Deviant Sexualities and Artistic Representations in Contemporary India

Introduction-3

Interestingly, specially in the Indian context, the presence of hijras both at the public and private spaces (as mentioned above) creates fissures for the other s****l and gender deviants as well.

The consumption of the public spaces and streets through art in the form of erecting a mural in Bangalore by Poornima Sukumar in January 2016 is a significant instance in this respect. On a wall at Dhanvantri Road the mural, titled “naanu iddiv (we exist)”, in Kannada, portrays a transgender person using visual motifs that suggest both masculine and feminine attributes. Sukumar (2017) postulates:

I’ve chosen the hibiscus as the main symbol as it is a unique, beautiful flower that has both male and female parts. The designs were simple and geometric so they could paint it easily. Since they were untrained, I could not immediately expect them to design something, but the end goal was for them to design their own wall and paint it.

The juxtaposing of space and identity becomes conspicuous when one sees that the same pattern is painted on the body of both the hijras and the wall. For Sukumar, building the trust among the transgender community was the hardest part. She explained:

We need to understand that it is difficult for most trans-people to come out on the street and paint. This is not their comfort zone. It’s taken time to build that trust and it’s finally easy for me to call them to a location and say, “Let’s paint this wall together”.

This mural is painted both by the transgenders and the straight people and depicts the power of art while creating a negotiation between normative-selves and trans-identities.

Cinematic and Photographic Representations of Trans Lives

This is the kind of revolution that art is capable of and Revathi has talked about it in her second autobiography, A Life in Trans Activism (2016). Keeping this sort of radical potential of art in my mind I have dedicated two chapters to hijra ontology. The very first chapter of it is entitled “Questions of Adaptation Techniques and Spectatorship as Raised through Mainstream Transgender Cinema”. I have included in this chapter not only specific hijras movies like Tamanna (1997), Daayraa (1996), Darmiyaan (1997), Bol (2011), Water (2005), Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) and Shabnam Mousi (2005), but also films like Chitrangada (2012) (that depicts primarily trans-s****l protagonist) have been analysed to provide a holistic understanding of the trials and tribulations of gender and s****l deviants. This chapter succinctly charts out the various spectators’ techniques that help us to understand the politics of circulation and consumption in the largely straight world and how still these commercial movies can be economically viable without compromising on transgender/hijra politics. I have taken into consideration Gopinath’s idea regarding the destabilizing potential of the spectators and tried to showcase as how the strategies like haptic visuality, fantasmic spectatorship, oppositional gaze, employment of coalition politics by combining feminism and Dalit politics with trans-activism (as in Shabnam Mousi, Bol and Welcome to Sajjanpur), using parenting as a tool to introduce the gender queer entity and the merging of the familiar spaces with gender queer identities (in order to acclimatize through the familiarity of the spaces) have been ingeniously used by the directors of the films as discussed in this chapter. These tales of plain subjugation hide convoluted issues like AIDS citizenship, overlap among sports, gender identity and nationalism, crazy-queen syndrome, pan-sexuality, trans-feminism, trans-misogyny, necropolitics and translation of the queer geographies, and I have tried to address these issues through the cinematic representation of the transgender identities.

The second chapter is entitled “The Ontology of Hijras as Documented in the Various Photographic Series”. In all I have included three photographic series (by Anita Khemka, Tejal Shah and Takeshi Ishikawa) which are strikingly different from one another despite having hijras as their common photographic subject. Tejal Shah’s photographic exhibition entitled “Who Are You” (2006) is a “Hijra Fantasy Series”. Talking about this series Shah contends:

I always wonder, what if there were indeed a thousand tiny genders? And we could define our own unique one, which is always open to change, or what if we don’t need to define one at all because it does not matter.

— h***:://courses.washington.edu/femart/final_project/wordpress/tejal-shah/

On being inquired as how they want to be photographed, Laxmi desires to pose as Cleopatra, Malini (another hijra) likes to be photographed as a mother and Maheshvari as a South Indian actress. The second photograph in the series is an allusion to Raja Ravi Verma’s (1848–1906) painting, “Yashoda with Krishna”. The title of the photograph is “you too can touch the moon”. Moon has been a traditional symbol in Indian ethos of something that is both fascinating and unattainable. Motherhood is a dream that largely remains unrealized for hijras and illusive like moon for them. No wonder, moon becomes a metonymic signifier for the so-called unrealized normative dreams of hijra lives. Despite the mitigation of the over-glorification of the motherhood by the radical feminists, one is forced to accept the fact that it provides a certain kind of citizenship right to women (because the right is on account of producing future citizens) though in a tangential way.

Anita Khemka’s “Munna Guru: Portrait of a Eunuch” is a more realistic depiction of the real life hijra Munna Guru. It is precisely for this kind of photographs that Barthes seems to use the term “biographemes”. According to Barthes, some photographs provide “infra knowledge”. To quote his words:

It supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this “me” which likes knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which in a writer’s life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features “biographemes”; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

— 1982: 30

This particular photographic series opens up an ethnographic window and gives us an insight into hijras’ specific cultural ethnicity. Takeshi Ishikawa’s photographs also centre around the visibility of hijras at urban spaces and how they change the dominant cartography of a space. All these photographs have been analysed from the perspective of Roland Barthes’ concepts of Studium and Punctum as well.

This section of my book focuses not only on the excavation of the artistic works exploring trans-identities in the last two decades but also tries to highlight the fact as how the academic endeavours in trans-studies are required to create new subaltern sources of knowledge and production. Through a close analysis of the trans-art a humble attempt has been made to lay bare the radical potential of hijras and transgender identities in creating fissures in both the queer theory and feminism. In this research work I have tried to retain the cultural specific identity of hijras and made an effort to draw a parallel between hijras and global Eurocentric transgender entities while critiquing artistic works by the Indian artists. Taking a clue from Wibke Straube, I have understood the word trans not as a noun but as a verb. To quote his words:

Using trans as a verb also introduces Donna Haraway’s critique of fixed, bounded categories … through her investment in “getting at the world as a verb which throws us into worlds in the making” (Haraway 2004: 330). Transing is a worlding, it makes new meaning, opens up the reading to multiple meanings (Dyer 2013: 2) and ultimately generates possibilities to imagine alternate worlds.

— 2014: 41

The all-encompassing fluidity of the transgender studies can also be seen from its intersection with the various other branches of knowledge such as musicology, digital media, performing arts, medicine, sports and law. There is such intricate interlocking of these areas of investigations with the transgender studies that these overlaps find manifestations even in the artistic signatures. Due to the hegemonic restrain trans-identities have not been much explored even by the queer artists or people working on the queer art, specially in India. Patently we are nowhere close to form something like MOTHA ( Museum of Transgender History and Art) in India but the impact of art on the transgender revolution in India at a miniscule level can be seen in the form of forming of the first transgender theatre group, Panmai (whose play Color of Tans 2.0 showcases an evocative performance by Living Smile Vidya, Angel Glady and Gee Imaan Semmalar), the first transgender music band (6 Pack Band) and in the transgender art festival held in Bengaluru. These two chapters are also an attempt to reveal the symbiotic relationship between art and trans-entities and how each radicalizes and revolutionizes the other specially in this image-heavy contemporary culture.

Gay and Lesbian Spatial Consumptions and Contemporary Indian English Writings

Part II of this book deals with the contemporary gay and lesbian writings and as how a specific kind of spatial appropriation is visible in these works. The focus here is on contemporary literature. In all, there are four chapters. These chapters attempt to critique Indian texts to lay bare not only the exclusive homosocial spaces and familiarization of homoeroticism through the appropriation of the conventional heterosexual spaces but also to highlight the specific Indian spaces like chhat and aangan space which are heterotopic spaces (to quote Michel Foucault). These unique liminal spaces create significant ruptures in queer spatial dynamics and have various effects on the larger framework of queer activism. Through these artistic works, there is an attempt to excavate the specific Indian queer spatial experiences which are quite different from the visibility-centric coming-out narratives of the West. As opposed to perceiving invisibility only as a monolithic technique of erasure, these works demonstrate that secrecy and camouflage are also strategies to combat the insidious effects of homophobia. And since Indian spatial configuration produces many homosocial spaces, the unique coexistence of homo and hetero desires is a specific feature of Indian ethos.

Much prior to the spatial turn in humanities and social sciences, space as a concept has been critiqued by philosophers and was later appropriated by mathematicians and scientists. Quoting Isaac Newton from “De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum” Edward S. Casey asserts that “no being exists or can exist unless it is related to space in some way” (1997: 133). Thus, space as a concept has been at the centre of the major philosophical and scientific thoughts. Edward S. Casey in The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (1997) charts out the history of place vis-à-vis space. The earliest theorization of space can be traced in the works of geographers of ancient times like Polybius (c.200–118 bce), Posidonius (c.135–51 bce) and Strabo (64/63–c.24 ce). These geographers (specially Polybius in History) have tried to emphasize that time is the primary marker in constructing history and space is subordinate to it. However, both Isaac Newton through his “Absolute Theory” and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by “Relational Theory” have propounded concepts that have defined “space” independent of time. After that the major intervention came in the form of Immanuel Kant’s theory of “Transcendental Idealism”. Human body shapes and supports the particularity of place and this thought started with Kant (1724–1804) and continues onto Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Merleau-Ponty, where place is considered with respect to human body. For Merleau-Ponty, the lived body is the origin of the “spatializing” as well as spatialized space, and the body then has important implications for understanding of place, particularly “lived place”. Commenting upon this aspect, Casey contends:

The tie, the knot, between body and place is so thickly Gordian that it cannot neatly serve at any point. Merleau Ponty teaches us not just that the human body is never without a place or that place is never without (its actual or virtual) body; he also shows that the lived body is itself a place.

— 1997: 235