salwaar kameez, and ghaghra-cholis.

Talking about some unknown facts, Falguni

They dance in circles, performing recognizable garba moves. Meanwhile, Falguni Pathak saunters around the stage, engaging cheerfully with her fellow musicians and fans. They draw huge crowds unconcerned with the apparent mismatch between sound and image in her star persona. She tends to be as immersed in the devotional songs she sings as her audience. But her movements, plain clothes, and floppy hair-style make her look more like the male percussionists who accompany her, rocking and whipping their heads from side to side as they keep the beat, than the middle-class women clapping and singing along.

Performative traditions of mimicry and cross-dressing abound in India. The very casualness of her look, the fact that she dresses in t-shirt and trousers in all of her public appearances, suggests that this is not a temporary or theatrical adoption of a gender role. When asked in interviews why she eschews traditionally feminine clothing, Pathak always responds that she never has worn anything other than pants and t-shirts and is comfortable as she is.

There were certainly other pop stars in the s whose musical performances had masculine elements to them. Pathak sounds charming and benign in her songs and interviews, but she does not dress the part. But even that is difficult to pin down. She either evades questions about relationships or simply states that she is single. Where some celebrities come out publicly or keep alive innuendoes about their sexuality Singh , she treats it as a non-issue.

To be clear, my argument is not so much that Falguni Pathak looks or sounds queer. The latter point is as hard to prove as the former is easy. She sings in a traditional idiom, of traditional themes. This becomes apparent when we remember that the s was a period not just of economic liberalization but of vibrant queer activism as well. But it did more than that, too.