『A Story of Two Women Fighting Against the Social Taboo of Homosexuality in Nepal: Repressed Love and Conflict』
🎥 Film Overview
🎬 Title: Soongava: Dance of the Orchids (सुनगाभा, 2012)
🌍 Country: 🇳🇵 Nepal
🎞️ Genre: Drama / Romance
🗓️ Produced and Aired: 2012
⏳ Runtime: 90 minutes
📢 Director: Subash Koirala
🖋️ Screenplay: Subash Koirala
👩💼 Cast: Deeya Maskey – Diya
Nisha Adhikari – Kiran
🧩 In-Depth Story Exploration (Spoilers Included)
🌸 The Bud of Love Veiled in Dance and Friendship
The relationship between Diya and Kiran begins against the backdrop of art and youth that they both share.
- The Connection of Dance: Diya is an elegant and delicate woman who dreams of becoming a traditional Nepali dancer, while Kiran is deeply captivated by her dancing. Dance is the only legitimate outlet for expressing their repressed feelings. Kiran's gaze on Diya's dance carries intense affection and desire beyond mere collegial admiration.
- Contrast in Personalities:
- Diya: Diya tends to conform to traditional family expectations (arranged marriage), struggling with inner conflict and anxiety. She is constantly torn between conformity and self-denial.
- Kiran: Depicted with an androgynous style, Kiran is relatively firm and active in expressing her emotions and identity. She symbolizes freedom and liberation and plays the role of the catalyst for change in Diya's life.
- From Friendship to Romance: Their relationship begins in the safe space of friendship, but over time, Kiran's assertiveness and Diya's internal confusion lead to a forbidden romance. This journey reflects the emotional trajectory commonly experienced by queer individuals in Nepal, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness and acceptance.
🧱 Barriers to Love: Tradition, Family, and Pregnancy
The love between the two women faces multiple barriers in the form of Nepal's strict moral concepts and traditional values.
- The Burden of Arranged Marriage: Diya's arranged marriage brings a decisive crisis to their relationship. For Diya, marriage is an obligation to fulfill family expectations, and a fateful compromise where she has to abandon her true desires forever. Her act of choosing Kiran and returning the engagement ring to her fiancé is her boldest and most dangerous moment of self-liberation.
- Social Isolation: When Diya chooses to live with Kiran, rejecting her family's expectations, the two women face intense anger, hatred, and physical threats from the family and the town. They are cast outside the safety net of society, becoming isolated and vulnerable.
- Melodramatic Element (Pregnancy): The fact that Diya is pregnant with her fiancé's child complicates and tragically deepens their relationship. This event makes their love not just an issue of identity, but also a challenge to the existing family structure and reproductive order, blocking any potential escape from reality. While this melodramatic device has been critiqued by some as a cliché, it plays a pivotal role in driving the two women’s fate toward extreme tragedy.
💃 Hope and Harsh Reality
Soongava delivers a message about the strength of love while showing the harsh realities the characters face.
- Orchid (Soongava) Rarity and Beauty: The orchid is rare, unique, and beautiful, symbolizing something rare. Diya and Kiran's same-sex relationship in conservative Nepali society is a 'non-normative' love, something that should be precious and rare, but at the same time, vulnerable. Their love is like the orchid: beautiful yet hidden from the societal gaze and constantly under threat.
- Dance The Outlet for Repressed Expression: Diya, being a traditional Nepali dancer, uses dance as her only socially acceptable outlet for expressing her emotions and identity. Kiran's admiration for Diya's dancing deepens their relationship through art, symbolizing how taboo desires are metaphorically released through artistic expression.
- Tragic Fate: Just like the orchid, which withers when unprotected, the tragic fate of their love reflects the theme of fragility in the film’s title. It means that the most beautiful things can be the most easily crushed.
Soongava: Dance of the Orchids is a significant film that portrays the courage and pain of two women who break cultural taboos and pursue true love, while documenting the conflict between tradition and change during Nepal’s modernization.
🎯 Personal Rating
💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥
⭐ Rating: ★★★☆
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