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Book Review
Outside the heterosexual norm
THE PHOBIC AND THE EROTIC — The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India: Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya — Editors; Seagull Books, 26, Circus Avenue, Kolkata-700017. Rs. 795.
Suguna Ramanathan
The fact that, when asked to review this book, I could not tell from the title what the subject matter would be, classing it in my mind vaguely with gender studies, is an indication of the general invisibility of dissenting sexualities in this country. The editors say they hope that this volume will inform, and help transform, society. Having read it through, I can vouch for the wealth of information and the very high level of academic discussion to be found here, which is not surprising considering the many well-known contributors to the study. Perspectives come from experts in economics, law, medicine, culture and politics. The fundamental issue under discussion is the status and identity rights of people with sexual orientations outside the heterosexual norm — gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people, queers, kothis, hijras, pankhis, all categorised under the label as LGBT.
The norm
The screening of Deepa Mehta’s Fire, while provoking outrage, also started a public debate starting December 1998, a debate that was stifled, as one contributor tells us, by the outbreak of the Kargil war and subsequent valorisation of male gallantry and valour. The Hindu Right saw the film as violating the sanctity of the Hindu family, claiming that same sex practices were imported from a hedonistic Western culture. It is interesting to note that Britain in its imperial heyday saw these precisely as importations from an effete and decadent East. More than one of the essayists adduces evidence from ancient texts to show that they were prevalent in ancient Greece as well as India. A continuous interrogation of the norm of heterosexuality runs like an underground stream through the study. Is it, Ranjita Biswas asks, pre-ordained? Or is it that the construction process is invisible? She asks pertinently whether, in the anxiety to keep the family unit as society’s cornerstone, these are processes of fundamental repudiation (innate rejection) or repudiations of fundamental signifiers (marginalising of different but undeniable sexualities). Pramod Nayar notes that the ritualistic functions of hijras at marriages and births in our culture which rejects them suggest they are part of that very culture. Bandyopadhyay suggests that the homophobia about the ‘other’ different sexuality may well signify that that other is an unacknowledged part of self. Ruth Vanita writes of the disruptive effect of erotic love, so private and intense that it is indifferent to the outside world, and thus a threat to social institutions such as marriage.
Locating the issue
Other essays locate the issue in cultural and social spaces peculiar to their times. Leela Gandhi discusses both Empire and its antagonist as profoundly hetero-normative projects, expressive of a male signifying economy, and the homosexual dissidence that withheld consent to the imperial project. Dennis Altman in an essay titled “Sexuality and Globalisation” suggests that migration and the flow of labour and capital across the world today all affect sexuality profoundly and point (as do other contributors) to the fact that the AIDS/HIV phenomenon has made sexuality part of public debate. That sexual mores have always been part of the public domain is clear from Ratna Kapur’s essay, which examines the legal lines drawn around ‘right’ sexual speech and behaviour and the responses to, for instance, Valentine’s Day celebrations or the rape scenes in Bandit Queen. Arguing that there has been far too much censorship, she suggests that petitioning should move from simply the legal struggle to a wider mobilisation that takes on board the concerns of the queer community. Many contributors deal with the policing role of the state (an issue, one may recall, at the heart of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure). Many essayists point to Hindu mythology which suggests that sexuality is, to use Ranjita Biswas’s phrase, “work in progress”; references to Shiva’s role as Mohini and Ardhanarishwar, of Arjuna as Brahannala, of Amba as Shikhandi, occur in more than one essay.
Representation
Representation of the theme in the arts comprises a final section. Brinda Bose critiques Fire for suggesting that the women are drawn to each other out of expediency (no one else to love) rather than passionate choice. Hoshang Merchant writes sensitively of the poems of the gay poet Agha Shahid Ali from Kashmir. Georgina Maddox discusses the paintings of Bhupen Khakhar and Amrita Sher Gill and Shivani Mutneja the fables of Sunita Namjoshi. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, in a fascinating essay called “Approaching the Present”, full of digressions, takes us through Plato’s Symposium, Sappho’s lyrics, the Mahabharata and Manu with equal ease. The longest piece in the volume, it is a model of scholarship that keeps the reader fully engaged through its 70 pages. That cannot be said of the introduction, alas, where the writing is academic to the point of aridity.
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