I also include the brother-love of Laxmana for Rama, the devotion of Hanuman for Rama, the love bond of friendship between Krishna and Balram and Krishna and Sudama from the Bhagvata Purana in this category of male bonding. The ‘guru-shishya parampara’ (tradition of discipleship with a teacher) had platonic love-overtones for both guru and shishya. Brotherly love, shorn of eroticism, was a form of male bonding in a world largely mistrustful of women. Mother-worship can lead as easily to homoerotic leanings as misogyny can; the two psychological states springing from the duality of the mother and the whore.
Much of Sanskrit writing celebrates love between man and woman. Man/man love could not be celebrated without offence to the audience. Hence much of the homosocial or the homoerotic content of Sanskrit texts has to be teased out of them by the alert or aware reader. Linguistic confusion and circumlocution was regularly practised in discussions of adolescent male awareness or mistrust of the female as in some tales of gender confusion in the Mahabharata.
In the medieval, largely Muslim Indian literary history, I include the Sufis who are bound each to each with bonds of love rather than sex. Woman, of course, is excluded from this world though there have been woman saints. Mir Taqi Mir’s father was followed in the streets by a Sufi who when brought to the Delhi household of the Mir’s became the young poet’s teacher. So the teacher of both father and son was also their lover, giving the murshid-shagird silsila (student-teacher lineage) a new dimension. Rumi has said, ‘To the sacred everything is sacred/To the profane everything is profane.’ As every Sufi knows, the divine principle is male while the human soul is always female. Hence, Rumi and Kabir are forced to speak as women while Meerabai or Rabia of Basra can speak in their own gender. Traditionally, even in heterosexual Urdu poetry, the love-object is always ‘he’—a strategy of subterfuge—until the nineteenth-century Lucknow poets dared to introduce a woman as muse.
It was my city
but your alley:
I got lost
Searching you
In everyone’s face.
I was mocked
Being innocent
you showed me your house
Being foolish
I lost my way
Quarrelling with others
didn’t bring you back:
I only lost them
For the love I never had
I lost the loves I had
Cruel one!
if you remember me come home
Busy one
if you tire come home.
‘It Was My City’ by Mir Taki Mir (1722–1808)
In medieval Hindu India when the Chandelas built Khajuraho, and Tantra was at its height, bands of naked young men roamed the country from ‘tirtha’ to ‘tirtha’ trying to make their ‘kundalinis’ rise. You can still see such sadhus at the Kumbh Mela. The photographer Raghu Rai memorably caught one young sadhu with his penis wrapped around a walking stick for discipline. The medieval sadhus used little wood dildos (artificial penises) to make the psychic kundalini energy rise up the spine from the anal to the pineal region in the head.
In 1835, Macaulay with his Minute foisted Western education on India. A brown-skinned Englishman with English mind and manners was created. In the British presidencies of Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, the traditional family was under severe pressure for space—mental as well as physical. Women and children were crushed as men became schizophrenic culturally, wearing the veshti at home and the waistcoat at office. Homosexual children learnt schizophrenia at their convent schools. An imported suffering god-on-the-cross taught them sweet torment and self-guilt while in their ‘pagan’ playpens they were, well, happily ‘pagan’. Homosexuality was fostered if not engendered and foisted upon children in single-sex schools run by celibate teachers, usually priests. The work of the erstwhile gurukula was taken over by the Western missionaries.
The gurukulas enjoined an enforced twenty-five-year brahmacharya. Something was bound to happen within those sexually active first twenty-five years of a man’s life. That something would be, out of necessity of circumstance in an all-male world, homosexuality, since woman was rigorously kept out of bounds. (Mahabharata, trans. Ganguly, 1897, pp. 968–73).
With the Bible came the Western narratives, Shakespeare, the novels of Dickens, Scott and Austen, the essays of Hazlitt and Lamb. My Parsi teacher at convent school told me I should never be marooned on an island without these four. How more marooned could I be than at school among heterosexual boys was beyond me. Not that these books within civilization spoke to my condition. They came severely disinfected and sanitized. The Old Testament was Moses but not Lot or Sodom or David who danced naked before the Ark. The New Testament was the Sermon on the Mount but not the Temptations of Christ. Shakespeare was Romeo and Juliet but not the sonnets. It was Shakespeare bowdlerized through Goan or Parsi schoolmarms’ minds. (Bodies all of us did not have, only minds.)
In Calcutta the Charulatas sighed over Bankim’s novels written a la Austen and the Brontes. They were all heterosexual. Adultery they had in plenty.
The novel form itself is Western. In the frenzy of post-colonialism today we are led to believe that the ‘lok-katha’ (or ‘rupa-katha’) and the ‘burra-katha’ are the wellsprings of modern Indian narratives. If so, how does one account for Tagore of Ghare Baire. For Jibanananda Das, the Ginsberg of fifties’ Calcutta? It is almost a truism that Bankim is Scott. Aurobindo’s brother, after all, was Wilde’s confidant in London.
This is not to say that there are no local forms of narrative. The Ramlila of Delhi or the Nautanki of Uttar Pradesh are too well known to be elucidated here. The analogous Bengali form would be the ‘burra-katha’, viz., the song of the heroes and their boons recounted at Durga Puja. These forms are used in the Hindi heartland even today in revamped versions. Just as the folk motifs on village walls of Bihar were transferred by Madhubani women onto rice paper to be sold in London, Nautanki was sanitized in Teesri Kasam, made memorable by Waheeda’s dances in the Bombay film version. Kamleshwar’s Hindi novel on homosexuality uses these folk forms.
Islam first came to south India in the eighth century AD. Kasargode, Mangalore, Calicut are largely Muslim today. The Mopilah is the descendant of Arab missionaries, traders, spice merchants, boat-builders. Quoilandi in Malabar is famous for its gay boys even today. The dress there is an Arab robe, thobba or djelebba in Arabic; jubba in Arabized Malayalam. Malayalam is a ritualized language. Even gay slang is elegant. ‘Fellatio’ is ‘sucking the fruit’, ‘sodomy’ is ‘entry from behind’ or ‘unusual usual practice’ and so on. This is Mopilah slang. In Calicut homosexuality is privately practised and publicly ridiculed. There is no literature of, by or on homosexuals.
South Indian Brahminism practises taboos centred around the menstruating woman. These taboos and fear of pollution often turn the lyengar and lyer boys away from women to other men. Homosexuality is not uncommon among Brahmin boys in Tamil Nadu and Andhra. An elder colleague, an Iyengar, was compassionate to me: ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I!’ Nowhere is homosexuality proscribed in the shastras. There is no guilt. Nowhere is it mentioned. The conspiracy of silence. Erasure. It does not exist. No gay literature in Tamil or Telugu either. But the Brahmin mind encompasses homosexuality and condones it tacitly as one more illusion to be shed on the road to Moksha. Artha and Kama were never proscribed, but overindulgence is.
In Brahmin Karnataka the gurukulas surreptitiously harboured homosexual teacher and students. Again, no high Brahminical literature on the subject. But the Dalits have plays which refer to homosexual practices. Unfortunately these texts are in local dialects which are well-nigh untranslatable. As the gentrification of the proletariat progresses apace, homosexuality will be pushed further underground.
In Maharashtra, it could be poverty that forces the rural farm labourer to Western tourists or city sahebs for sexual favours tacitly exchanged for goods or cash. The big, bad city of Bombay and its money culture is never far away from any village in
Maharashtra. Rape of Dalit women and the Yellamma culture are realities. The ethnographist, the late Sontheimer lived with the male practitioners of the Vithoba cult for a long time. He gave them draught cattle and bullocks for ploughing (a pair of bulls would cost as much as seven thousand rupees), he told me. These men-centred men held him in reverence as a saviour. Sai Paranjape’s Disha, a film about migrant rural labour in the Bombay cotton mills, has a scene of homosexual overtures between Patekar and Yadav, the implication being that men-without-women practise occasional homosexuality in Bombay’s labour-chawls as men do in prison or at sea. Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay has a severely abridged scene of homosexual horseplay between the drug-pushing Yadav and the film’s child-hero. Actually these homeless children fear rape every night of their lives from the police, if not from older street people.
Bombay’s films are not without its homoeroticism. The real love plot is again dosti or yaraana between the two heroes. The female lead is there only to lessen the homosexual sting. Women are for marriage, male friends for the love-emotion. It goes back to Mehboob’s Andaz. Nargis comes between Raj and Dilip. She, a high-society woman, marries Raj, murders Dilip and goes to jail in the Marxist Mehboob’s melodrama. Interrogating modernity as well as capitalism, woman is the helpless victim in a male capitalist world. In Raj Kapoor’s remake of it, Sangam, Raj loves Rajendra. Rajendra loves Raj’s girl, Vyjayantimala. Rajendra has to commit suicide to resolve the love triangle. In Sholay it is the Amitabh–Dharmendra love story that is centre-stage. Illiterate street people, the bulk of India’s film-going public, hoot if Sanjay Dutt should sleep in his girlfriend’s lap in Naam. They applaud when the boys are ready to die for each other, hunted down by the Hong Kong drug mafia or the police. These are the single-sex love myths alienated urban India lives by.
Modern India with its variety of languages is a challenge to any anthology editor. But homosexual writing in the vernacular addressing small-town audiences is non-explicit when available. There is the added difficulty in our society of social stigmatization of any contributor to a homosexual anthology. Tennessee Williams said just before his death that the modern homosexual faces not so much exploitation as loneliness. Ifti Nasim, Urdu poet, gender-bender and ex-car salesman, writes from the relative security of his Chicago penthouse about his exploited brethren in the subcontinent:
The first stone was lifted by the mosque’s preacher
who had slept with me
The second by the municipal councillor who had also
slept with me
—poem from Narman (Man/Woman)
Androgyny is a lonely business in any world. Those very men who sleep with us become our enemies in the very act of sex. Enemy, my enemy, I name you friend.
English-speaking India yields strident new voices like Mahesh Dattani’s or Raj Rao’s, and there are mainstream writers of English-speaking India like Vikram Seth, writing on gay themes. From Urdu I include a homosexual-hating writer, Gyansingh Shatir, because like all peoples, the homosexuals have their share of scoundrels and child molesters. In high Marathi literature, Jnanpith-winning novelist Vishnu Khandekar’s Yayati has captured the imagination of the homosexual painter Bhupen Khakhar of Baroda. Yayati talks of two brothers. One practises abstinence. When a woman comes to him, he tells her: ‘Be for me a man.’ The other brother, Yayati by name, is licentious. To regain his youth he couples with his own son and is regenerated. Bhupen Khakhar’s painting with the same name shows a green Yayati with sagging scrotum beneath his pink-fleshed son who is also winged. So the gay painter has teased out a homoerotic myth from this allegory of conflict between kama and dharma.
Bhupen Khakhar who is Baroda based and well past his seventieth year is a painter in his prime. He is India’s only openly gay painter. Younger artists—gay in private life—are still hiding for pecuniary benefits. A public that is paying high prices for art will not accept homosexuality. Bhupen has made his money as a chartered accountant and is free to paint as he likes. The homosexual British art critic Howard Hodgkins visits him regularly and is included in his anecdotal paintings a la Delacroix and Hockney.
Bhupen has now taken to prose in Gujarati. His stories satirize the mad craze for Western things of the moneyed Baroda bourgeoisie. ‘If I wear lipstick, will I be able to speak English?’ asks one typical Gujarati lady in a Bhupen Khakhar story.
Every nation has a historic moment when it comes into its own and bursts upon the world’s consciousness. Such a moment has already been defined by their literatures for India’s women and Dalits. I am humbled to have been entrusted with defining the historic moment for India’s homosexuals through their literature, old and new, heroic or pedestrian, lovely and lovelorn, or rough and ironic.
What is remarkable is the number of genres homosexual writing encompasses and the easy transition from one genre to another in a single piece of work by taboo-breaking lives. Literature has no sex and poems have no sex organs. There is only good writing or bad writing. India’s homosexuals have produced a lot of good writing, over the centuries a veritable feast. Here’s a sampling. Enjoy!
July 1999
Hoshang Merchant
Public Meeting and Parting as Private Acts
Firaq Gorakhpuri
Look at your face in the mirror, friend
After our reunion it shines twice as bright
I am besotted with the scent of his words
His each word brings the scent of his lips
This isn’t a public meeting since
My eyes are raised only to you
This coloured cloth hides a secret joy
There’s current playing under the shroud of the grass
Loving grudgingly is no love, friend
Go! Now you have no sorrow from me
Nevertheless my life is spent
Either remembering or forgetting you
Your tearful shadow is the sorrow of the age
Before my sight plays this shadow eternally.
Translated by Hoshang Merchant
The Contract of Silence
Ashok Row Kavi
When the stirrings started, the fantasies were all very disturbing. Beautiful men floated in the mental mist, their pectorals and pubes making their sexuality all very obvious. And the bubble burst one day on the football grounds that were perched on the seashore of Mahim Bay.
Right there, in the middle of the game, everything came to a halt. The wolf-whistles were deafening. The girls had come into the ground for their recreation period while our game was still on. The boys loved it. That’s the first time I realized that women were objects of sexual desire; an extraordinary feeling of something having gone wrong dawned on me. There were no women in my paradise.
It was nearly a year since my affair with S had started. He was a strapping, swarthy senior who was the object of my sexual desires. We had quick, furtive sex in the sprawling school campus. Sometimes, it was the boys’ cloakroom and sometimes behind the old banyan tree that grew in the grounds of the quaint one-storeyed structure that was the Bombay Scottish High School.
After a year of such bliss, it was horrifying to be told that a chit of a girl was a better screw than I. I don’t think I got over the wolf-whistles from S appreciating a top-heavy Anglo-Indian girl called Rosemary. ‘What a juicy . . .’ he had said. To me, the female genitals were a sort of wound I had played doctor-doctor with (yes, with Rosemary’s) and found too repulsive for words. How could anybody in his right mind think that it was juicy?
The decision that evening was a watershed in my life. I decided that I had to get to the bottom of this. Discussion with Anna (Daddy) was one way out. I was just over twelve. Anna was a barrel-chested film producer; sickeningly heterosexual, monogamous to a fault and an incredibly sensitive person. The discussion went along these lines:
Ashok: Anna, how are babies born?
Anna: Uh! What’s the problem?
Ashok: The boys in school were discussing. They say that men and women do it like frogs.
One-on-top-of-the-other. Is it true?
Anna: (Taking out a plug and socket from his electrical repair kit after much hesitation) It’s more like this. When a plug gets into a socket, the electricity flows, you see. You see, men have the plugs and the women have the sockets. When they get together, things happen and the electricity flows. That’s called sex.
Ashok: It sounds very unhygienic. How can they do that, it’s too atrocious, Anna.
I felt completely betrayed. Even Anna thought it was right. To me, it was not at all the natural way of things and nothing would convince me even if Anna thought it was the way things should be. I looked askance at him. My anxiety obviously made him uncomfortable.
Anna proved himself that day. He wasn’t just a father. He was a friend. Next week, two volumes of Havelock Ellis’s The Psychology of Sex were left conspicuously in the living-room. When I grabbed them, Anna groaned and heaved a sigh of relief. His job was over! Mine had just begun. What a journey that would be! I have yet to reach my destination.
Havelock Ellis was only the first step in exploring the fascinating world I had been thrown into, as it were, by fate. Understanding one’s sexuality is always a difficult and dreaded process on the path to adulthood. My steps into adulthood were even more difficult. My introverted nature, withdrawn to a fault sometimes, made talking out my problems a major hurdle. Coupled with this was my blunt way of asking questions which others found a bit unsettling.
Dr P, my psychiatrist, made the best of it! The early morning sessions with him at the Nair Hospital in Bombay intrigued my mother. I had to lie to her saying that they were part of my college routine. It was embarrassing the way Dr P handled my case: as if it were a deviation, an odd kind of behaviour which the rest of humanity didn’t really like amidst it.
I was lucky in the fact that my homosexual identity was established as ‘natural’ before social regimentation could suppress it. Dr P took three sessions with me and then commented: ‘You are all right. I am afraid I can do very little for you.’ Of course, I was surprised when he thought fellatio (oral sex) was deviant. He got a psychiatric intern to sit in on one of my last sessions, who commented on my orientation till I burst out: ‘I am afraid, Doctor, I am okay and you are deviant.’ My visits to the venerable doctor ended on that friendly note.
Yaraana Page 2
