Deviant Sexualities and Artistic Representations in Contemporary India

Introduction-1

Introduction

That in colonial India, the marginalization of “queer” sexualities was a latent but a potent part of the political agenda of the colonizer is an established fact now. The effeminate Indian men were supposedly deemed feeble enough to rule both the land and women of the nation. Thus homosexuality was catalogued as a specifically oriental “vice” that can be annihilated only through colonial intervention and control. Anti-colonial nationalism tried to mitigate this oppression by promoting heterosexual procreative s*x which has further redlined the alternative sexuality. Indubitably the non-acceptance of homosexuality is greatly linked with the colonial rule.

The British rule forged a strong link between s****l identity and national struggle for freedom. In fact, Ashis Nandy (1983) in his book, The Intimate Enemy, examines the homosexual criminalization of Oscar Wilde in the colonial context. Equally pertinent is to note the case of Richard Burton’s missing Karachi Report as mentioned by Anjali Arondekar in her seminal work, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (2010). In and around 1845 an officer in British army serving in India, Richard Burton (as he was the only one who could speak Sindhi) was authorized by General Charles Napier to form a report on the so-called vice of pederasty.1 The contents proved to be so scandalous that it resulted in Burton’s dismissal from the service. A detailed discussion of it can be found in Arondekar’s book, For the Record. In fact, the report was considered lost and a veil of mystery shrouds around the missing content. To quote Arondekar:

One must remember here that the scandal of the Karachi report lies in the promise of its explosive contents, in its exposure of the most covert and unspeakable of activities: male–male s*x and, moreover, English male–native male s*x.

— 2010: 32

So the empire’s decision to not record it hugely signifies the imperialist agenda of invisibilizing homosexuality. Such was the paranoia amidst the rulers regarding any effort to visibilize homosexuality in colonial India that the entire career of Richard Burton both as an officer and as a writer has been entrenched in a quagmire. As Arondekar mentions in her book that a major part of the manuscript was destroyed by the over concerned relatives and numerous fires. Such was the opprobrium suffered by Burton that it resulted in self-censorship because of which he has developed an extremely illegible handwriting. Quoting Alan Jutzi, Arondekar states:

Burton may have trained himself to fit a reduced script into smaller pieces of paper and that the transformation in his handwriting thus happens somewhere between 1849 and 1853, when went from India to East Africa. He also points out that Burton’s handwriting is large and readable in the early writings on India and that it gradually fades into unreadability after his departure from that country.

— Ibid.: 29

In fact, Arondekar, by quoting Jutzi, further proclaims that interestingly Burton’s handwriting in English, Marathi and Arabic is remarkably different and whereas his handwriting on the so-called inappropriate subject in English is illegible (obviously fearing the wrath of the English-reading public), his handwriting in Marathi and Arabic is quite readable and legible. Thus, this self-imposed censorship and secrecy surrounding the writings pertaining to homosexuality are clearly indicative of the regressive attitude of the colonizers. The white rulers considered it to be important to overtly magnify the heterosexual masculinity of the British people as opposed to the effeminate Indian men who are not fit to take care of the nation and women and thus try to legitimize the oppression induced by the colonizers on the natives. As has been pointed out by Uma Chakravarti:

The degeneracy of Hindu civilization and the abject position of Hindu woman, requiring the protection and intervention of the colonial state, were two aspects of colonial politics. The third aspect was “effeminacy” of the Hindu men who were unfit to rule themselves.

— 1989: 35

In fact, in the introduction to her seminal work, Infinite Desires, Madhavi Menon (2018) catalogues that before the colonial invasion the Aryans, the Greeks, the Ghaznis, the Mughals, the early Syrian Christians, the Parsis, the Americans, the Chinese and the Arabs have found a flourishing ground in India to weave even their non-normative desires in the fluid porousness of s****l desires as prevalent in the ancient India (in fact, famously Kama, the god of s****l desire and love in Indian mythologies is called Ananga — without any limbs and therefore highly malleable, porous and without any boundaries and thus fluid in nature), but

the British colonizers did something different. … Even as the colonial masters started to bleed India economically, they shored up their presumed moral superiority by policing what the “natives” did sexually. Suddenly, they introduced legal code against s****l proclivities that did not conduce to the reproduction of missionary position. This continues to be the basis for the Indian Penal Code in effect in postcolonial India.

— 2018: 17

In the critical sphere, specially in the specific Indian context, the works by Giti Thadani (Sakhiyani, 1996), Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (Same-s*x Love in India: Readings from Literature and History and Love’s Rite: Same-s*x Marriages in Modern India, 2002) there is a constant stress on excavating the homosexual histories through religious and historical texts and sites and showcasing the deliberate heterosexualizing of homosexual iconography and representations as I have discussed in detail in my book, l***q Identities in Select Modern Indian Literature (2015). Hence they attempt to explore the very Indian character of the same-s*x desire through ancient texts and religious sites and try to deconstruct the assumption that it is an exclusively foreign import and there is nothing Indian about it. To quote from Sakhiyani:

I saw the breasts of Goddess being cut, then polished over with orange, and a new male divinity was born. At Tara Tarin, the temple of lesbian twin Goddess, the original iconography of the Goddess in embrace has been replaced by a heterosexual image. Such gender conversions extend to entire temples and sites.

— Thadani 1996: 2

Another major tool for the deferral of same-s*x desire is to locate it within the middle-class set-up. No wonder Maya Sharma in 2006 makes a deliberate effort to catalogue it within a working-class framework. Sharma in Loving Women depicts the ten stories exclusively of working-class women. She also evinces in the brilliant introduction to this book, the partial treatment meted out to “lesbian women groups” within feminism. In the similar manner, R. Raj Rao in Whistling in the Dark (2008) gives voices to gay men across class, culture and nationality. In this anthology, unlike Sukthankar’s Facing the Mirror (1999) (the first Indian lesbian anthology though with pseudonyms), the real identities of gay and bisexual men have been revealed. These records of personal histories undoubtedly blunt the boundaries of exclusive heterosexual-national-cultural identity and emphasize issues pertaining to citizenship rights and citizen subject. Thus be it Roshanabadi’s poem, “Vande Mataram” (1999) or Ruth (2002) and Thadani’s (1996) critical works and decriminalization of Section 377 along with a demand for gay marriage, all these various modes of activism ultimately aim at highlighting exclusively the national history of homosexuals and their consequent right on the nation.

Hence on the one hand, situating same-s*x desires within the specific national, religious and cultural history has a specific political agenda and on the other there is an incursion of the market forces that shape “s****l idealism” and globalization and thus it seems significant to demonstrate the fluid negotiation between the specific Indian critical tools and the Western theoretical apparatus, for at times they neither contest nor collide but create a unique third space of assimilationesistance model. And literature and artistic endeavours are potent tools to create necessary fissures in both the queer and spatial studies. Further, literature in the various other languages is also pertinent to break the idea of single coherent queer epistemology. In this regard it is significant to quote David Eng et al.:

[S]uch a politics must also recognize that much of contemporary queer scholarship emerges from US institutions and is largely written in English. This fact indicates a problematic dynamic between US scholars whose work in queer studies is read in numerous sites around the world. Scholars writing in other languages and from other political and cultural perspectives read but are not, in turn, read. These uneven exchanges replicate, in uncomfortable ways, the rise and consolidation of US nationalist identity and political agenda globally. We propose epistemological humility as one form of knowledge production that recognizes these dangers.

— 2005: 15

Hence radical politics and artistic representations together can produce a revolutionary space of explosive potiential for subaltern queers. Commenting on the connection of art with emancipatory politics, Boris Groys affirms that both try to seek recognition at the public arena:

Art and politics are initially connected in one fundamental respect: both are realms in which a struggle for recognition is being waged. ... [T]his struggle for recognition surpasses the usual struggle for the distribution of material goods, which in modernity is generally regulated by market forces. What is at stake here is not merely that a certain desire be satisfied but that it also be recognised as socially legitimate. ... Both forms of struggle are intrinsically bound up with each other, and both have as their aim a situation in which all people with their various interests, as indeed also all forms and artistic procedures, will finally be granted equal rights.

— 2008: 14

Hence, this work tends to focus on the various art forms like cinema, photography and literature to lay bare the queer and spatial politics of contemporary India. The protests through writings against the unfair treatment meted out to gender queers have been an integral part of the queer activism and Revathi in her latest autobiography, A Life in Trans Activism (2016) has in fact clearly affirmed that after spending so many years in NGOs she has realized that art is a much more powerful vehicle for social change. To quote from the text:

Their reactions touched me. I feel humbled. Despite having worked for over a decade at Sangama, I felt that art has a powerful and far greater reach and appeal than NGO work. I developed a newfound respect for its role as an instrument of social change.

— 2016: 123

Thus this work centres around the artistic representations of queer ontologies and in the process a lot of convoluted issues regarding gender queers emerge out. In all there are six chapters, out of which two chapters catalogue the trans-cinema and trans-photographic representations. The other four chapters highlight the spatial turn in the contemporary Indian queer literature. Let me first talk about the first two chapters that focus exclusively on trans-identity. For this purpose it is essential to understand the specific kind of marginalization which transgenders suffer even within queer activism. The next section will briefly introduce not only the specific subjugation suffered by hijras within queer activist arena but also will reveal the major thrust areas of transgender politics as highlighted through the various artistic representations.

Margins within Margins

Even within the oppressed groups there are hierarchies of oppression and while talking about the specific Indian ethos the presence of hijras within the spectrum of the LGBTQI community, makes this fact quite conspicuous and no wonder hijras are considered one of the most marginalized groups. Despite the artistic visibility and sea changes in law — with the introduction of the “Rights of Transgender Persons Bill 2014” as initiated by Tiruchi Siva, there has been an assurance in terms of providing equal rights and entitlements to transgenders and assigning the status of an equal citizen to them — the cultural and social acceptance has hugely eluded them.

Although not only the legal and social activism has given impetus to their mainstreaming but also the media and popular culture have played their part, yet the mainstreaming of trans-identities remains a tantalizing dream. There has been a lot of coverage of the stories like the appointment of Manobi as the first transgender principal of Kalyani University, the success story of Prithika Yashini, India’s first transgender police officer, the inclusion of Anjali Amir as the heroine of Mammootty’s Tamil film Peranbu, bending of the rules by the West Bengal varsity to admit transgender students like Sumana Pramanik and the appointment of Aishwarya Pradhan as India’s first transgender civil servant. Besides, there is also a circulation of the stories like the performance of the last rites of his/her father by a transgender woman known as Puja in Gujarat’s Panchmahal district in June 2016. Lately the social networking sites were flooded with the story behind the touching new Vicks advertisement about hijra mothers who had adopted children and raised them as good citizens.