Gender is a human construct. It feels nice to be genderless,’ says a character, one of the nine members of the non-binary community, who get to tell their stories of marginalisation, abuse and, most importantly, of hope and triumph in In Transit. The Amazon Prime Video series — produced by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti and directed by Ayesha Sood — is coming in for praise ever since it dropped last month. t2 chatted with the trio to know more.
What has the response been like to In Transit in general and specifically from the LGBTQIA+ community?
Ayesha Sood: We have done a bunch of screenings in Delhi and Bombay where there have been many NGOs and community members. It has been quite overwhelming. We did one with the Lalit Group, which employs a lot of transgender people. A transgender employee was present at the screening and when we finished, she came up to me. She was a young girl and had a lot of scarring from burns — she had obviously had a tough life. She was shaking and in tears and couldn’t speak. I just held her hand for a long time. That is one extreme reaction. Then, there are a lot of people who see their stories told in different ways through the various characters in the series. Overall, it has been amazing, overwhelming and humbling.
Zoya Akhtar: People have written to me, DMed me on Instagram and said extremely kind things, extremely moving things... that they are happy to be seen. Some of them are very personal messages that I wouldn’t reshare because they haven’t been made public.
What made you pick these nine individuals in particular to share their stories? Were they the ones who had the courage to be forthright without any fear of stigma?
Ayesha: We had a very long list of names that came up in our conversations and through our research. These are the nine, as you rightly said, who were able to tell us their stories. Also, these are the stories that narratively worked in our episodic structure. The themes that we wanted to talk about — universal themes of love and of your place in the world and the relationships that you have — these are the characters who had really, really strong stories in those narrative notes. They sort of made our job easy, in a sense.
Is there any one aspect of any story that has stayed on with you?
Zoya: There are so many, but the first one that comes to my mind is the love story of Madhuri (one of the founding members of the transgender-led troupe Dancing Queens) and her husband. It was so sweet and when you meet them together, you realise how lucky they are to have each other. That really moved me.
Reema Kagti: Across the board what hit me were not the differences but the similarities... how the human experience is eventually the same. People just want to be seen, heard, respected, to be able to live their lives, work, love....
Ayesha: There were so many parts of their stories that didn’t even make it to the final cut. They are all moving, amazing and transformative. All the stories in In Transit move me in different ways. But one of the stories that has cut across a lot of people in a lot of places is Tina’s story.
Apart from these nine stories, what kind of research did you seek from the community itself, one which is so misrepresented and misunderstood?
Ayesha: We spent a lot of time in research first, educating ourselves and learning about the complexities and the nuances of the community... whether it is to do with their politics, their legal rights, their mythologies.... We did modules where we spoke to different people in different fields. Our research team itself had members from the LGBTQIA+ community. That is how we got to meet a lot of people who we eventually cast in the series. And honestly, even after the show is out, the conversation continues.
Was there a balance to be achieved in keeping these stories organic and free-flowing and allowing them to speak from their hearts, and yet rein them in sometimes to keep it within the larger narrative structure of the show? Such content often runs the risk of manipulation....
Ayesha: I didn’t really feel like we were walking on a tightrope. When we were having conversations with the nine individuals in the stories, we built a certain trust and relationship with them. The idea was that we allow them to talk and free flow in the conversation. That is the only way in which they could fearlessly, and without hesitation, talk about themselves. But eventually, it is on the edit table that you craft that story.
I didn’t feel like we were limiting them in any way. We were very mindful that we should be an open space for them to share whatever they wanted to and also not share what they didn’t want to.
Reema: Zoya and I were not on set while recording these conversations, Ayesha was. We knew that Ayesha is such a purist that there would be no way in which she would manipulate anything. We knew that she would treat every subject and every character with the respect and dignity they deserve.
Reema and Zoya, the seed of making a documentary on the community was laid as a result of your casting real-life trans actor Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju as a trans character in Season 2 of Made in Heaven. What about that strand spoke to you?
Zoya: The fact that when we started writing it, we realised how little we knew about this community and how to write about characters belonging to this community. Meher (Trinetra’s character) was a pretty specific trajectory — her arc in the show was one-dimensional compared to In Transit as a series. But even after making Made in Heaven 2, we felt we knew nothing. We then started interviewing women, and we realised that what we knew about them was a result of what we projected onto that character. It was our lens of how we see them as opposed to what they want, what their experience is, their fantasy and how they would like their life to pan out. It was while we were doing these interviews that we realised that this needs its own space. These women, these characters telling their own stories need to have their own space and they need to tell their own stories. So, the core of it stemmed from the fact of how little I knew and how much I needed to educate myself.
Reema: When Zoya and I were writing Made in Heaven, we interviewed a lot of people. There were stories of such human resilience... not just of the people who are going through this, but also their families. The people we spoke to, half the number had their family’s support and the other half didn’t. It is a space where people are so stigmatised that we felt that something like In Transit needed to be done. There is very little of these kind of stories out there and we wanted to change that.
Aamir Khan’s Sitaare Zameen Par takes a significant step forward by casting neurodivergent people to play neurodivergent characters. Would you count that as a big shot in the arm for inclusivity in the Indian creative space?
Reema: I would say that the situation has improved marginally, but we still have a long way to go.
Zoya: I think it is much better than what it was. Previously, the representation of certain communities wasn’t up to the mark. In fact, there was misrepresentation. I think people are kind of course-correcting. There is a certain awareness and it will only get better. I am very hopeful.
With Angry Young Men and now In Transit, you have made a seamless transition into unscripted content. Zoya and Reema, what prompted you to want to explore this genre?
Reema: We both watch a lot of unscripted content. We love documentaries, it is a very different kind of storytelling. ‘Why not documentaries?’ was really the question, especially now when we have platforms willing to put them out and a space that one can distribute them in... there are studios to fund this kind of storytelling. We can now tell stories in the format they deserve to be told. Earlier, they couldn’t be told because they didn’t lend themselves to a commercial, theatrical venture. There are so many stories to tell out of India that are so unique. I hope more of them get produced.
There is a lot of othering in the world happening right now. What aspect of exclusion bothers you the most, both as humans and as creative people?
Zoya: Everyone is complicit in it, you know. I can’t sit here and claim a higher moral ground and say only other people other. I don’t mean everyone does it... I just mean that othering involves both large strokes as well as smaller nuances. Then there are microaggressions. The more awareness we put out there, the more we see somebody else with an equal lens, the better.
Reema: ‘Othering’ is an interesting choice of a word. That is because when we had our first meeting with Ayesha, we had discussed that removing otherness was the only intent of this series. That was really its starting point. I do feel that films, documentaries, any kind of pop culture, can influence society and change things for the better.
Ayesha: Othering, bullying, picking on or using lazy language is complacent and lazy, but it is also inbuilt... it is easy to do it. It can be rectified, like Reema said, with the effect of popular culture, but also through families and parenting. I see my niece and find her generation more on top of their language and way more on top of how they treat other people, especially those who are not like them. I wouldn’t even say it is about being woke... I think they are just cooler than the rest of us. We need to catch up.