India in Love

by Ira Trivedi

  At 3 a.m., I yank Kapil off the dance floor. It is time to go home. He has been dancing non-stop, unabashed and drenched with sweat, for four hours. In the car on the ride home, Kapil has stars in his eyes as he continues to hum the songs he has heard all night.

  ‘Kapil, I’m sorry you didn’t meet anyone,’ I say to him apologetically. Finding a boyfriend for Kapil had been our original plan.

  ‘No, Ira ma’am, why are you sorry? It was my first time in a disco, and it has been the best night of my whole life.’

  ♦

  Kapil and I do not have the same taste in men. He likes thin, fair-skinned, nerdy men; I like dark, handsome, rakish bad boys. Kapil is probably wiser in this department. Kapil and I check out men at the 5th Annual Queer Pride Parade in Delhi. It is the first parade that Kapil has attended since coming out, and he has tied a rainbow scarf around his neck to show off his gay identity. He attended the parade last year, but with a mask on his face, afraid of being exposed. I too was at the parade last year for no other reason than that it was the biggest street party that Delhi had ever seen. I notice that this year there are fewer people shrouding their faces with colourful masks than last year. People are proudly preening their rainbow pride with banners, placards, hats, socks and scarves. The marchers are mostly men, but I see a fair number of women and small groups of flamboyantly dressed, attractive transsexuals showing off their perfectly muscled legs in tiny skirts.

  The parade moves at snail’s pace, like an Indian marriage baraat, stopping every few minutes to dance exuberantly to the drums of the dhol-wallahs who accompany the marchers. Kapil, too, dances along with the drums, fluttering his scarf in the air. The afternoon winter sun is harsh, and people crowd underneath rainbow umbrellas. People are proudly holding up placards that they have made: ‘Be straight not narrow’, ‘Love is the law’, ‘Gay is Happy’ and the like. ‘Meri chhatri ke neeche aja’ says one, held by a man underneath a rainbow umbrella. Others are more direct: ‘If you want a straight son-in-law, support us’. Another one held by a voluptuous transsexual, reads ‘Kinky is queer’. I, too, have made a placard, ‘India in Love’ in rainbow colours, which Kapil and I hold together. Joints are being passed around, and everyone partakes in the fun.

  After three hours of dancing and drumming, the parade finally ends, and the crowd slowly disperses for a picnic on the lawns of India Gate, a popular picnic spot where hundreds of people—families, couples and young lovers alike bask on the lawns. As Kapil and I walk towards the rainbow-coloured banner in the distance, Kapil tells me that he recently met the Director of IIT Delhi about starting an official LGBT club on the campus.

  ‘What did the Director say?’ I ask.

  ‘He didn’t know what LGBT meant. He thought that I was referring to a chemistry experiment,’ says Kapil with an embarrassed look.

  ‘Did you explain it to him?’ I asked Kapil.

  ‘I did. I told him that I was gay, but he seemed confused. I am doubtful that he understands anything.’

  I wonder how it is possible that people could live in such utter ignorance. But then again, many of the Director’s generation (and unfortunately many in this one too) are trained to reflexively block out anything that refers to sex—imagine that, in a 5,000-student-strong college in the middle of the city.

  As the crowds swell at the gay parade picnic site hawkers flock the lawns. I see a group of hijra beggars amongst them, trying to finagle money from the crowd, as is their practice. The group approaches us, and they start grabbing at my bag. They tell me they will pray for a good husband for me if I give them some money. They see that I won’t relent, so they target Kapil.

  ‘We hope that you marry a beautiful girl, that your studies are good, and you stand first. Please give us some money,’ they implore.

  Kapil looks mortified and quickly runs away.

  I ask one of the hijras if she knows why the picnic is being held.

  She does not.

  I try to explain to the group that this is a gay pride picnic, and that we are fighting for sexual rights, including theirs.

  They stare at me utterly confused, and then one dressed in a colourful sari caked with dirt, puts her hands on her hips and asks me in a throaty voice, ‘Are you giving us money or no?’

  I really don’t know what to say to them anymore, so I hand them 10 and walk away to locate Kapil.

  The crowd at the picnic is mostly young. It is a sea of young faces, the average age probably being twenty-five. We sit amidst picnicking families and are accepted by everyone without the blink of an eyelid.

  Kapil interrupts my thoughts, ‘Ira ma’am, I told my mother I am gay.’

  ‘Wow! Congrats, Kapil! That’s a pretty big deal… what did she say?’

  ‘Well, I told her I was gay…and then I told her I was kidding,’ he says, blushing. ‘I was just testing to see if she knew the meaning of gay.’

  ‘Oh. Did she?’ I ask curiously.

  ‘Yes, she did. I was happy about that,’ says Kapil.

  ‘How did she react to the joke?’ I ask.

  Kapil looks at me sheepishly. ‘She told me she is getting me married off as soon as I finish IIT.’

  I am not surprised at the reaction. Kapil’s stock in the marriage market is up considerably because of his IIT degree. The truth is that gays in India still find many reasons to remain closeted. There are no gay icons, no major Bollywood stars who have come out, no influential CEOs who have made their orientation public. The vast majority of gay men still get married: 70 per cent in Mumbai, 82 per cent in smaller cities, according to a 2009 survey by the Humsafar Trust64.

  ‘Never mind, Kapil. One day it will be the right day to tell her, and on that day, you will,’ I say to him.

  PIMPS AND HOES

  ‘IT’S BEEN BUSINESS DOING PLEASURE WITH YOU’

  It is the beginning of the auspicious Navratri, the nine days of fasting and worship during which Hindus pray to the Mother Goddess. A full moon blinks its way through a flurry of clouds as I make my way on a cycle rickshaw to GB Road (ironically renamed Swami Shradhanand Marg in 1965), Delhi’s red-light district, and one of India’s largest, with an estimated 5,000 sex workers residing in ninety-six brothels.

  The British established GB Road in the 1930s by consolidating Delhi’s five brothel areas, including the prosperous brothels of Chawri Bazar, which had once flourished under Mughal patronage, into one area. They sold the ground floors of the twenty buildings where the brothels were located to hardware merchants. Today, GB Road is famous for another reason—it is Asia’s largest hardware market and India’s largest market for sanitary ware. Nestled between the hardware stores are steep, vertiginous staircases that lead up to the kothas whose windows are boarded shut. Each kotha is distinguished by a number—the more prosperous kothas have their numbers inlaid in tiles, the less prosperous have theirs scribbled on a pillar in white chalk.

  I sit on the floor of Kotha 36, the most famous kotha in Delhi for mujras. The room is bathed in the pale luminosity of artificial white lights. I am familiar with these lights from my investment-banking days; they are purposely bright to sting the eyes and keep workers awake. It is 11 p.m. on a Thursday night and it seems like I am the only customer here. The kotha isn’t empty though; it is crowded with the women who live and work here; they’re sitting around on plastic chairs waiting for customers to arrive. They wear refulgent saris in bright colours with tiny navel-exposing blouses, their generous stomachs exposed and spilling in all directions. They remind me of a set of matryoshka dolls, their faces plastered with white paint, abnormally pronounced red blotches on their cheeks, crimson lipstick, and dark eye shadow over long, sparkly fake eyelashes. They aspire to look beautiful, but look old and tired instead. They all clutch one or two mobile phones, not the inexpensive ubiquitous Nokias, but expensive smartphones with fancy displays and touch screens which they flaunt like diamond rings. As I am to discover, the mobile phone plays a critical role in this business; the nicer the phone, the mo
re exalted the status of its owner. The small hall where we are all seated features a motley group of performers: a young boy playing the tabla, an old man with an orange beard playing the harmonium, and another clanging cymbals. A woman who looks distinctly different from this crowd, with an authoritative air about her, sits with them. She is dressed in a flowery salwaar-kameez, there is no make-up on her face, and her hair is tied back tightly. The hall abuts the living quarters of the women, and I can see a cluster of tiny, crowded rooms. This multi-purpose hall is also used as a bathroom and dressing room. A rusty sink is installed on the wall, next to which a plastic shelf holds a number of colourful toothbrushes; nightgowns and towels are untidily splayed on a row of hooks. Above the sink is a picture of the singer Lata Mangeshkar, a plastic garland around her neck. I had expected the brothels of GB Road to be a far cry from the luxurious bordellos of the past re-created in films like Umrao Jaan, but I had not imagined this sort of shabby decrepitude.

  Everyone stares at me in bored silence. As I had guessed, the woman who sits with the band is the lady in charge. She throws me an angry glare.

  ‘Are you from the media?’ she asks.

  ‘No, I am not,’ I reply firmly.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asks suspiciously.

  ‘Yes! I am just here to see the famous mujras of Delhi!’ I reply.

  ‘Girls from good homes don’t come here,’ she says rudely.

  I am unsure about how to respond to this so I say nothing. She considers me for a second more, then says, ‘Just remember the lives of young children are at stake here,’ and then she launches into a song from the movie Umrao Jaan. To my surprise, the woman sings well, and while the background music is poor, her voice is melodious and powerful.

  As the show picks up pace, a few women rise and begin to dance, swaying gracelessly to the rising tempo. Brothels are hardly the place to expect tender things, but here amongst the women is a cute little girl who couldn’t have been more than a year old. She has only recently learnt to walk and is waddling around on her chubby legs, chewing on the ear of a grimy teddy bear. It is not clear who this child’s mother is as she is on friendly terms with all the women. She is picked up and cuddled freely, and then put down on the floor to waddle around some more. She goes over to the musicians, tapping on their instruments, and then at the beginning of an upbeat Hindi movie song, she squeals and breaks into a waddle-dance. This song, it seems, is not just familiar to her but also a favourite. I can’t take my eyes off this child even though I feel rude staring like this. That said, half the women in this room have been glaring at me ever since I entered, so I probably shouldn’t feel too diffident about staring. As the child totters around, someone hands her some masala chips, which she demands more of; she is given the entire packet, which she happily munches her way through. Another person gives her a sip from a soda can. It is 11.30 p.m., and I wonder why this child is still awake. She walks over to me and smiles. She hands me her teddy bear of indeterminate brown-grey colour in a gesture of friendship. She is a handsome child—fair, plump, with small, round features and a head of thick hair tied into two wispy ponytails. She is wearing a pair of frilly panties, discoloured but clean, a faded black tunic and a black thread around her neck to keep the evil eye at bay.

  I can’t help but wonder what her future will be. Will she, like her mother, become a sex worker? After all, 90 per cent of sex workers’ daughters in India follow their mothers into prostitution.65 As the tempo of the Bollywood song rises, two women begin dancing frenziedly. Their dance is just a series of bawdy pelvic thrusts, breasts and stomachs jiggling. The child, too, starts spinning in circles and then falls down on the hard floor. There are a few seconds of silence before she breaks into a shrill cry. Someone comes and scoops her up and takes her into one of the adjoining rooms. Finally, it is bedtime.

  I have already given 100 as my entrance fee to the performance and a couple more 100 notes to the singer and musicians who demand it. There is one last note left in my wallet—it is my auto fare home. On my way out I bump into the child who, it appears, is having trouble sleeping and has found her way into the hall. She gives me a toothy smile and demands to be picked up. I take out my cab fare, fold it into a small square and place it in the child’s palm. That was my last 100 and it leaves me stuck in a brothel at midnight without a ride home but I don’t mind, for this child has stolen my heart.

  ♦

  Prostitution in India has a long and storied past. From the verses of the Mahabharata to the renditions of the exquisite ganika in the time of Kautilya to the charm of Mughal bordellos, prostitutes have held an important place in Indian history. The first records of prostitution anywhere in the world were found in the ancient civilization of Sumer—the ‘art of prostitution’ and ‘the cult of the prostitute’ are two of the ‘me’ (sacred treasures) given to the Sumerian goddess Inanna by her father Enki, the god of wisdom. When Inanna takes the me back to the city of Uruk in the boat of heaven, the people turn out in droves to cheer in gratitude. The principal deities of the Egyptians were Osiris (Sun God) and Isis (Earth Goddess) and the cult of these gods gave rise to temple prostitution where young, prepubescent girls were donated to the temple to placate the gods, often in elaborate ceremonies.66 Prostitution found its way from Egypt into India67 sometime during the Brahmanic (Vedic) period when liberal marriage morals were being remodelled and virginal purity and an ideal of strict monogamist life was being established.68

  The Devadasi, or temple prostitute culture in India has its roots in the Egyptian cults of Osiris and Isis. Temple sex workers were thought to have been an important part of religious and cultural life in India as early as 300 CE, and became an established institution by around 700 CE. Devadasis sang and danced for the temple god and provided sexual favours to temple priests and favoured male patrons. In time, Devadasis began to provide sexual favours to common visitors to the temple in exchange for money. Historically, these women came from tribal or lower caste communities such as the Nat, Bedia and Kanjars; daughters born to Devadasis were reared in the temple compound and initiated into the profession by their mothers.69

  There were other strands of prostitution in ancient Indian society. One of these was concubinage in which women were traded, sold and offered as gifts or spoils of war. In ancient India prostitution was widely accepted by the government and the public. Prostitutes were not looked upon as socially and morally inferior beings as they are today, and several Hindu scriptures even extolled prostitutes as objects of good luck. For example, the Matsya Purana, the oldest of the Puranas, thought of the prostitute as a portent of good luck, and another religious text, the Vishnu Samhita, says that circumambulating a prostitute brought good luck. Though many of these practices have been forgotten, a rare few exist even today. In some parts of South India, for instance, the mangalsutra of a new bride is made by the hands of a prostitute, and in Northeast India, a handful of earth from the threshold of a prostitute’s house is required to mould the statue of the Goddess during the Durga Puja festival.

  One would imagine that the best time in Indian history to have been a courtesan was in the beginning of the third century BCE, during the prosperous rule of the Maurya dynasty, a time of great renaissance in art and literature. The prostitute or ganika as she was called in Sanskrit was a highly refined temptress adept in the arts of song, dance and seduction. The numerous discourses on prostitution during this time suggest a significant increase in the popularity of the trade. The ganikas were trained in the sixty-four kalas or arts forms that were prerequisites to be a ganika—these included song, dance, the art of seduction, and more scholarly pursuits such as the knowledge of warfare and literary recitations. Brothels were state-controlled, by the ‘Superintendent of Prostitution’, and the revenue from this institution went to the upkeep and teaching of the ganikas.

  Ancient texts such as the Arthashastra, Kamasutra and Buddhacharita (Life of Buddha) are testament to the distinct, widely accepted position that courtesans held i
n Indian life. Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the ancient and authoritative treatise on civics, lays out in elaborate detail the functions of the prostitute. It includes an entire chapter on the regulation of ‘public women’ and roles of retired prostitutes as cooks, midwives and nurses, or as maids of honour in royal households. In the Kamasutra, Vatsyayana devoted an entire section to ganikas, writing that it is the duty of a man to indulge the ganika who was an indispensable and estimable factor in public functions of the town and of the aristocracy. In the Buddhacharita, the author, Ashvaghosa, recounts a story. When the Buddha was travelling, he met Amrapali, a prostitute, who invited him for a meal, which he readily accepted. A little later, a Brahmin invited him too, but the Buddha said no as he had already accepted Amrapali’s invitation. This act of the Buddha established equity between the highest caste of Brahmin and the prostitute.

  Under the reign of the Mughals, the culture of the courtesan was enriched. They brought with them their own practices from Persia which integrated seamlessly into the practices of the ganikas.70 The tawaifs were the courtesans of the Mughal times and were sponsored by rich and powerful nobles. They embodied luxurious and urbane living and were connoisseurs of song and dance specializing in vocal forms such as the dadra, ghazal, and thumri, and dance forms like kathak. Veena Oldenburg, a scholar who studied the lost tawaif culture of her hometown of Lucknow writes, ‘Many of the musicians [in the kothas] belonged to famous lineages, and much of late-nineteenth-century Hindustani music was invented and transformed in these salons, to accommodate the new urban elite who filled the patronage vacuum in the colonial period’.71

  It is said that during the reign of Emperor Akbar, courtesan culture was so popular, that Akbar had a separate space allocated to the courtesans of the time, known as the Shaitan Puta (or Devil’s Ville).72 Prostitution in those times was a seriously regulated affair and anyone who wanted to take the virginity of a woman had to formally apply for it by writing a letter to His Majesty the Emperor Akbar himself. During the reign of Emperor Shah Jahan, the tawaif culture continued to flourish. It only fell upon hard times during the reign of the last great Mughal, the puritanical Aurangzeb, who proclaimed that all prostitutes should get married or run the risk of banishment.73