Badnam Basti (83 minutes version)

SynopsisPrem Kapoor's debut is considered India's first queer film. The artfully crafted musical melodrama, an adaptation of Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena's 1957 novel of the same name (published in English under the title A Street With 57 Lanes), revolves around a love triangle. The cunning truck driver and bandit Sarnam Singh saves the beautiful Bansari from being raped. They fall in love, but their future together is destroyed when he is thrown into prison for a petty offense. After his release, Sarnam searches for Bansari, unaware that she has fallen victim to human traffickers. During his search, he meets the attractive, younger Singh Shivraj and hires him as a bus cleaner. An intimate relationship develops between them.

In 2019, the film curators Simran Bhalla and Michael Metzger drew our attention to the print in our archive, likely the only extant copy of the film. This is because BADNAM BASTI only saw the light of day briefly in 1971, only to disappear immediately afterwards. It is likely that the Indian censorship authorities deemed the first 132-minute cut of the film, which is now considered lost, to be harmful to minors because it dealt with homosexuality and human trafficking. Only the cut version from the Arsenal Film Archive (83 min) and an incomplete but longer picture and sound negative from the NFDC - National Film Archive of India have survived.

As part of the digital restoration three versions were created. These are derived from the film's surviving analog materials: the 35mm picture negative (103 min., incomplete) and sound negative (112 min.) from the National Film Archive of India (NFDC-NFAI), as well as the unique 35mm positive print (83 min.) from the Arsenal archive. The missing first act in the picture negative was replaced in all three versions by the first act of the positive print.

83 minutes – This short version was presumably produced in 1971 for international distribution and corresponds to the positive print in the Arsenal archive.
112 minutes – In 1978, the film received a U-rating from the censorship board. The length of the sound negative largely corresponds to this documented version. Due to the missing first act in the negative and the cuts in the positive print, this version contains 4 minutes of sound without a picture.
108 minutes – In this version, which is considered the main version for distribution, the part without a corresponding picture has been shortened.

‘I thirst for you’: the inside story of Badnam Basti, India’s first queer film The Guardian, 12.2024

The digital restoration was made possible by a grant from the Cultural Preservation Program of the German Federal Foreign Office.

Alternative titleBadnaam Basti

Alternative titleDie verrufene Straße

Alternative titleInfamous Neighbourhood

DirectorPrem Kapoor

CountryIndia

Year1971

LanguageHindi