Daayraa

A landmark film of popular Indian cinema, lauded as a meeting of Bollywood with Satyajit Ray, The Square Circle ventures into rarely explored and controversial issues of sexual identity and gender stereotypes.

As the popular musical cinema reaches the far corners of the country changing audiences tastes and expectations, the male performers who played the female role in traditional folk theatre are becoming obsolete. that is the fate of the main protagonist (actor Nirmal Pandey) who continues, however, to live as a woman and travels rural India as a troubadour.

Due to a case of mistaken identity a young village woman, (played by Sonali Kulkarni), is abducted the night before her wedding by a brothel madam and her gang. Through she escapes, as a woman alone she is soon brutally raped before she is taken under the wing to the transvestite performer. His solution to the social constraints on women is to dress her as a man while they journey back to her home village.

Disturbed by the new demands and reward of living in the role of the opposite sex, the girl is awakened by the freedom of action accorded her and grows into an expanded sense of identity and sexuality.

A bond of affection develops between the odd couple in this hybrid road movie, but the story comes to a tragic, if dignified conclusion as society's power over the individual's quest to define themselves reasserts itself.