'Dostana' a bit of Bollywood daring

Abraham and Bachchan, both strapping matinee idols, have built their careers playing sensitive lovers and good sons, but in their upcoming film "Dostana" (Friendship) they are breaking with tradition, risking their carefully cultivated screen images and testing the sensibilities of Bollywood audiences.

"Dostana," which will have its worldwide theatrical release Friday, is the first big-budget mainstream Bollywood film to feature gay protagonists. But the movie has more in common with "Three's Company" than "Brokeback Mountain" or "Milk." That's because the characters aren't actually gay. They are heterosexual men pretending to be homosexuals so they can save on rent and share an apartment with a curvaceous and conspicuously single magazine editor, played by popular actress Priyanka Chopra.

Predictably, both fall in love with her but are forced to keep up the charade of being lovers themselves. The film, set in Miami, is a breezy romantic comedy, with what producer Karan Johar calls "a candy-floss take on homosexuality." But in a country where homosexuality is a criminal offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison, candy floss is cutting edge.

While police in India don't usually arrest people simply for being gay, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a law dating back to 1860, criminalizes even private, consensual sex between adults of the same sex. Subsequently, the law has pushed homosexuality underground and there are no reliable numbers on the gay population in India. In 2004, the National AIDS Control Organization pegged the number at a minimum of 2.5 million, but some media estimates suggest a much higher number, as many as 50 million out of India's total population of 1.13 billion.

Despite the numbers, the Indian gay story has rarely become fodder for film. Popular Hindi cinema has largely reduced gay characters to comic sidekicks or, on occasion, villains. India's first bona fide gay film was a 12-minute adaptation of a poem by R. Raja Rao, who is one of the best-known gay fiction writers in the country. The film, titled "BOMgAY," made in 1996, circulated at festivals and private screenings. It generated media buzz but was never commercially released.