The Politics of Shaming

 Manash Bhattacharjee

As the 5th annual gay parade in Delhi walked the streets with colourful pride on 25th November, 2012, I remembered the outrageously disturbing story two years back, which shook every gender sensitive conscience: the alleged suicide of Dr Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras. The possibility of Dr. Siras committing suicide didn’t hold much conviction in the face of everyone’s disbelieving shock upon receiving the news. Those who were empathetically in touch with the AMU professor claimed he was happy about the Allahabad High Court’s decision to stay his suspension. Dr. Siras was also quoted as saying he wanted to go to America, where he would be allowed to live freely as a gay man. He wanted to spend the rest of his life fighting for gay rights. It’s tragic he had to fight the first battle, without luck, for his own life.

 

The Question of Evidence:

If it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary.

~ Mark Twain

The police and others said it couldn’t be murder as the doors were locked from inside. As if locked doors were such a conclusive clue. The farce of prima facie evidence had always sought to transform countless murders into suicides. Suicide is the official euphemism for murder in India. It has become the most convenient cover-up story. What comes readily to the investigating police officer’s lips is “suicide” whereas the most obvious possibilities of deliberate poisoning or other subtle ways of stage-setting a murder as suicide doesn’t seem to occur to the qualified gentleman. Such a defensive strategy raises more suspicion than hope. Worse is the tacit assumption that suicide is an angst-ridden private act whereas the reasons behind even legitimate suicide cases are socially instigated.

 

The Question of Shame:

Thus speaketh the discerning one: shame, shame, shame – that is the history of man!

~ Nietzsche

The lure of shaming others publicly now has a lethal weapon: the spy-camera. The spy-camera, used to shame something ethically private before the eyes of the public, gets into a dangerously unrestricted territory of manipulation. It ends up being a bizarre syndrome where neo-perverts exploit others for money or revenge. The film LSD showcased how women are used as tools into unknowingly performing sexual acts before a hidden camera for the sake of profit. Other people are made victims of hate because of their queer sexual identity. Their sexual practices are termed ‘immoral’ by the moral police who comprise religiously conservative, heterosexual goons. This psyche was exemplified by those students who surreptitiously filmed Dr. Siras’s consensual sexual act. As if Dr. Siras being gay posed a threat to the paranoid norms of the hyper-masculine, heterosexual brigade. They decided to strike back at the professor with a fascist mindset. It was a premeditated act by the students in the name of stirring up an utterly reactionary public scandal. They saw themselves as representatives of the entire heterosexual community’s moralistic concerns. This seemed to legitimise their act. They gave the impression, as if acting in the larger interest kept them outside charges of private motivations. But what is most private is the pleasure involved in shaming. The pleasure of shaming occurs in the individual, even though it is shared in the larger realm of public consumption. The pleasure of shaming comes from the desire to humiliate. Humiliation is instigated by the breakdown of erotic and altruistic ties among human beings. In such an exceptional situation, hate wages war against shame. Shame is the irreducible, ethical essence of a human being. Humiliation is aimed at the dis-possession of the other’s shame. But it includes the violator’s shamelessness. Shamelessness is the most consciously violent mode of terrorising shame. It can be best defined in modern times as possessed rationality. Humiliation is the most venomous form of shamelessness, while shame, always exposed to the possibilities of assault, is the most vulnerable part of our solitude. Kafka had painfully discovered “the violation of solitude”(to use Milan Kundera’s phrase), chased by the state’s secret police. Dr. Siras had discovered a similar kind of violation in the shape of a bunch of heterosexual moralisers hell-bent on exposing his private life to public gaze in the name of social duty. What is common in both cases is the desire to humiliate the victim and try and ensure that “the shame of it must outlive him”, to quote the last line of The Trial.

 

The Question of Justice:

Murder is not the crime of criminals, but that of law-abiding citizens.

~ Emmanuel Teney

The question of justice takes on a different dimension after the victim’s death. It shifts the whole responsibility to the public who are concerned about the victim receiving justice at the hands of the state. Dr. Siras symbolised a collective cause – of gay rights and a respectful place for sexual minorities in Indian society. The question of justice in Dr. Siras’s case encompassed a larger justice which is awaited in favour of the gay cause in India.

Emmanuel Teney seems to tell us, we cannot make easy distinctions between criminals and law-abiders. People follow the law to keep their own hegemonic interests intact. The law itself is a product of and run by the dominant class. It suits this class to be within law. But once the hegemonic order is threatened by people who challenge their social, cultural and sexual norms, the dominant class takes recourse to violence outside the law, in the name of another law. It is the notion of justice before justice – a pre-judicial justice, violently meted out by the moral vanguards of society. It challenges modern law and the foundation of its secular institutions. These institutions have to be predisposed in favour of the victimised crusaders and act against such criminal law-abiders. Or else these institutions of justice would be accused of being complicit in fostering pre-judice.

Dr. Siras’s case was a reminder for the law to push its horizons further in order to expand its vision of justice. It asked of law to empower those identities struggling to gain a foothold in our society. In a democracy people should have the right to have sex, ideas and values according to their human dis-positions. The state of hypocrisy and denial in our society can’t be cajoled by the institutions of justice. It will be a national shame if people who want to live truthfully are made to live in fear.

The acts of pre-judice which provoke hate-crime and push people towards death needs to be redeemed by the law. Until then, justice will elude the victims of endless violence.

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Manash Bhattacharjee  is a writer and scholar in political science, working from New Delhi.

Sex, Work & Autonomy

Anchita Ghatak

 

Sex work continues to be a vexing issue.  Abolitionists feel that prostitutes or prostituted women are victims of the worst possible kind of sexual exploitation and prostitution should not exist. They will not use the term ‘sex work’ or ‘sex workers’ because they believe that giving exploitation the dignity of work and victims the dignity of workers is supporting and perpetuating exploitation.

The other day, I was speaking to an eminent Abolitionist activist, who told me that she had never met a woman who had entered sex work of her own accord and willingly adopted the epithet of sex worker. I replied that I had met several.

It is important to remember that many places across the world have seen demonstrations by sex workers and their allies, where people in sex work- women, men, transpersons- have demanded an end to stigmatisation and criminalization, recognition as workers and rights as workers. There are some countries where prostitution is legal. At the outset, I would like to state that while sex workers are not exclusively women, much of this article will focus on women sex workers.

Activists who believe that ‘prostitution’ should be abolished, usually work against trafficking. Implicit in their anti-trafficking approach is the belief that trafficking is synonymous to prostitution. Organisations / individuals who work for the rights of sex workers also work against trafficking. They say that human trafficking sells people into forced labour and is a crime.

Working to establish sex workers rights, activists, many of them sex workers themselves, have focused on the discrimination, injustice and violence that exist in the sex trade. They have drawn attention to the injustice and harassment sex workers face from the state, their families, pimps and madams, to name a few. They have not tried to portray the arena of sex work as a great and glorious place. They say that many women earn a living as sex workers and their work should be recognized as work and there should be norms and regulations in place that enable women to earn a living in a safe conditions.

Many sex workers’ organizations have pointed out that they are against children being in sex work, or any kind of work, for that matter. Children should be in school and not at work. Adults who are in sex work or join sex work should make informed choices – that includes the decision to join or not join sex work, to engage in sex work and any other occupation(s), to leave sex work and so on.

Gloria Steinem in a recent meeting in Kolkata told me that body invasion is intrinsic to sex work and so, it is not right to see prostitution as just another occupation in the unorganized sector, where working conditions are unjust and often, inhuman. It is difficult for me and many other feminists to agree with Steinem’s position. The sex worker is selling sexual services – that is her work. She has entered into a contract with her customer to provide sexual services. It is a transaction between consenting adults. To say that the sex worker is being invaded by the very nature of  her work, is to deny her agency. In an article, in The Hindu, Steinem disagrees with the proposition that a sex worker is consensually selling sex. She says, “also I don’t think “consenting adults” is practical answer to structural inequality. Even sexual harassment law requires that sexual attention be “welcome,” not just “consensual.” It recognizes that consent can be coerced.” If consent is coerced, it is not consent, surely?

Harassment and violence in the workplace is a reality. Struggles against sexual harassment in the workplace are going on everywhere. It is imperative to remember that like all women workers, sex workers too have a right to a harassment free and violence free workplace.

Asking for customers of sex workers to be criminalised is a forceful way of denying women control over their choice of livelihoods. Saying that the very act of a woman selling sex is violence and exploitation is as paternalistic a point of view as saying that there can be nothing called marital rape. It is necessary to have a situation where the buying and selling of sexual services is not a furtive, criminal activity. It is such a social climate that will enable sex workers to lay down safe working conditions and bring clients to book if they violate agreed conditions.

One has come across news reports, where governments in Northern countries have apparently told women on unemployment benefits that they have to become ‘sex workers’  as sex work is work like any other. Abolitionists often use such examples to argue against adopting the term ‘sex work’ and seeing it as a legitimate arena of work. Surely, this is not the first time that the patriarchal state machinery has appropriated the language of women’s liberation to oppress women? The question here is whether citizens have any element of choice when they are offered jobs instead of unemployment benefits.

Abolitionists, as well as those who work for the establishment of sex workers’ rights, agree that if women on the margins have to assert their rights their choices have to expand and they must have access to education, healthcare, food, shelter and safe employment opportunities. It is in the area of employment that there is a sharp difference of opinion.

Amongst abolitionists, there is a slight moving away from the term prostitution to survival sex. The question of women’s sexual autonomy in marriage is a vexed question. Is it only ‘prostitutes’ who engage in sex for survival?

Sex workers have been categorical that they do not support people being coerced into sex work even if it is a caste based occupation. They are clear that while women have the right to opt to earn a living as a sex worker, they also have a right to refuse to do so. Like women workers in the unorganised sector – domestic workers, construction workers, piece rate factory workers, farm labourers – they want to be free of stigma, criminalisation and exploitation.

It is necessary to understand why it is alright for women to sell their intellectual and physical labour but the selling of sexual labour is viewed with horror. Surely a decision to sell or not sell sexual services by a woman is a step towards sexual autonomy?

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Anchita Ghatak is a development professional and a women’s rights activist. She works on issues of poverty, development and rights. She is the Secretary of Parichiti, an organisation working for the rights of marginalised women and girls, especially  domestic workers. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of Wafers, Lozenges, Essence & Magnetic Powders

 Dr Velpeau’s Magnetic Love Powders

WANTED! An industrious and strictly honest man in each County in the State to take orders by samples for Velpeau’s Magnetic Agents. Salary first year $800, and small commission, payable monthly. For full particulars address Dr. M. Velpeau, 422½ Broadway, N. Y., sending stamp. Source: The Sauk County Standard, (Baraboo, Wisconsin) 18 July 1855 —————————————————————————————–

This advert might not leap out from the thousands of similar mid-19th-century US ads seeking salesmen for books, farming equipment, store goods etc., but the product behind it is quite unusual. If the industrious and strictly honest man wrote for particulars, the reply wouldn’t tell him much about the job. Instead, it would ask him to send $2 for a sample of the product. Only on the arrival of the sample would he discover that he was expected to sell Dr Velpeau’s Magnetic Love Powders. At this point, most industrious and strictly honest men probably put the episode down to experience and went to look for a more reputable and less embarrassing business opportunity. The particulars sent with the sample claimed:

These powders, properly administered, are warranted irrespective of age, circumstances or personal appearance, to win them the love or unchanging affections of any one they may desire of the opposite sex. The enamoured person had to work out a way of getting the object of their affections to eat the powder, and then wait in anxious lovelorn anticipation until absolutely nothing happened. As one newspaper joked: Only think of it! For two dollars, any enterprising young man – no matter if he is as poor as an editor, and as ugly as a baboon, can through the instrumentality of these powders, make himself “lord” of the most charming lass of “sweet sixteen” to be found within the limits of our friend’s agency, which comprises four counties!

Velpeau’s real name was J C Merrill – perhaps the pseudonym was an attempt to associate the powders with famous French surgeon Alfred Velpeau – and according to the New York Times, his scheme attracted up to 40 letters per day. In late 1855, angry (and still single) customers began writing to the Mayor of New York to complain about ‘Velpeau’. Merrill was arrested for fraud but released when he promised to discontinue business and return the complainants’ money. Six weeks later, however, he was still selling the powders and pocketing the cash, so he was arrested again, charged with defrauding a variety of people, and locked up. As for the spurned lovers, they presumably had to find another way of attaining their goal – the obvious solution being to become richer and better looking.

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Mr. Crucifix

 Goss & Co. According to a correspondent of the Monthly Gazette of Health (vol 5 1825), the proprietor of Goss & Co was a former shop assistant going by the unlikely name of Mr Crucifix. While Mr Crucifix insisted that his company had genuine surgical credentials, it had a terrible reputation among the medical profession. The Medical Adviser and Guide to Health and Long Life, edited by Alexander Burnett, particularly had it in for him, mounting a sustained campaign against Goss & Co in 1824: Goss and Company!

“Good God! Was there ever such a heap of filth and infamy as this swindling firm of straw! Was there ever such a cancer upon society – such an adroit and plausible system of rapacious plundering! “

The Adviser also remarked that the letters M R C did not stand for Member of the Royal College, but for MURDERING, ROBBING CHARLATAN. ”Domus et placens uxor.”—HOR. Thy house, and (in the cup of life, That honey-drop) thy pleasing wife. H A P P I N E S S “the gay to-morrow of the mind,” is ensured by marriage; ”the strictest tie of perpetual Friendship” is a gift from Heaven, cementing pleasure with reason, by which, says Johnson, we approach in some degree of association with celestial intelligence.” Previous, however, to entering into the hallowed obligation of marriage, it becomes an impressive duty not only to regulate the passions, but to cleanse the grosser nature from those impurities which the freedom of unrestricted pleasure may have entailed upon it.

To the neglect of such attention, are attributable many of those hapless instances, which while they excite the commiseration of the beholder, should also impress him with the fear of self-reproach. Luxurious habits will effeminate the body—a residence in the tropics will too much relax the elastic fibre—but more especially does the premature infatuation of youth too frequently reduce the natural dignity into a state of inanition, from whence the agonized sufferer more than doubts the chance of relief. To all such, then, we address ourselves, offering hope–energy–muscular strength–facility; nor ought our advances to appear questionable, sanctioned as they are by the multiplied proofs of twenty-five years successful experience. The easy cares of married life are sometimes disturbed by the want of those blessings which twine the nuptial wreath—for the female habit is often constitutionally weak —yet it can be strengthened, and deficient energy improved into functional power.

 In every case of syphilitic intrusion, as well as in every relaxation of the generative economy, we pledge our reputation to cure speedily and permanently. Earnestly solicitous to expel the unfeeling empyric from the position so presumptuously taken by him, we deviate from general principles with less hesitation; and confident in our own honourable integrity as Members of the College of Surgeons, we invite sufferers of either sex, (especially those entering into matrimonial life) at once to our house, where daily attendance is given for personal consultation; and immediate answers are returned to country letters, which must minutely describe the case, and contain a remittance for advice and Medicine, which can be forwarded to any part of the world, however distant. No difficulty can occur, as the Medicine will be securely packed, and carefully protected from observation.

GOSS & Co., (M.R.C. Surgeons). 7, Lancaster Place, Waterloo Bridge, Strand, London. *** Just published (Twenty-First Edition), 1st, The AEGIS of LIFE, a similar commentary on the above Diseases.— 2d. HYGEIANA, addressed exclusively to the Female Sex.— 3. The SYPHILIST, a Treatise on Lues Venerea, Gonor- rhoea, &c. May be had at 23, Paternoster-Row, London; F. Hobson, Leeds; and of all Booksellers, Price 5s. Source: The Leeds Mercury, Saturday 29 April, 1837

A correspondent to the Medical Adviser described his experience thus: “When I wrote to Goss & Co., I enclosed a pound bill, and asked their advice. I received a letter by return of post, asking all particulars, (useless to them), for example whether I was fair, tall, handsome, and many other things of little consequence. I was quite disgusted; they concluded with a request for 5l., and they would send me a box of medicine. I received the medicine and a modest request for 25l. and they would cure me … Their medicine I took to a Chemist, and he said I could have got it, bottles and all, for 5s. “

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Champion Damiana Wafers

Damiana is a shrub long reputed to have aphrodisiac effects, and is still used in herbal medicine to boost libido. P.N. George sold a variety of products that were despatched with the utmost discretion. As well as the “Rubber Goods” advertised below, there was also a “Male and Female Combined Preventive Appliance,” and if you were having trouble deciding, you could consult the illustrated catalogue. If the Damiana wafers weren’t enough to get you going, Mr George could also supply cards showing “The Sixteen Positions of Matrimony” or steamy popular literature such as The Honeymoon, and what occurred, The Confessions of a Lady’s Maid, or Boudoir Intrigue, and Confessions of a Gay Young Footman; or Secrets of High Life Exposed. CAUTION!!—Men, Be Careful! Use my Sanitary Rubber Goods. Men’s best Rubber Goods, 2s., 3s., 5s., 7s. per dozen, post free, with my 32 page Illustrated List of every known and up-to-date Rubber Appliance. “Men who are Weak” should send at once for my “Champion” Damiana Wafers. They restore the lost vigour, and are a remedy for Spinal Exhaustion and General Weakness. Send at once. Post free, 2s. 9d. per box; two boxes, 5s. “Men who are Strong” preserve and increase your strength by taking my “Champion” Damiana Wafers. The only genuine strength preservative.

Send at once. Post free, 2s. 9d. per box; two boxes, 5s. Sandalwood or any other capsules sent post paid 2s. 9d. per box. P. N. GEORGE, 10, HOLYWELL STREET, STRAND, LONDON. N.B.—Any of the above goods sent privately at prices quoted to any adult reader of this paper. Write your name and address clearly.

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Renovating Essence of Azilica

 

 

Here is a picture of a fellow epitomising health and manly vigour. The image is from the Dictionnaire encyclopédique Trousset, published in Paris between 1886 and 1891, and is reproduced courtesy of Old Book Illustrations. HEALTH and MANLY VIGOUR GUARANTEED ̶ The RENOVATING ESSENCE OF AZILICA. ̶ One packet of this remedy will convince the most sceptical of its surprising invigorating virtues; it may be taken with the greatest safety and certainty by all who suffer from weakness, lowness of spirits, depres- sion, nervousness, and debility.

 Females would do well to take this remedy, as, by quickening the circulation and enriching the blood, it imparts health and bloom to the most impaired constitution, and is a remedy for relaxation, spermatorrhӕa, and all the distressing con- sequences arising from early abuse, indiscriminate excesses, or too long residing in hot climes. It has restored bodily and sexual strength and vigour to thousands of debilitated persons, who are now in the enjoyment of health and the functions of manhood; and what- ever may be the causes of disqualification for marriage, they are effectually subdued by this wonderful discovery.

Parties taking the above remedy are entitled to the advice of a Medical Man, Free of Charge. Price 1s. 6d. per Package, to which are added advice and directions for self-cure. ̶ Sole Agents : Winnall, High Street, Bir- mingham ; Mander and Weaver, Victoria Street, Wolverhampton ; Hutchings, Dudley; C. Britten, Wednesbury; W. Britten, Tipton and Prince’s End; Osborn, High Street, West Bromwich. Source: The Birmingham Daily Post, Thursday 23rd January 1868

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May’s Celebrated Love Lozenges 

 This advert doesn’t specify whether you have to take the lozenges yourself in order to exert a magnetic influence on the object of your affections, or whether you’re supposed to give him or her one (a lozenge, that is) under the pretence that it’s a delicious bon-bon. But in either case, who could resist ordering the “extra-strong” version? MAY’S CELEBRATED LOVE LOZENGES. SURE and safe, pleasant in taste, certain in effect; gains the undying love and affection of any one you wish; none can resist their magnetic influence. In boxes, post free, 9 stamps; extra strong, 13 stamps. The best are the cheapest.—Mr. MAY, Pharmaceutical Chemist (by diploma), 22, Heaton-road, Peck- ham-rye, London. N.B.—Beware of Spurious Imitations. Y.S.—Latin prescriptions translated into English, six stamps. Source: Reynolds’s Newspaper (London), Sunday 4th January, 1874.

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

 

Rupleena Bose

 ‘Oh, disgraced Radha

 Rascal Krishna mounts the riverside Kadam-tree,

 Dear girl, step not into that river.

 Not the fair, not the village, not the ghat,

Step not for your shame

The mother-in-law names you disgraced Radha.

Dear girl, step not into that river’ (trans. mine)

Kalankini Radha (disgraced Radha) a folk song from the bhawaiya musical tradition of North Bengal takes the path of the river that flows into the popular and with it one of the sung stories of Radha’s moment of transgression. Boundaries necessitate transgression almost as if one derives its identity from the other, like this song reminding of the forbidden gently urges Radha towards the location of her desire. It is of course to be remembered that the transgression is a recurring theme in Indian mythical and folk narrative forms, named adultery in socio-legal terms.

Adultery has been a central anxiety, disrupting through the site of marriage the very foundation of order and governance. However every story of stepping over boundaries is not a story of transgression. In these three novellas translated from Bengali and brought out by Penguin, the predominant idea is that of sin and adultery yet none quite delve into the realm of transgression towards desire rather remaining in the peripheries.

Located firmly in a comfortable middle class universe, Maloti begins an intimate first person narrative which begins with her act of transgression and travels back deeper into her neatly divided worlds of lack and fulfilment. “It’s over-it happened-there’s nothing to say… How did it happen? Easy. In fact I don’t know why it didn’t happen before.” Beginning with these words, as the narrative alternates between the story and the arguments of Maloti and Nayanangshu and the instances that build a picture of a exalted idea of love and marriage necessitated with a negation of their own sexuality.

Buddhadeva Bose’s It Rained All Night, translated by Clinton. B. Seely was first published in Bengali in 1967. It is also important to note that there was an obscenity court case against Basu in 1970, which goes to show that this narrative even though it depends on the established masculine and feminine roles threatened the moral order of patriarchal society. “This is why I love you so. You speak out your desire, you’re not timid, you’re not even careful- you play with your cards face up on the table, and that’s why no one has been, or will be able to hinder you. The traditional gender roles are firmly rooted in Maloti’s imagination as she voices the realisation of her individuality through the necessity of desire within the idea of love but the narrative never quite looks at the possibility of desire without love as a qualifier.

However the interesting portrait which emerges in It rained all night is through the voice given to the husband Nayanangshu. So you realized you were on the verge of real danger, Maloti-why weren’t you more careful? But what could I have done. Everything was out of my hands…On the one hand you claim to be a person with independent will, yet you want to place the responsibility on your husband?  In it’s narrative style Nayanangshu’s voice is the constructed voice of an intellectual with an intense sense of propriety, which has no space for sexual gratification. His is a fear of the body almost as if the body can disrupt order. Maloti’s body, his own body, Goyna’s body, Kusum’s body, the woman’s body, lower middle class bodies. Real bodies bring out fear of disruption in Nayanangshu as opposed to Botticelli’s Venus, which remains aesthetic and unreal, never quite disrupting any moral, social order. Nayanangshu’s is a construction of the Bengali gentleman, ‘bhadralok’ dating back to the reform movement where his primarily vocation is the fashioning of his wife and his marriage as a model of new modern patriarchy.

Taking off from where Tagore’s Ghaire/Baire (trans. Home and the World) started, Nayanangshu’s narrative is that of the University professor moulded by the world of literary tropes and western education yet unable to negotiate desire within his immediate social/ moral universe. Ridding oneself of the conservatism of the middle class family structure in the 1970’s, Nayanangshu attempts at self-fashioning and Maloti’s understanding of her identity both tell a tale of politics filtering into the intimate, spaces which are usually silent and almost never uttered in own’s voice. A larger question is of-course raised about the basic premise on which marriage is based, that of ownership. A contract, which defines itself by trapping bodies as properties within the institution they inhabit. Love in such a context becomes like the only legitimate narrative carefully clothing desire and making transgression easier to accept. In any other case, guilt is the only thing that holds the possibility of redemption.

 When she thought of Debashish she felt uncomfortable looking at Sachin. She couldn’t look at her children either…She even feared her own shadow. There Was No One At The Bus Stop by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay looks back at the burden of an adulterous relationship between Trina and Debashish carried by both into their respective psyches. Written in 1974 and now translated into English by Arunava Sinha, There Was No One… does not step into any uncomfortable territory in the choices taken by the characters. Trina lives in a house haunted by her guilt of her affair along with the gaze of knowledge and disregard of her family. Debashish, on the other hand struggles with the memory of his bad marriage, his wife’s suicide and his son’s memory of his dead mother. Somewhere in the loneliness of their urban affluent lives, both try to hold on their tumultuous affair, which can at best stay a guilty aberration. No, there would be someone. Debashish. He was quite mad. He called her in a way that made everyone know of it. Sachin knew, the children too. Trina’s heart trembled all the time. Sometimes in the excitement of a forbidden relationship. Sometimes in fear. Sachin and the children didn’t consider her any better than a whore. And Debashish? Did he think of her as anything but a fallen woman?

Trina continually wallows into perceptions of herself that others hold limiting the possibility of a real transgression in her own terms. Instead she steps out only to return. In recovering from an ailing childhood and adolescence of which Debashish is the only witness Trina could never form an identity of her own which made her visible to the others around her. Her doing of the forbidden then becomes the only way she can claim her existence. All the three novellas equate love with desire and marriage with the lack of it hence resulting in infidelity making it easy to relate to in the popular imagination.

The possibility of sex without love as in Dibyendu Palit’s Ilicit can only meet with disappointment. Ilicit, also translated by Sinha, appeared in Bengali in 1989 but did not shatter any real conventions or established ways of looking at sexuality. Rather it posits sexuality primarily in the domain of the masculine with Jeena, the protagonist realising the contractual nature of her illicit relationship. He was deceiving Gayatri, neglecting his official work. Why! Because he would take something in return. If Jeena gave it up willingly, fine-otherwise by force. Love could conceal the physical factor-but once the factor was over, what did that leave? An illicit train journey is undertaken by Jeena from Calcutta to Puri in the absence of her husband to meet her lover Partha; a journey which begins with Jeena voicing her disinterest in her marriage stripped of sex and ends with the reality of violence. The failure of one’s attempt to fulfilment in physical relationships outside of the legitimate is what the narrative seems to suggest finally.

 Neither Mukhopadhyay nor Palit manage to do what Budhhadeva Bose does in his novel which, despite its limitations attempts to address intimacy and gender roles in a way rarely talked about in Bengali prose of that time. However all three in translation also make it possible to access a cultural and linguistic space across three decades and its value systems. But neither of the three stories look at the really ambiguous where desire escapes the stereotypes of sin or love, or the dichotomy of social and individual, spaces often unapproachable through realism in writing. Love of course is another story, which is oft evoked in the three narratives in an attempt to qualify relationships into neat known boxes easier for readers to relate to Maloti, Debashish, Jeena or Trina. Love is yet another trope, a much needed word to make it all acceptable and reinstates the order or as Catherine Belsey, points out, ‘And true Love, too, itself another kind of fundamentalism, has legalized prohibitions, expropriations and transformation of people into private property’.  Going back to the song, Radha’s transgression into the forbidden continues to be sung, along with the name given to her, that of the disgraced one. More often anxiously.

Rupleena Bose is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi.

# Belsey, Catherine. “Postmodern Love: Questioning the Metaphysics of Desire.” New Literary History. Vol.25, No. 3. (Summer, 1994)

Reflections on “Being Queer” in Kolkata

Niharika Banerjea

“To speak of sexuality, and of same-sex love in particular, in India today is simultaneously an act of political assertion, of celebration, of defiance and of fear” (Narrain and Bhan 2005, 2).

Recent work exploring same-sex experiences in India emphasizes that lesbian and feminist causes must work together to respond to ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. This position raises several issues, among which the tenuous nature of same-sex experiences and the ongoing need seek a collective, critical community are abiding concerns. There is little published writing around queer middle-class women from India that takes reflexivity seriously as a method. Therefore my short essay takes the form of a series of self-reflective fragments that illustratethose moments of communitythat I experienced with women who self-identify as ‘samakami’. ‘Samakami’ is a Bengali term meaning same-sex desiring person.

Rather than conceiving of community as a monolithic empirical unit of analysis “as points of arrival for our research agendas” (Green 2002, 521), I approach the term as emerging within the lived context of my interaction with same-sex desiring women in Kolkata.

Kolkata

The sights and sounds of the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass-the main thoroughfare in the city-on a June morning in 2009 does indeed have clarity. As the taxi speeds down the road, the dense summer air envelopes the weather beaten and the freshly painted residential apartments, the one manned retail store, the mall and gently pushes the masses of people – sweaty, crisply dressed, – onto their daily destinations. The public transportation is once again so conspicuous by its packed compartments. The newly designed buses are a reminder of economic liberalization, of hope for a once dying city and fear for its future. In this tropical city there is indeed an air of expectancy. Kolkata today is the juxtaposition of a pre and post liberalized economy, in its physical structure as well as social fabric. For someone like me whose personal history is entangled with the city’s pre and post liberalization history, it may be rather difficult to recognize all the signs of degradation and rejuvenation. But one change is unmistakable. There is an air of affluence in the place and a pride about the affluence. It shows itself in a plethora of various types of cars on the roads, of new buildings, restaurants, and the neighborhood stores packed with goods meant for personal grooming and household improvement-previously unavailable to the inhabitants of this place and the nation. The happy middle-class heterosexual couples staring down from the billboards are the new drivers of this economy. In a largely Hindu nation where the ideal “Hindu-nationalist citizen-body rests on the exclusion of Others who embody, albeit differentially, improper gendering, sexuality, and nationalization” (Bacchetta 1999: 151), what meaning does community hold for same-sex desiring women in the city?

I cannot take Kolkata for granted. The city is too complex, too dense to be entirely familiar. Then again the tenuous nature of same-sex relationships (Vanita and Kidwai 2001) makes it hard to imagine a gay space in the city, unlike many cities in the global north. Thus, I am not in search for an enclave, but for a meaningful community at the very heart of the city.

Academy of Fine Arts

2nd  July 2009. A large group of people outside the Academy complex, the cultural hub of Kolkata, carrying various banners and posters celebrating the de-criminalization of homosexuality in India. Something changed that day. The High Court of Delhi ruled that the provision in Section 377 of India’s Penal Code that criminalises private consensual sex between same-sex adults violates the country’s Constitution and international human rights conventions.

A group of people long considered a moral hazard and previously deemed shameful in public discourse was on its way to become an object of public discussion about human rights in the world’s largest democracy. Was this that moment where same-sex desiring people could officially reach out to the contemporary Indian public without discrimination or was it just the beginning of a new phase in the struggle to de-stigmatize same-sex relationships in the nation?

The gathering at the Academy was an appeal to community, or rather the promise of a community that refuses to remain non-existent within the folds of the city, loving, laughing and seeking to change the norms of social interaction right at its heart. This collective was not a fiction, but a reality that with all its territoriality and face-to-face interaction became a site for political re-imagining.

But many of us were careful not to conceive of it as an essential foundation. For those who do not live their sexuality as a fixed form of identity, community as a foundational entity is meaningless. The appeal to community therefore was an appeal for living with difference. Living with difference is “another way of thinking how it is that ‘the more than oneness’ of sociality requires new ways of living” (Ahmed and Fortier 2003: 256).

Sappho

Sappho is part of a long history of same-sex, particularly, lesbian activism in India. It formed in 1999 to claim recognition for lesbians in Kolkata.The first floor of a two-storied modest house in a middle-class neighborhoodin southeast Kolkata serves as its office. This location had indeed surprised me the first day I visited it. As the taxi slowly but surely made its last turn and stopped short of my destination, I asked myself: “how has Sappho managed to survive in this neighborhood for such a long time”? The taxi could not enter the small by-lane, so I got down and walked the last few minutes. There were no signs to indicate the presence of the organization. Was it possible to exist in a modest middle class neighborhood such as this? Didn’t the neighbors say or ask anything? What did the neighbors think that the office was about?

The nebulous character of same-sex experiences in the Indian context is well documented (Khanna 2005; Vanita 2001). There is often an absence of explicit words in Indian languages to denote same-sex desires and relationships. Same sex-sexualities are possible in India “without necessarily fostering discretely identifying same-sex sexual subjectivities” (Boyce 2008: 111). Sappho is a collective of same-sex desiring women that exists within patriarchal structures and not as a discrete identity at the margins of a heteronormative city.

Through its various workshops, conferences, film festivals, Sappho consciously distances itself from entering into an oppositional logic of “us versus them”, which many in the global north may be familiar with as a framework of collective identity construction during the closet and coming out eras (Ghaziani 2011). But neither is Sappho excited about operating within a framework of “us and them”. It strives to reach out and educate about same-sex experiences in repressive contexts, for example in those where social actors may not even label a same-sex experience as such.

Ayesha

Ayesha is in her mid 20s, medium built, born in a Muslim middle-class family. Akanksha-one of the founding members of Sappho-introduced her to me. To celebrate the reading down of section 377, several of us, including Ayesha went out for a drink on the evening of July 2nd. Ayesha at present works for a media outlet in London.I present an excerpt of a conversation with her.

[10.25] Q: How did you come to know about Sappho and why did you join it?

[10.28] A: I think that was when I finished school and there was this thing that I need to connect with people who are like me and I need to go out there and see if there’s anybody out there, so obviously I started research then. At that time, we did not have a website. We had some peer lists which were just they would give you the name of the organization and the city so I thought fine there’s something in Calcutta as well.

…

[11.36] Q: Did you want a network more than support?

[11.41] A: No, actually no. When I came to Sappho more than network, I was looking for support I think.

[11.50] Q: In what sense?

[11.51] A: community feeling, coz I was tired of being around [sigh]. Not that people weren’t sensitive to me and they didn’t want to listen to me but I wanted to be around people who did think like me and who saw life maybe to a certain extent the way I did. It’s all right to be around friends and talk about their boyfriends and stuff but I was like I just wanted to connect with people who were more like me. I was looking for a sense of belonging I think.

[12.30] Q: When you think of community then, do you think only of Sappho, or do you also think outside of it? Let me explain. There could be two aspects to it, a political and an emotional aspect. When you think of a sense of belonging, if you do, in these contexts, how do you see yourself?

[13.22]A: When I think of the term community, the first word that comes to my head is Sappho, because it’s just a place where I am accepted regardless of what I am and what I do, so it doesn’t really matter.

[13.38] Q: So, are you saying that community is where ever you are accepted as you are?

[13.52] A: I think so yes, definitely because otherwise it will become a situation where you have a society where either you pretend or if you don’t they are hostile to you…Emotionally [I think of] Sappho as a group coz it comes almost like a family. You have drama, everything happens here, is just amazing. But people will support you, if you do something wrong, people will still talk to you it doesn’t matter.

[14.36] And there’s a lot of friendship and everything. Might sound odd but we also have these somebody somebody’s brother and somebody somebody’s mother [to connect with] and I don’t know I think maybe because in everyday life something is missing somewhere that we try to find or make relationships over here, not necessarily just friendships and finding a partner and stuff. But you will always find someone calling each other by your, some sort of a term which you would be like some sort of a family member thing.

…

[15.56] And if you talk about the larger political community I would say the other not only the other LGBT organizations but also women’s movements and everything else that I identify with, I would say that that’s the larger community. And networking between these communities is very important. If we give them space in our movement for representation of their issues, you know, we will also have representation in their issues. Because I can’t say that I am just an LGBT activist. I mean if I go out then I see maybe a housewife or a woman is being discriminated against in her workplace, I would definitely also say that this is something I don’t agree to, so there is always this I think all the movements are interspersed, because one person has different aspects.

Concluding thoughts

The interconnections between Kolkata, Academy, Sappho, Ayesha and me is central to our understanding of how same-sex sexualities create contingent, collective and relational kinds of community that do not necessarily depend upon essential ideas of same-sex identity politics. Community takes the form of queer resistance that while moving away from the primacy of heterosexual and patriarchal family is also a bridge to that world; it is a kind of everyday lived resistance that “protests the hypocrisy of silence around the desires and needs” (Narrain and Bhan 2005: 4) of same-sex sexualities.

References

Ahmed, Sara & Fortier, Anne-Marie. (2003) Re-Imagining Communities, International Journal of Cultural Studies. No. 6, 3: 251-259.

Bacchetta, Paola. (1999) When the (Hindu) Nation Exiles Its Queers, Social Text, No. 61: 141-166

Boyce, Paul (2008) Truths and (mis) representations: Adrienne Rich, Michel Foucault and sexual subjectivities in India, Sexualities, 11 (1-2): 110-

Ghaziani, Amin (2011) Post-Gay Collective Identity Construction, Social Problems, 58(1): 99-125

Green, A. I. (2002)Gay but not queer: Toward a post-queer study of sexuality, Theory and Society, 31: 521-545

Khanna, Akshay (2005) Beyond Sexuality(?), in Bhan, Gautam and Arvind Narrain,(eds.) Because I Have a Voice, Yoda Press, New Delhi

Narrain, A. and Bhan, G. (eds) (2005) Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, New Delhi: Yoda Press

Vanita, Ruth and Kidwai, Saleem (Eds.) (2001) Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History.New York: Palgrave

Vanita, Ruth, (ed) (2002) Queering India: Same-sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. New York, Routledge

Niharika Banerjea is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of  Southern Indiana, Evansville.

The Modalities of ‘Coming Out’

T.P. Sabitha  

I propose to look at the dynamics of the production of two kinds of subjects, the autobiographical and the fictional, and attempt to see how a gay identity informs and transforms the two in sometimes similar and sometimes differing ways. Let me look at Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (subsequently to be referred to as SM in the course of this essay) and Christopher and His Kind (to be referred to as CK). What makes the “subject” a specifically Modernist one in these texts written in 1964 (SM) and 1964 (CK)? And what makes it specifically gay? The last question will of necessity imply a look at the notion of the subject –my proposed objective – in that both the texts are narratives informed by the gay identity of the subject, fictional or autobiographical. And lastly, what are the implications of looking for a gay narrative or gay subject in these texts? These are the questions I wish to explore in the course of this essay. It is, I confess, is only a pointer in the direction of possible answers.

So, how is the subject a “Modernist” one in these narratives? The novel, A Single Man, is not a first-person narrative, but it uses certain first-person narrative techniques like the Woolfian stream of consciousness and a certain Bergsonian idea of subjective time or durèe both of which are characteristic of what has come to be labeled “Modernist”. There is a certain interiority to the Modernist subject which comes from a self-awareness of this subject capable of objectivising itself and indeed reading itself. The fictional subject in A Single Man, George, is both the subject of this narrative and also the object. In the beginning as well as at the end of the novel, there is a pseudo-clinical objectivisation of the subject:

Fear tweaks the vagus nerve…But meanwhile the cortex, that grim disciplinarian, has takes its place at the central controls and has been testing them, one after another; the legs stretch, the lower back is arched… And now, over the entire inter-communication system is issued the first general order of the day: UP…It stares and stares. Its lips part…It knows its name. It is called George” (SM 7-8).

The novel here curiously resembles an autobiographical narrative in that there is an explicit rupture between the subject “George” and the George that this subject objectivises in the third person narrative of this novel.

The opening lines of the novel establish the subject as the subject in two principal ways: first through a self-recognition (“I am”) and through the recognition of itself as George in the eyes of others, in a dialectical cognitive process. Its existence is confirmed by its self-awareness and its recognition by others. The public affirmation that this self desperately needs in order to establish its identity is a persisting idea in the text. Look at these lines for example: “George slips his parking-card into the slot (thereby offering a piece of circumstantial evidence that he is George); the barrier rises in spastic mechanical jerks, and he drives in” (SM 34) and “[a] veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, ‘Good morning!’ And the three secretaries – each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style – recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply ‘Good morning!’ to him” (SM 35).

 However, the recognition by others is also a misrecognition. They fail to read in George his not-so-concealed secret: his queerness. All the characters in the novel – including those who know about his liking of men – either fail to read altogether or misread this essential constitutive of the subject called George. In a conversation with his married student, Dreyer, George learns that his wife has taken up a teaching job and teasingly asks him, “ ‘So you’re fixing your own breakfast?’ ” and Dreyer replies, “ ‘Oh, I can manage. Till she gets a job nearer in. Or I get her pregnant.’ ” The narrative continues, “[h]e visibly enjoys this man-to-man stuff with George. (Does he know about me, George wonders; do any of them?)” (SM 40-1). There is misrecognition even by friends who “know” he is gay: After a few drinks with Charlotte, a close friend, when George gets up to leave, we are told, “As they embrace, she kisses him full on the mouth. And suddenly sticks her tongue right in…It’s one of those drunken longshots which just might, at least theoretically, once in ten thousand tries, throw a relationship right out of its orbit and send it whizzing off another” (SM 122). Even the possibility of a true understanding – I am referring to the Kenny episode at the end – is shown to be impossible. This misrecognition is what makes George feel truly alienated. Indeed, the whole novel is marked by an acute feeling of alienation. And the only other self who will have understood this queer subject, Jim, is dead. Jim is an absent presence in the novel. Time, space and the alienated fictional subject – all bear markers of his absence. The absence of Jim is a signifier of a larger absence of understanding, sharing and desire – an absence of  the returning gaze of the queer subject. And since subjectivity is presented in the novel as constituted as much by others as by the self, the queer subject remains partly unconstituted.

However, the unreturned gaze of desire has been compensated through a fictional device in the text – that of making the subject the third person “he”, thus creating a rupture in the self (the self as observing and desiring subject and object that is observed and desired.) This fictional device of a fissure in the self creates a space for the acknowledgement of his homoerotic desire. This is further enacted in the masturbation scene towards the end of the novel. A homoerotic relationship with the self is explicitly performed in this episode. The novel in this way compensates for the misrecognition by others, through inventing fictional compensations for the absent gaze. Jim’s absence is compensated for by a doubling self.

Turning to Christopher and His Kind, what is of immediate interest is the title, which places the autobiographical self in relation to others. (Contrast this title with the novel’s title – A Single Man – which, one could argue, is more suited for an autobiographical narrative, the emphasis being on just a single man). The autobiographical subject is one whose identity is recognised and understood by others. It is not a solitary self, but one who can share his queerness – and all that it implies: joy, pain and even alienation – with others of his “kind”. There are feelings of alienation, hostility and terror that this self has to encounter, much like the fictional subject, but in the autobiography there are others whom he can share it with and feel understood by. The queer subject’s identity is affirmed by these others whose desire is of the same kind as his. This makes the act of writing the autobiography performative and equivalent to “coming out”.

J. L. Austin had long ago told us that a performative is different from a constative in that the former “does” the act it utters in the very instant that it is uttered whereas the latter, the constative, only describes. The instance he gives – that of saying “I do” by the bride or bridegroom in a heterosexual marriage ceremony – has come under severe criticism by queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. However, a lot of theorising by queer critics is indebted to Austin’s idea of the performative. How does the writing of a queer autobiography perform the act of “coming out”? The nature of autobiography is a concern with the self and making a public utterance about the self. When this public utterance is about a gay self which has so far suffered exclusion and silence, it takes on the dimension of a “coming out”. It is in this sense that Christopher and His Kind can be said to be performatively queer.

It is interesting to note that fiction does not permit this kind of performative aspect of “coming out” because of its status as fiction. In contrast, the autobiographical utterance is privileged because of the truth-effect that it produces, by its claim to truth in which both the writer and the reader participate (this is the “autobiographical pact” that Lejeune writes about). Autobiography is performative of the queer subject itself because it is through self-referential writing /utterance that the subject constitutes itself as a queer subject. In Christopher and His Kind, Christopher (the narrator, different from Isherwood the author) speaks with shame about instances in which he failed to own up to his gay identity. In fact the narrative begins with the declaration of his earlier autobiographical narrative (Lions and Shadows) as fiction because, “[t]he Author conceals important facts about himself” namely, his gay encounters, and it also declares that “[t]he book I am now going to write will be as frank and as factual as I can make it, as far as I myself am concerned” (CK 7). In this declaration lies the act of “coming out”. Declarations or utterances of this kind make autobiography constitutive of the gay identity of the subject.

Why is it that the writing of A Single Man does not amount to a “coming out” in the same sense as that of the autobiography? One reason as I stated earlier is its status as fiction as opposed to that of autobiography as “truth” (although the production of which is a pact between the writer and the reader); writing about the alienation of a gay man is possible, at least theoretically, by a straight person whereas writing about a gay self – when the writing requires a reading practice of it as producing truth – is possible only by a gay him/herself. The second reason why A Single Man does not perform coming out is that the fictional subject fails to create an identity for itself since it is constantly misrecognised by others, wherefore George’s constant feeling of alienation. If “subject” itself is a construct and a “gay subject” is constituted through language and desire, it needs others to participate in the reading of its language in order to bring itself to being (in an ontological continuum) and it also needs others to reciprocate the gaze of desire. It is here that fictional compensation through a doubling of the self comes into play in the novel, where the “coming out” is understood and read only by this doubled image of himself. However once we take readers of these two texts into account and think of them as participating in this reading of “coming out”, we can only talk of the novel and the autobiography as employing different modalities of coming out.

What A Single Man does is to employ narrative techniques we now read as peculiar to Modernism – the fragmented, yet coherent, subjective perspective in the stream of consciousness narrative, the Free Indirect Style which Gerard Genette sees as the narrative “taking on the speech of the character”, the breaking up of chronology and the idea of associative memory as opposed to voluntary, structured memory – and invest this narrative with the perspective of a gay subject. Mark Lilly, in Gay Men’s Literature in the Twentieth Century writes about A Single Man that in it “George’s viewpoint is, more or less, the one we are invited to adopt as readers…Gay values are taken for granted; they constitute the starting point; but heterosexuality is seen to threaten a life of tedious and inane conformity”(182). These gay values which give the text the performative function of coming out constitute the text as a gay text for Lilly. Lilly also goes on to say that “[t]he sexual orientation of George is not obsessively central to the narrator’s account, and this results in a matter-of-factness about homosexuality which is positive” (188). However, the sexual orientation of the fictional subject is an important constituent – perhaps  the most important – in the very definition of that self and the text, given that the text constantly grapples with questions of evasion or articulation of homoerotic desire as foundations for formal judgement.

Now to come to the last question in a series of questions I posed at the beginning of my essay: what are the implications of looking for identifiably “gay” texts? The imperative to produce a difference based on desire as an object of cognitive scrutiny is central to the project of queer theory and the lesbian and gay movements which are committed to the social necessity of ‘coming out’. However, Lee Edelman warns us in Homographesis:

[A]t just this point the liberationist project can easily echo, though in a different key, the homophobic insistence upon the social importance of codifying and registering sexual identities…I want to call attention to the formation of a category of homosexual person whose very condition of possibility is his relation to writing or textuality, his articulation of a “sexual” difference …that generates the necessity of reading certain bodies as visibly homosexual. (731-5).

Even as we continue to ask the question “what is a ‘gay text’?” we also need to bear in mind the dangers of classification and tropology we might be leading ourselves into that Edelman is quick to warn us about and we ought perhaps to be alert to where political agency is vested in the very articulation of a self based on disempowered difference.

Select References: 

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962.

Edelman, Lee. “Homographesis.” Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Massachusetts, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method. Trans. J. Ewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1980.

Isherwood, Christopher. Christopher and His Kind: 1929 – 1939. London: Minerva, 1976.

Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. London: Methuen, 1964.

Lejeune, Phillippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis:Minnesota, 1989.

Lilly, Mark. Gay Men’s Literature in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York UP, 1993.

 

T. P. Sabitha is a well known poet. She teaches at Hansraj College, University of Delhi.

Sexuality, Identity and Censorship

Charu Gupta

What I am going to say is nothing new. While exploring the linkages between sexuality, identity and censorship, I want to talk about certain key elements, which reveal the intersection of the three. There are multiple sites of censorship, which of course is done by the State over and above all, but there is explicit and implicit censorship done in India by dominant castes, majority communities and patriarchies. I am interested here in this kind of censorship, which is done to silence and marginalize alternate sexualities, ambiguous religious identities, sex workers, certain languages, people, symbols and culture. Such censorship of sexuality has historical roots. My examples come largely from a colonial context and from contemporary India, exploring how sexuality becomes a key arena for the imposition of censorship by the moralist Hindu brigade particularly, in literary genres, print and visual media, and in actual practices.

I would also like to ponder how identity politics, in a manner, contributes to a different kind of censorship. I want argue that in the construction of a homogenous Hindu community identity, which operates and works through a reworked and updated patriarchy, censorship becomes a critical tool, as it helps to control sexualities on the one hand and impose a fixed identity on the other. In fact escalation of sexually repressive censorship is intricately tied to heightened assertion of a Hindu community identity. The pogrom in Gujarat has brought home to us how implicit censorship imposed by dominant religious communities and castes operates in tandem with State censorship.

The influential work of Michel Foucault has revealed how propagation of disciplinary regimes requires an intensification in the management and policing of sexuality, which further leads to distinctions of identity. It has been also asserted that obscenity also emerged as a distinct regulatory category in the modern period, and was subject to intense censorship particularly in Europe, in part due to the rise of literacy, the spread of print and a wider dissemination of written texts, and in part due to Victorian notions of chastity. Combined with this of course, this debate has extended to pornography. Sharp lines have been drawn between anti-pornography and anti-censorship feminists in the West. Catherine MacKinnon in her powerful critique of pornography claims that it institutionalises the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticism of domination and submission with the social construction of male and female. However, feminists like Judith Butler question the pervasive power of pornography. She builds a case for performative contradiction, whereby utterances cannot be assigned a consensus of meanings. Divisions often made between legitimate erotic art on the one hand and obscene pornography on the other, where the latter is subject to censorship, have been attacked, linking it to debates on high and low culture. It has also been pointed out that distinctions need to be made between sexually explicit representations and sexism. Consensual and coercive sex cannot be collapsed. Some even say that pornography actually reflects male anxieties and fears. Moreover, it is argued that while women are victims of violent crimes, the persistent foregrounding of pain and political correctness marginalises women’s sexual pleasures and desires.

In India, feminists have pointed out that there has broadly been a ‘conspiracy of silence’, combined with censorship, regarding sexuality. In recent years examples of such censorship abound, be it the attack on songs like ‘choli ke peeche’ or M.F. Hussain painting Saraswati or the withdrawal of the 1997 Delhi Tourism Diary due to the protest by BJP for the inclusion of a representation of the bronze statue of the nude Yakshini or ‘Dancing Girl’ from Mohenjo-daro.

There is a long history of such censorship, and in the colonial period particularly, moral and sexual worries of the British combined with those of an aspiring indigenous Hindu middle class. There was a moral panic of sorts that gripped a section of the British and the Hindu middle classes, creating anxieties regarding questions of sexuality, which was reflected in various arenas. Implicit and explicit censorship was used here for a coercive and symbolic regulation of women, which helped in replenishing colonial authority, updating indigenous patriarchy, and proclaiming a collective identity. In north India for example, there were endeavours made particularly by the Hindu publicists to redefine, control and censor literature, entertainment and domestic arena, especially pertaining to women, to forge an empowering Hindu identity. The discursive management and control over sexuality was essential to project a civilised and vibrant sectarian Hindu identity. Regulation and censorship of sexuality thus was, and continues to be, central to identity politics, be it fundamentalist, racial or nationalist. It is needed in order to control women, justify domination and subordination, and uphold community honour.

However, sexuality, pleasure and love have been expressed in diverse ways. Through various mediums women and men have found ways to undermine implicit assumptions about gender systems and to negotiate codified sexual relations. We have a rich variety of experiences and practices, which are indifferent to and sometimes even subvert the tyrannies of respectability and standardisation. Such transgressions have precluded the crafting of a master narrative, and ‘disorder’ has crept into the ‘moral order’ of the censorship brigade.

In dominant narratives of love and sexuality, monogamous, heterosexual, same community/caste marriages and relationships continue to be the predominant ideal. In colonial period too same-sex attractions or inter-religious love represented a dangerous breach to nationalist ideals and Hindu community assertions. Deviance from ‘normal’ codes of behaviour revealed the possibility of diversion from the accepted and the expected. I want to first explore a book written in this period on male-male sexual bonding, which became a major target of attack by the Hindu publicists and faced severe censorship and condemnation. This was a period when efforts were being made at linguistic standardisation of Hindi, combined with attacks on any hints of eroticism and obscenity in Hindi literature, which were seen as hallmarks of a decadent, feminine and uncivilised culture. There was a growing fear of romance, of sexual and bodily pleasure, seen as a transgression of the ideals of the nation itself. Aesthetics became an exercise in ethics.

At the same time, print facilitated the widespread production of ‘ashlil’ (obscene) material as a commodity, and erotic consumerism became a part of the publishing boom in UP, surreptitiously disturbing the dominance of ‘clean’ literature. Such popular literature came under increasing attack, especially with charges of obscenity levelled against it. The first obscenity laws appeared in India in the late nineteenth century Sections 292, 293 and 294 of the Indian Penal Code were explicitly designed for censorship of any form of obscenity. However, in spite of various rules, regulations and agreements, the term obscenity has remained vague. It has often been used to censor not only pornography as it is often defined today, but also in nineteenth century England to outlaw publications on birth control. In colonial India too there was not clear definition of the term, and it could encompass a variety of meanings in common usage and debates. Extremely divergent material could thus be classified as obscene and thus subject to censorship. For example, the erotic epic Radhika Santwanam of the eighteenth century Telugu poet and courtesan Muddupalani was republished in 1911. This classic work placed the sensuality of Radha at its centre. The British soon banned this edition on charges of obscenity, and a long controversy followed. The Indian social reformists too offered a vehement criticism of the work, and denounced it for alleged crude depictions of sex, and asked for its censorship.

The strongest however was the case of Pandey Becan Sharma Ugra’s book Chaklet published in 1927, which dealt with issues of sodomy, sexual acts between adult males and adolescent boys, and other aspects of male homosexuality. Chaklet was a collection of eight short stories, variously titled ‘He Sukumar’ (Oh, Beautiful Youth), ‘Vyabhichari Pyar’ (Adulterous Love), ‘Jail Mein’ (In Jail), ‘Hum Fidaye Lackhnau’ (I am a Fan of Lucknow), ‘Kamariya Nagin si Bal Khaye’ (The Waist Twists like a Female Snake), etc. Written in a titillating fashion, these stories were against sodomy and homosexuality, claiming to draw inspiration from real life incidents. However, by the process of condemnation, they also acknowledged the wide prevalence of such practices, especially in UP, where the beautiful young boys were called ‘chocolate’, ‘pocket-book’ and ‘money-order’. Chaklet hinted at homosexual tendencies between Krishna and Arjun, Ram and Tulsidas and Krishna and Surdas. It proved to be a commercial sensation and within six weeks of its publication, two editions of it were sold out. However, it was soon banned and its next edition could come out only after independence.

The guardians of morality actually launched militant criticism against the book, and through it, against many writings like Ugra’s Dilli ka Dalal (Delhi’s Broker) and also books like Vyabhichari Mandir (Adulterous Temple) and Abalaon ka Insaf. Such works were referred to as ghasleti sahitya, and a movement against it, known as ghasleti andolan was sustained for 12 years. Banarsidas Chaturvedi, the editor of Vishal Bharat, took a lead, and was largely backed by the new Hindi loci of authority — university departments, literary associations and important journals. In UP, the magazines, Chand and Sudha published material against such literature, and the associations, Hindi Sahitya Sammelan and Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha adopted resolutions against these books. Gandhi initially wrote against Chaklet without reading it, but later after going through it, did not find it obscene. He wrote a letter to this effect, which, however, was brought to light only in 1951.

The point is, why did a book like Chaklet, which actually attacked sodomy and homosexuality, lead to such a hysterical reaction? The campaign against it was at once a paternalist and a moralist stance, deployed to ‘protect’ the public from ‘unhealthy’ influences. However, its reach hints that here there was something more volatile at stake than the mere offending of ideas of purity and respectability. Ugra wrote on a taboo subject, an unmentionable act, and spoke the unspeakable. The critics claimed that the actual effect of Ugra’s writings was to titillate and excite his readers and thus to encourage, not discourage, homosexual desire. Colonial presence, growing nationalist movement, emerging high literary trends and its links with Hindu identity gave the campaign a specific colour in north India at this time. The attack on Chaklet was also part of a nationalist critique, as the de-gendered male was one stereotype of colonial domination. Chaklet threw into doubt the stability of the heterosexual regime, procreative imperatives and modern monogamous ideals of marriage. It was a stigma and a disgrace of effeminacy and sexual inversion in male behaviour, which was at best unmentioned.

Chaklet brought into public view emergent urban male attachments and alternate sexualities, posing a danger to civilisation, at a time when the imagery of a strong, masculine Hindu male was a concern of the nation. It opened an epistemological gap, a void in maleness itself. The consequences of this conflict, which pitted critics against popular literature, and by extension against entertaining fiction, was a long-lasting rift between Hindi literature that was enshrined in a large part of the canon. Reading such books was considered a crime for students, and critics made sure that they were never included in the syllabus, indeed in the history of Hindi literature. But this literature survived, thanks to its popularity. The conflict continued well over the coming period and saw many debates in the 1940s as well — over Jainendra Kumar’s Sunita, Yashpal’s Dada Comrade, and Ismat Chugtai’s Lihaf (The Quilt).

Another result of such censorship for example was that there was a pervasive and systematic attack on sensual poetry of the earlier times. Serious charges were levied by an influential section of Hindi writers against sringar ras poetry, particularly that of obscenity, centring on the woman’s body. It also appears that obscenity was redefined by many literary writers, specially to control certain female sexual identities. The debate on obscenity was largely a debate on sex for pleasure and recreation versus sex for reproduction. The figure of Radha also almost completely disappeared from the canons of Hindi literary syllabi and normative standardized poetry. In earlier poetry, Radha was a potent symbol of a woman in love who is neither mother nor wife. Her sexuality could not be contained within any rigid bounds of conventional propriety. But now from a predominantly aesthetic category, the image of woman became a stiflingly moral one.

Even in the case of films, we see that in colonial India the Censor Board banned various films like Strange Interlude and Passion on charges of ‘obscenity’. The opposition was to bathing scenes, short skirts, kissing and embracing, as they were supposed to have a ‘demoralising’ effect on the spectators. In fact, the Hindu Mahasabha wanted its representatives to be nominated to the Censor Board of each province to ensure a proper scrutiny of films, in order that they did not corrupt the morals of Hindu boys and girls.

However, it would be incomplete to stop here. Such censorships and attempts at control have received a constant challenge, and various forms of assertions and resistances question the given models of sexuality and the so-called homogeneity and cohesion of community identity. Besides formal sites of protest, again we see that our everyday lives are an arena where resistances to such censorships abound. Everyday is an area, where maybe due to pragmatic reasons, maybe due to sheer indifference and unconcern, it is not so easy to continue to impose such censorships and draw rigid boundaries, as they show the messy complexities of working together. Even amidst new regulations of control, examples abound of freedom, of sharing, of assertion. They inspire us to come to terms with ‘difference’ and conflict and live with such differences. Perhaps these examples can be seen as subversions and alternative assertions. But more than that, to borrow from James Scott, they are everyday forms of resistance, in their own way challenging stereotypes, and refusing to be silenced. Such interventions through documentaries, street theatre, media, women’s movement, our daily living practices etc. highlight the messy complexities of reality and inchoate ways of life, suggesting a different order of rationality against efforts made through censorship to categorise, classify and project a particular kind of sexuality and identity, and silence or marginalize others. Such interventions weave a narrative thread, which illuminate ruptures in dominant paradigms of sexuality and identity. When we celebrate our freedom of expression, when we resist censorship and break silences, we are in a way challenging and, within limits, transgressing an oppressive social order. We are celebrating our heterogeneity, our differences, and pluralities of our existences and experiences in spatial and political practices. We are disrupting the logic of rigid boundaries and providing moments of vulnerability in the dominant discourse.

Charu Gupta is Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Delhi.

Material Love

 

Nandini Chandra and Jesse Ross Knutson

Indeed, love is a many splendoured thing! Different categories of age and class appropriate romantic literature offer a guide to this tremendous variety. There is a virtual caste/class system operating in the love industry whereby some people feel real/authentic love in contrast to more debased others. But despite this hierarchy, love is for everyone, like in the Mira Nair film Monsoon Wedding. What is shared across this class system is a desire for another human being for sure. But the sexual feeling aroused in romantic hetero-normative love is a specialized one not to be confused with sex qua sex. The sex here has to be constantly negotiated and differentiated to a point where it is no longer sex, but a suitably inflected synonym for it. So while the Valentine’s day lovers may relate to each other via loud commodities, like heart shaped balloons, Archies’ greeting cards and red roses that have been frozen for weeks before February 14-the magic date, our subdued low-profile love in defiance of this blatant commodification is no less a type in the many splendoured index file of the culture industry.

It was the Marxist theorist Theodor Adorno who pointed out that the dominant form of love under capitalism is romance. His exact words: love downgraded to romance! What is so debased about romance? Is there nothing beautiful or transgressive about it? How do we make sense of our defiance of love and, defiance in love in the same breath? One minute we are distancing ourselves from a love that needs the aids of the shopping plaza, and the next minute we are buying more things to shout to the world that we will love despite all the sri ram senas and the khap panchayats. Is that schizo or not? The answer must lie in the deep structure of alienated love that affects us all whether we like to acknowledge it or not.  By alienated love is meant a love that has been taken away and then sold back to us, a love appropriated from our bodies’ capacity for sensual pleasure and then returned as a mechanism to mediate that sensuality—ways of loving, ways of kissing, ways of fighting and ways of making up via the market place that any reader of Cosmo or popular ads can immediately appreciate. This is not merely a market place of things, but also a market place of ideas and we would do well to believe Marquez, when he reiterates that there is a lot of cross-fertilization between the high and the low.

At the same time, sexuality—the embodied experience of love—cannot be completely regulated by the moral police. The very fact that they are trying so hard must be reason to explore what it is that is getting their goat.  For one, when people feel pleasure, it is a dangerous thing because they allow their bodies to come out of fear and start questioning the repression that is cajoled into them. Who to love, how to love, who absolutely not to love are some of the edicts laid down by the enemies of love. But the defenders of love, the liberal bourgeoisie, who have surrendered to the lure of the market and allowed their daughters and sisters to enter dating sites, marriage bureaus, internet chat lines, are not so different either. These exchanges of love are rife with caste and gotra markers apart from an implicit injunction for class and religious inbreeding. It is therefore important see the defenders or tolerators of love and the enemies of love not as opposite camps, but allied (maybe disparate) units trying to come to grips with the new products of sexuality, inaugurated by advanced capital. While the fanatics are merely crying foul at the loss of their hold over the women who are daring to marry outside caste and religion, the more entrenched capitalist class, who embrace modernity with riders, want to teach women lessons in self-censorship, so that they know the boundaries within which their pleasure is permissible. After all, romantic love is not necessarily liberating. It works very much within the auspices of patriarchy and accepts women’s subservience to men. Given the uneven development of capitalism, what we have are different faces of the same thing, rather than modern love versus barbaric opposition to it. The sooner we understand the different encroachments upon our sexuality, the better we will be able to fight the constant attempts to incorporate it for the love industry. For ultimately we need love—not for happy little families who can watch telly on increasingly upgraded technology, serving up programmes that perpetually leave them on the brink of a promised pleasure so close and yet so far away—but instead to create a pleasure that can truly belong to us, and then to learn to mould the world in the image of this pleasure.      

The question is not the content of this pleasure, the alternately authentic or debased love that we started with, and whether one should love this way or that.  The question is the trajectory. The violence against those who would love in a socially unsanctioned or defiant way (which we can now begin to recognize as fascist) comes from precisely this: the uncharted territory where an economy of unpredictable, creative pleasure might lead.  It could lead to the demand for a world of pleasure, a world in the image of desire, with full stomachs and moist throats, with freely moving bodies, and social relations that we want and invent, instead of those that we suffer for lack of any other available option.  Sexual repression and frustration teach one to live with lack and invest one’s libidinal energies in the reproduction of lack that capitalism represents.  Socialism put simply would start with the reproduction of plenty, which the spark of pleasure in its unpredictable eddies might begin to capture in microcosm before the pigs are ready. 

Nandini Chandra is Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi.

Jesse Ross Knutson is Postdoctoral Fellow, South & South Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.