Gazal Dhaliwal is a master bard and screenwriter who has brought to Indian and global audiences a bouquet of beloved films and shows such as Lipstick Under My Burkha; Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga; Feels Like Ishq; Mismatched; Murder Mubarak; Wazir and Qarib Qarib Singlle.
Through years of dedicated yarn-spinning, Gazal has given us endearing and complex on-screen characters to fall in love with. As a queer and trans writer, her universe-building, the radical empathy with which she brings stories alive, and her ability to develop counternarratives have made her a beloved creator. Be it long-form stories, spanning multiple episodes and seasons or a taut, three-act-structured feature film, her narratology is always able to shine.
In this conversation, she chats with queerbeat about her creative process, the struggles of being a writer, and queer representation in Bollywood today.
What’s cooking in your life these days? What are you working on and what are you particularly paying attention to right now, which may inform your choices?
I’m currently working on the next season—which is also the final season—of my Netflix series Mismatched. My co-writers and I have been working on it for seven years now. It has been one of the most satisfying, challenging, and exciting professional journeys of my life.
I feel like I’ve poured a lot of my youth into it, and in many ways, it has also kept me young. I’ve channelled into it many of the dreams that remained unfulfilled during my own college years. It’s been a deeply wholesome experience, not just creatively but also because of the people I’ve worked with. My co-writers have become dear friends. When we’re together, we’re a group of serious, high-level thinkers, but also complete idiots who laugh a lot. Working with them has been a privilege.
What I’m particularly paying attention to right now is the global shift towards the extreme right. Those of us on the liberal end of the political spectrum increasingly feel pushed into a corner—suffocated and silenced— and this is happening across the world. While I don’t write overtly political dramas or explicitly ideological content, these observations inevitably inform my worldview, my characters, and the stories I tell. That awareness is very much shaping the work I’m doing at this moment.
What does it really take to write well-rounded, complex characters and build the interiority of their worlds? How does a writer create multi-dimensional protagonists and supporting characters that drive a compelling story on screen?
I think writers draw a great deal from the world around them—from their personal lives and from their political points of view. And when I say political, I don’t only mean party politics; I also mean social positions and the way one views the world. All of that inevitably feeds into the writing.
Sometimes a character comes to you first, and sometimes a story or an idea arrives first, after which you design characters to serve that story. When a character comes first, it’s often an unusual one, or someone who deeply affects you. Even the ordinariness of a person you know in real life can be inspiring if it moves you. For instance, on the surface, my mother might seem like an ordinary, middle-class woman. But I know her interiority—I know how extraordinary she is—and that inner life could become a deeply unusual and compelling character. That’s how people from your personal life can profoundly shape the characters you create.
Even when a story comes first, a writer’s first loyalty has to be to their characters. A character is what the viewer connects to and relates to before anything else. The plot, the drama, the jokes—all of that matters, but the audience attaches itself to a character who carries them through the journey of the story.
How does universe-building happen in projects you have worked on such that your characters sound authentic in the spoken experience?
I personally spend a lot of time researching how a particular character would speak. If a character is Punjabi or North Indian, that comes more naturally to me because I grew up in Punjab, so that language and rhythm are familiar. But when I’m writing characters from regions that aren’t immediately my own, I’m very conscious about doing the work. For instance, in Lipstick Under My Burkha, all the characters were based in Bhopal. At the time, there wasn’t as much content available online, so I spent a lot of time speaking to friends and acquaintances from Bhopal or Madhya Pradesh to understand their dialects, common phrases, and intonations.
Today, it’s become easier because there’s so much material available online, but that also means you end up spending a lot of time researching, because you don’t want to miss the nuances when there’s so much to learn.
What is your process for balancing the urgent need for social commentary in cinema with the timeless demands of compelling and commercial storytelling?
At my core, I see myself as a mainstream writer. My stories are rooted in lived reality, but the storytelling itself is heightened—the romance is more amplified, the drama more dramatic, and the dialogue sharper. So while the emotional ground is real, the telling is stylised.
Because of that, the driving engine for me always has to be the plot. Plot, of course, means different things in different genres. But regardless of genre, the story has to be engaging on its own terms.
My counter-narratives or social commentary come through characters rather than messaging. I create characters who can carry those ideas within the structure of the plot. The plot pulls the audience in, and the commentary emerges through the character’s actions.
For instance, in Mismatched Season 3, there was a trans man character whose goal was to transition. To achieve that goal, he hacks into a social media platform and ends up disrupting the lives of the primary characters. His actions actively drive the plot. At the same time, the character is written with empathy for his situation. The social reality is present, but it’s inseparable from the narrative progression.
Similarly, in Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, the film consciously embraces familiar Bollywood grammar—song and dance, comedy, romance, heightened emotion. All the commercial elements are firmly in place. Yet the central conflict driving the story—a small-town girl from an orthodox Punjabi family falls in love with a girl—is also the statement the film is making.
That balance is never easy. Especially in a climate where representation itself can be questioned, it becomes crucial that the story around the character works strongly. When it does, the plot feels primary and compelling, even though it is the character’s lived situation that’s quietly driving it underneath.
When drawing inspiration from real-life events, how do you negotiate the responsibility to the truth of the experience versus the demands of dramatic license?
When the inspiration is someone’s personal journey or lived experience, the ethical boundary is very clear to me—you ask them. You ask what they’re comfortable with, where they want the line between fact and fiction to be drawn, and how much they want fictionalisation to step in. If the person themselves isn’t available, then you speak to those who can responsibly take that decision on their behalf. Consent and comfort come first.
I haven’t really written event-by-event recreations of real life. My work is more often inspired by people and their challenges rather than specific incidents. For instance, in Mismatched, the character of Anmol is a wheelchair user. In Season 3, there’s an exploration of his sexual desires and how complicated that can be for a disabled person. For that, we did careful research and spoke to people who are wheelchair users. Whatever they were comfortable sharing, we took only that. We didn’t sensationalise or dramatise it beyond what felt truthful. I’m someone who would always rather err on the side of caution than overuse dramatic license.
In Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, there was a very conscious ethical and creative decision around not showing a kiss between the two women in love. On one level, of course, physical intimacy is a truthful part of romantic love. But I wanted the film to exist in a space where families could come together to watch it. In earlier Hindi cinema, especially in the ’70s and ’80s, love was communicated without explicit physicality, and audiences still deeply believed in it. Today, kissing on screen is common, but queer love is still relatively nascent in mainstream Indian cinema.
So, my boundary there was strategic and intentional. I wanted audiences to feel emotionally safe enough to engage with the film, rather than be pushed away by discomfort. My responsibility to the truth of the experience was to show love between these two women—and that truth could be conveyed through emotion, longing, tenderness, and choice, without necessarily showing physical intimacy on screen.
So, for me, negotiating ethics and dramatic license isn’t about dilution. It’s about timing, context, and intention. Sometimes restraint can actually serve the truth better than explicitness, especially when the larger goal is to open hearts rather than shut them down.
Too often, queer and trans stories in Indian cinema center on tragedy, coming out of trauma, or victimhood. What deliberate choices do you make in the writers’ room to ensure your characters are given space for joy, unremarkable happiness, and romantic fulfillment that transcends their identity struggles?
There is so much pain and trauma in our lived experiences that it becomes the most instinctive place to draw from creatively. It’s overwhelming, all-encompassing at times, and you can’t really hold it against anyone. For many queer and trans people, pain has been the richest and most available emotional material. I’m prone to that as well, and there are times when I’ve written from that place.
Because my sensibility is largely mainstream, even when the conflict has been tragic or rooted in victimhood, I’ve always tried to ensure that it is deeply intertwined with the plot—that it actively moves the story forward rather than existing only to underline suffering.
That said, I’ve evolved as a storyteller. I’ve consciously started moving towards queer characters experiencing joy, and ‘unremarkable happiness’. That shift has been very deliberate. Even in Mismatched Season 3, with Celina’s character, who is bisexual, you see her come into her own—enjoying her sexuality, having fun, navigating friendships, career challenges, and romantic conflicts, not in isolation but as part of a full life.
With Season 4, which we’re currently writing, that intention is even clearer. The choice now is to actively create space for queer characters to experience joy, romance, and pleasure without their identity being a source of conflict. For me, the idea is to show queer people having fun, falling in love, making mistakes, and experiencing romance with the same joy, abandon, and emotional richness that straight characters are allowed on screen.
You’ve actively advocated for proper recognition and rights for screenwriters in the industry. What tangible changes do you believe are still necessary within the Indian film ecosystem to elevate the status of the writer to be on par with other key creative roles?
I think there are multiple challenges. The most obvious one is remuneration. The amount of time, labour, emotional energy, and sheer dedication that goes into writing is hugely disproportionate to how writers are paid. You could be writing a film script for a year, or spending eight to ten months writing one season of a show in a writers’ room of four or five people. And yet, that labour often remains invisible because it exists only as words on a page until it becomes a film or a series.
Writing is also an intensely lonely and emotional process. It genuinely takes a toll. Most writers do this work largely for the love of it, because the monetary gains rarely reflect the effort, pressure, and emotional investment involved. So, money is the first, most obvious issue.
The second is the invisiblisation of writers. Many writers, myself included, tend to be introverted and prefer staying in our own space and just writing. I’ve had to consciously become more visible, partly because of my queer identity and because I felt it was important to speak up at a time when there was very little visibility or conversation around queer people. But most writers aren’t naturally inclined to do that. That’s why bodies like the Screenwriters’ Association and talent agencies like Tulsea become so important – they advocate for writers even when writers themselves don’t always have the bandwidth or temperament to do so.
Another challenge is that many stakeholders [in the cinema industry] are simply not good readers. Writers put an enormous amount of thought and craft into their work, but scripts are often read superficially. Feedback then comes without a full understanding of what’s being conveyed. As a result, writers often have to handhold people to help them see the intent or the subtext, which becomes additional, invisible labour beyond the act of writing itself.
Related to this is the lack of respect for the written word. Scripts are frequently altered after they leave the writer’s hands, sometimes without consultation. What eventually gets made can be very different from what was originally written or intended, which can be deeply disheartening.
And ultimately, all of this comes down to respect. Respect for the writer’s process, the time it takes, and the work that happens quietly behind closed doors. Credit is a huge part of that respect. There is still an obsession, particularly among directors, with claiming “written and directed by” credit even when significant parts of the script—especially dialogue—have been written by someone else. Younger writers, in particular, are often invisiblised or credited as assistant writers despite having done substantial writing work.
Another unfair expectation placed on writers is narration. When stakeholders don’t read scripts properly, the onus shifts back to writers to narrate their work. But narration is a skill in itself, and expecting every writer to be a good narrator is unreasonable. So, writers end up struggling on both ends – their work isn’t read closely enough, and they’re expected to compensate for that through performance.
I will say that things are better than they were a few years ago, and I’m hopeful they’ll continue to improve. But at the heart of it, elevating the status of writers really comes down to respect—in pay, in credit, in process, and in how seriously the written word is taken.
For aspiring screenwriters who are looking to bring more nuanced and inclusive stories to the mainstream, what is the single most important piece of practical advice you would give them about navigating the Hindi film industry?
I wish there were a single, clear piece of practical advice, but honestly, there isn’t. The Hindi film industry is extremely dynamic. It changes constantly—expectations shift, mindsets shift, and at the end of the day, it is an industry and a business. We come from the creative side of it, but the demands of the business are fluid, and they keep evolving.
All I really had in my control was to write—and to write stories that moved me, stories I genuinely believed in. I was writing for almost seven years before my first work released in 2017. There were difficult periods, even financially hard ones. But even then, I don’t remember ever writing something that felt untrue to me. I simply don’t know how to do that. So, if I had to distill it down to one piece of advice, it would be this: write what is true to you. And yes, be patient. The latter, sometimes, even ends up becoming more meaningful than the former.
Today, there are also far more avenues for young writers to put their work out into the world. You can write something small and share it online, collaborate with a friend who wants to direct, make a short film on a shoestring budget. You have access to cameras on your phone and platforms like YouTube and Instagram. These spaces allow you to begin finding your voice publicly, even if the industry feels inaccessible.
Commercial demands will keep changing—that’s inevitable. But what will make you stand out is the uniqueness of your voice. As much as possible, stay true to that. And give yourself time. Patience is not optional in this industry—it’s part of the work.
Beyond commercial success or critical acclaim, how do you personally measure the impact and success of your work?
When you say commercial success, I instinctively think of it as a business metric—how much money a film made, how many people watched it. And that’s never really been the parameter for me.
For me, it’s about how many people were genuinely touched by the work. How many people had a good time watching it, or felt seen in some way. Today, one very tangible way of measuring that is people reaching out to you directly—especially through social media.
With Mismatched, that has happened in a very big way. Every season, there’s this huge amount of content that people create around the show – Reels, edits, comments, messages. I get so many DMs from people telling me how much they loved it, how moved they were, or what it meant to them at a certain point in their lives.
There’s no real way for me to know the actual viewership numbers of the show, because that data isn’t available to us. But honestly, this kind of response gives me enormous satisfaction. I feel almost giddy sometimes, seeing the reactions, the Reels, the comments. That’s a very real sense of impact for me.
Similarly, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha wasn’t a commercial success in the traditional sense, and it didn’t receive overwhelming critical acclaim either. But over the years, I’ve received so many messages from people saying the film helped them start conversations with their families, or even reunite with them after years. They were able to take their families to watch what looked like a regular Bollywood film, and it ended up having the impact I had hoped for.
Those personal messages are what make the work truly worthwhile for me. That kind of impact can’t really be measured through box office numbers or reviews.
In the deeply commercial world of Bollywood, have you ever felt the pressure to “soften” or dilute a political or social message about gender or sexuality to make the film more palatable to a conservative or mainstream audience?
Honestly, I’ve been fortunate in this regard. Most of the times, I haven’t really faced pressure to soften or dilute a political or social message around gender or sexuality.
With Ek Ladki Ko Dekha, for example, my director Shelly was as deeply invested in the story as I was, and the producer believed in her vision. So that pressure simply didn’t exist there. We were all aligned about what the film was trying to say and do.
With Mismatched as well, Netflix has been very supportive of queer characters and queer storytelling. In fact, there have been times when their feedback actually pushed us to give the queer storylines more depth rather than less. So, in both these projects, I’ve been quite lucky.
I think part of that also comes from who I am. I come with the lived experience of being trans, and I come with a certain craft where my queer characters are deeply embedded in the story. They’re not add-ons, and they’re not symbolic gestures. So, there isn’t really a version of the story where they can be easily diluted.
I’m also very conscious of mainstream storytelling. My work is political and social, but I’ve always tried to make sure that the storytelling remains accessible and mainstream – without compromising the integrity of the character. That balance comes instinctively to me.
So I haven’t had to face a moment where I was asked to soften something in a way that felt damaging. And if I were, I don’t think I’d stand for it. For me, the line is very clear: you can always work harder on the craft, but you can’t compromise on the truth of the character. That’s not a compromise—that’s a concession.