In the 1990s a film was made in India called Fire. It wasn’t a particularly good film and would have gone into oblivion, as many such films do, had it not been for one fact, that the film depicted a lesbian relationship between its two lead characters.

In 1947, when India became an independent country, free from British rule, its population stood at 300 million. Today it is the second most populous country in the world, after China, with a total population of over a billion people, one sixth of the total population of the world.