Indeed, despite its general identification of desire as the thing that needs to be overcome, to be reduced to nullity, nullity is also the state to which Buddhists aspire. Unlike a Western tradition that sees homosexuality as the void, Buddhist traditions in India consider all desire to be problematic. While Western anxieties about nullity denounce only non-reproductive desires, Buddhism does not make such distinctions. It does not single out this or that particular sexual desire to condemn. The mathematician’s attraction to ‘the world of homosexuals’ thus flowers in a soil that does not map desires onto numbers. Buddhist notions of desire do not equate heterosexuality with 2 and homosexuality with 0. Shakuntala Devi’s passionate embrace of the zero and her active defence of homosexuality come together as part of a history of desire in an India where ancient Buddhist texts routinely asserted that no object or person has any inherent characteristics—svabhava—and that shunyata is the only reality. This concept of shunyata, which has given us the word that we continue to use for zero—shunya—is a desirable state, not one to be shunned.
In the land of the shunya, zero is not no thing: it is simply not one thing, and there is a big difference between these two designations. It is this long and complex history of the zero in India that allows Shakuntala Devi’s book on sexuality to go where no ‘polite conversation’ has gone before. The mathematical genius has said that her interest in The World of Homosexuals stems from her own marriage to a homosexual man. But the book is also autobiographical in the sense that it stems from a mathematical mind keenly attuned to the many complexities of the zero. While homosexuality in the West has traditionally been equated with the nullity of the devil, Shakuntala Devi’s book on homosexuality allows us to appreciate the complex history of desire in a land where the zero has for long been the hero.
3
AYYAPPAN
The seven verses (saptapadi) central to the Vedic marriage ritual nowhere mention procreation.
—Ruth Vanita, ‘Sexuality’
When I was six years old, my sister and I were taken by our father and maternal grandfather on a pilgrimage to Sabarimala in Kerala, the seat of worship for a god named Ayyappan. My grandfather was an avid follower of Ayyappan, and went on the pilgrimage about forty times in his lifetime. My sister and I knew nothing about what was going on; we were probably excited about going on an adventure. In the hills! With my father and grandfather! Today there are Ayyappan temples all over India—there is even one in London and one in Paris—but now, as then, Sabarimala (the hill of Sabari) was the major destination associated with Ayyappan. Pilgrims are meant to fast for 41 days before undertaking the pilgrimage (which we certainly did not do), and abstain from shaving, and expressing anger. Even more importantly, pilgrims have to abstain from having sex. And most important of all, only men can undertake this pilgrimage because women between the ages of 12 and 50 are not allowed to approach the Ayyappan shrine through the main entrance. Only pre-pubescent and post-menopausal women can ascend to the shrine since they are not considered unclean. The eagerness to take my sister and me along for the pilgrimage, then, was because we were still under the age of 12. Did I know the real reason why my mother was not coming along with us? Probably not: even if I had been told why, I would not have understood the explanation. My only encounter with blood on that pilgrimage was when a leech attached itself to my foot as we walked back down through the dense jungles of the Western Ghats.
Ayyapan is a celibate god—this is the reason cited for not allowing women in the vicinity of his temple. This version of events ties in with predictable and drearily misogynistic narratives about (a) menstruating women being unclean, and (b) women more generally being seductresses. Clearly this is a symbolic ban—the keepers of the shrine cannot seriously fear that a god, materially made from sculpted stone, wood and metal, will be defiled by having menstruating women at his shrine. But Ayyappan’s celibacy is such an oft-repeated theme that it is more than symbolic—not being around women seems to be integral to who Ayyappan is. So much so that all his male devotees too, as we’ve noted, need to abstain from having sex (with women) for over a month before undertaking the pilgrimage. This allows them to become ‘Ayyappans’ themselves because celibacy is the single biggest identifying marker of the god.
Ayyappan is one of the few gods in the Hindu pantheon who actively refuses to have sex with women by turning down offers of marriage. The most famous of Ayyappan’s suitors is Malikappuram who emerges from the body of the female demon Mahishi, after Ayyappan has slain the demon. It is rather telling that the woman in love with Ayyappan is symbolically housed in the body of a demon whom he slays. His first love sprung from his first hate. Legend has it that Malikappuram begged Ayyappan to marry her, but he took refuge in his celibacy. She persisted, and was eventually told that he would marry her only when no new devotees come to visit his shrine. This entreaty for marriage followed by a rejection of the proposal is ritually repeated every year during the main pilgrimage to Sabarimala. Every year, Malikappuram’s idol is removed from the shrine in which it resides, just a few metres away from the main shrine, and taken to see the number of wooden arrows—sharakol—deposited by first-time pilgrims to mark their attendance at Sabarimala. These arrows convince her that she will not be conjoined with Ayyappan and she returns disappointed to her role as the eternal consort-in-waiting.2 In 1977, I was a part of that horde of new devotees who thwarted Malikappuram’s desire yet again.
But even as Malikappuram’s is set up as the shrine of disappointment, there are two more hopeful shrines en route to Ayyappan’s. The first belongs to Kadutha, who helped to build the Ayyappan temple during Ayyappan’s lifetime, and became so attached to the god that he refused to leave his side, choosing instead to spend the rest of his life with his lord.
The second, in many ways even more remarkable, shrine that a pilgrim worships at before approaching Ayyappan is dedicated to Vavar, a Muslim saint whose mosque in Erumely is en route to Sabarimala. Such a custom of inter-religious faith is startling enough in these times of communal strife. But there is more. Some legends say that Vavar was a pirate from Arabia, whom Ayyappan defeated in battle. Others say Vavar was a warrior who defeated Ayyappan in battle. Still others insist that these two men were so equally matched in bravery and valour that they acknowledged their mutuality before becoming boon companions. Many versions note that Vavar helped Ayyappan defeat the demoness Mahishi (from whose body Malikappuram emerged), which continues to be counted as Ayyappan’s greatest feat of valour. No matter how many origin stories there are, though, they all seem agreed on the fact that Ayyappan and Vavar were inseparable in life, and closely connected after death. Legend has it that the demoness was finally killed at Erumely, which is now the starting point of the pilgrimage to Sabarimala, and the place at which Ayyappan asked his foster father, King Pandalam, to build a mosque for Vavar. This mosque is in addition to the shrine to Vavar in Sabarimala. Pilgrims believe they cannot approach Ayyappan without first praying to Vavar and making offerings of black pepper in honour of his pirate past. Like the two men buried together in many dargahs, Ayyappan and Vavar preside together in Sabarimala. Legend further has it that while explaining his attachment to Vavar, Ayyappan tells his father, ‘Consider Vavar as myself.’
What might it mean to consider an other as one’s self; Vavar as Ayyappan? Certainly, such a statement points to the existence of a close friendship. But usually, this language of interchangeable mutuality is reserved for married couples, the two of whom are said to make up a ‘whole’ uniting ‘two halves’. Ayyappan and Vavar are not married—remember that Ayyappan’s existence is legendarily opposed to marriage. He is very clear that he can never fulfil Malikappuram’s sexual desire for him. Equally, Ayyappan was emphatic in his lifetime—or so the legends go—that his male companion be accorded the same status as himself. Given Ayyappan’s nearly all-male following, and his refusal of heterosexual union, his relationship with Vavar points to a reorientation of desire that is fascinating from
a historical perspective. Without suggesting that Ayyappan and Vavar should necessarily be considered a romantic couple, it is important to remember that the possibility of male-male union is not alien to Ayyappan since he is himself the product of such a coupling between Shiva and Vishnu.
The tale of Ayyappan’s two fathers is widely known to devotees, not only of Ayyappan, but also of Shiva and Vishnu. In the case of Shiva, the tale of his coupling with Vishnu is only one of three tales of unusual desire that are regularly associated with him. (Indeed, in the light of these tales, it is tempting to think of Shiva the Destroyer as the god who destroys categories of gender, and opens up varieties of sexualities. He is, not coincidentally, one of the patron gods of the hijra communities in India.) The first tale of gender inversion involving Shiva produces the combination of male and female in the form of Ardhanarishvara—‘ardha’ is half, ‘nari’ is woman and ‘ishvara’ is a male god. This avatar of Shiva has a widespread iconographic presence in India, with everything from song and dance to films and poems and images being produced in its name. Almost universally, temples devoted to Shiva both in India and South-East Asia contain images of Ardhanarishvara in them. Tales about this form refer also to the equality between the male and female principles. According to one legend, Shiva and Parvati had an argument about who was superior between men and women, and settled on an equal partnership embodied in a form that contained halves of both. Significantly, the number of temples and rituals devoted to Ardhanarishvara is much higher in South India, especially in Tamil Nadu. The Ayyappan legend too has its roots in the same geographical zone—the border between what is now known as Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and what has been for much longer the forests of the Western Ghats.
Ardhanarishvara. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The second legend around Shiva’s gendered and sexual ambiguity involves Vishnu—both Preserver and Destroyer come together in this tale to form the deity of Harihara, whose conjoined body is fully male, but made up half of Shiva and half of Vishnu. There are no real explanations for why Vishnu and Shiva should come together in one body (no argument about who is superior, like in the exchange between Shiva and Parvati). But they are joined together nonetheless, and worshipped together as Harihara. Sometimes this conjoined male statue is flanked by statues of Parvati and Lakshmi, Shiva and Vishnu’s consorts. Harihara brings together the two most numerous sects in Hinduism—the Shaivites and the Vaishnavites—and is regarded as a form of the supreme being, both of whose halves are male.
This idea of a conjoined body made up of two men is not exclusive to Indian mythology. In its Greek counterpart—the origin myth about gender outlined by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium—such a doubly male body is one of three primordial states to which human beings belonged. People were either male-male, female-female, or male-female before the jealous gods decided to cut them in half in order to reduce the doubled power possessed by humans. In Aristophanes’ explanation of desire, each half then searches for its other in order to feel sexually and emotionally fulfilled. It is from this tale that we get the term ‘my other half’ with which to refer to our romantic partners. This is what Ayyappan seems to be saying about Vavar when he describes the Muslim pirate as ‘myself’. In the Greek schema, heterosexual couples formed only one-third of the world’s population, while both male-male and female-female couples populated the remaining landscape of desire.
Harihara forms the bridge between Greek myth and its Indian counterpart. But Shiva and Vishnu come up with yet another version of physical coupling that involves two men, one of whom is in drag as a woman. Indeed, the legend of Shiva and Vishnu in his avatar as Mohini is a staple of the Hindu pantheon. This tale takes Hindu gods close also to their Roman peers who, in Ovid’s legendary telling in the 1st-century AD Metamorphoses, are continually changing shape in order better to pursue their desires. Male gods change into swans and winds and seas and eagles in order to get their prey who are both female and male; the female gods are content with making other characters change shape while themselves remaining female. The Hindu pantheon is full of such shape-shifting gods; their malleability includes changing shape in pursuit of one another and also of humans. In such a landscape, Shiva and Vishnu are the prime examples of intra-divine desire.
As with all legends, the story of Shiva and Vishnu-as-Mohini has several versions. One version says that the demon Bhasmasura (‘the ashes demon’) performed severe austerities in order to please Shiva, who in turn granted the demon a boon, telling him to ask for whatever he wished. In a reversal of the Midas touch, in which the king asks for everything he touches to be turned into gold (which is one of the tales narrated by Ovid), Bhasmasura asks for the ability to turn into ashes anything that he touches. Shiva grants him this strange wish, at which point Bhasmasura immediately starts chasing Shiva in order to reduce the god to a pile of ashes and take over his power. Shiva hides himself in a tree and begs Vishnu for help. For reasons unclear to mere mortals, Vishnu decides to take on the form of Mohini, the enchantress, and seduce Bhasmasura into submission. The demon is so taken with Mohini’s beauty that he gets side-tracked from his mission to incinerate Shiva and starts courting the enchantress instead. As part of their courtship routine, Mohini asks Bhasmasura to put his hand on his head and swear fidelity. The moment that the love-struck Bhasmasura does so, he is reduced to ashes.
Vishnu goes to tell Shiva of his success against the demon, and Shiva asks if he too can see Vishnu in drag as Mohini. When Vishnu obliges, Shiva is so flooded with passion that he spills his semen. The consequence of this encounter is Ayyappan.
A less lurid version of the tale focuses more on necessity than desire. The female demon Mahishi is determined to take revenge for the murder of her brother, Mahishasura, at the hands of the goddess Durga (Mahishasura had been granted a boon saying he could not be killed by any man, so the gods sent a goddess to perform the deed). After undergoing a formidable set of penances, Mahishi is granted a boon by the creator Brahma. When she asks for invulnerability, Brahma has enough good sense to turn her down. But then she makes a second supplication, asking for invulnerability to everyone except the son of Shiva and Vishnu. Once she is granted this boon, she starts ravaging the world with impunity, secure in the knowledge that no one can vanquish her. The gods beseech Vishnu, the preserver, to attend to the situation. Vishnu decides to reprise an avatar he had taken on earlier. On that previous occasion, he had become Mohini in order to rescue the divine nectar (amrit) from the demons who were refusing to share it with the gods. In this avatar, Vishnu had seduced the demons into giving up their hold over the nectar so the gods could gain immortality by drinking it. In the second reprisal of this role, Shiva and Vishnu-as-Mohini come together to give birth to Dharmashasta, of whom Ayyappan is an avatar. And Ayyappan, as we already know, goes on to kill the demon Mahishi, with Vavar’s help.
Ayyappan temple with Vavar mosque.
‘Vavar Mosque, Kerala’ by Jay. Source: Wikimedia Commons
This second telling of the tale focuses less on the burning desire between Shiva and Vishnu and more on the pragmatic need of begetting Ayyappan. Interestingly, south Indian versions of the Shiva-Vishnu/Mohini tale tend to highlight the intensity of the erotic desire between Shiva and Vishnu, while tales emanating from the rest of the country tend to be rather more timid, even dour. Nonetheless, no version is able to deny the facts of a physical coupling between Shiva and Vishnu, and the birth of Ayyappan from that union. Ayyappan is the son of two men, and himself the boon companion of one man.
Such a lineage is unparalleled in the history of Indian Hinduism. Ayyappan is the god of men. The legends and rituals surrounding him might come across as misogynistic because of their insistence on male-male bonding. But despite this insistence on the company of men, Ayyappan beckons us to a history of desire that actively resists heterosexuality. And this resistance is not only to heterosexual union but also to the rules within which heterosexuality seems to be trapped these days in the Indian subco
ntinent. I refer to the insistence by the enforcers of heterosexuality on the issue of issue: a man and a woman should get married in order to have children. But before we get to a discussion of reproduction and children, we first need to take a detour.
The geographical layout of the temple at Sabarimala puts Vavar’s shrine en route to Ayyappan’s, and Malikappuram’s nearby so that she does not have far to travel in order to get proof of her thwarted desires. This layout has been dispensed with in Ayyappan temples in the rest of the country and, one presumes, the world. In the temple in Delhi that I visited recently, and to which my grandfather used to take me often when I was a child, there is only one main shrine to Ayyappan, and an adjacent shrine to Shiva, one of his two fathers. Malikappuram is dispensed with entirely, as is Vavar, with the result that the Ayyappan temples outside Sabarimala present a denuded picture of the rich desires in which the Ayyappan legend is steeped. As I contemplated this picture of denuded desire—no evidence of male-male parentage, no proof of a male companion, no suggestion of rejected female desire—I was approached by a devotee at the temple in Delhi. She looked at me suspiciously and asked me if I was there as a believer or because I was ‘just curious’. I said I was certainly curious, to which she replied that there was no place for curiosity in the Ayyappan temple, only for belief. By this point I had mustered up enough courage to say that I was not a believer, and that just as I would not tell her what she should be, she too should not tell me what I should or should not be. She marched off to the temple authorities to check with them. To their credit, the authorities told her that Ayyappan temples, unlike many other Hindu temples, are open to everyone, regardless of caste, religion or belief (the Ayyappan temple in Delhi is also open to all genders). She came back to tell me that apparently now I could stay with a good conscience, but her disdain of curiosity got me thinking about another legend surrounding Ayyappan.
Infinite Variety Page 6
